USA

The Zone of Interest (2023)

André Crous

With the horrors of Auschwitz audibly playing out on the periphery, The Zone of Interest paints a unique portrait of life during the Holocaust, but the director mucks it all up with a ghastly and pointlessly artsy aesthetic.

Zone of InterestUnited States/United Kingdom/Poland
3*

Director:
Jonathan Glazer
Screenwriter:
Jonathan Glazer
Director of Photography:
Łukasz Żal

Running time: 105 minutes

Roger Ebert once wrote that “if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen”. That certainly holds true for Jonathan Glazer’s austere Auschwitz drama, entitled The Zone of Interest, which finds itself teetering between a bloodless horror film and a historical art installation. It includes many a scene or shot that lingers far beyond what it merits while revealing little to nothing at all.

Following the most basic of opening credits, the white title emerges on a black screen in a silly font that calls to mind some horror-inspired WordArt, accompanied by eerie sounds that border on comedic. As the title slowly fades and ultimately vanishes into the black screen (presumably a very gross visual representation of the millions of Jews turned to ash inside the crematoriums at Auschwitz), we anticipate a cut. But none comes. Instead, we are left staring at a black screen that probably only lasts a minute or two, though it feels much longer. When we finally encounter an actual diegetic scene, we see a group of people picnicking among lush greenery next to a river. Again, we remain at a distance, waiting an uncomfortably long time for a cut.

We are not introduced to these characters, and can barely see them, as the camera makes no effort to present them to us. Their actions lack both interest and significance, a trend that persists as the movie meanders through its nearly two-hour runtime set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland’s most infamous locale. Occasionally, Glazer opts for artistic detours that alienate more than they enchant. These include using thermal night vision to craft unsettling visuals of a young girl distributing apples in the countryside – presumably to offer sustenance to prisoners labouring outside the camp walls during daytime, although these scenes don’t go anywhere and add nothing except some colour (in black in white) to the narrative. Moreover, the director experiments with auditory elements, presenting blank screens overlaid with sounds that swing between the ominously bizarre and the comically absurd, reminiscent of a frog belching in bass or a cat being strangled.

The primary zone of interest is the house where Rudolf Höss, the commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his wife, Hedwig, and their two sons, two daughters and a baby. What’s intriguing about the house, and the main reason the film exists, is its proximity to the camp. With a vast flower bed full of dahlias, sunflowers and marigolds, as well as an admirable vegetable garden, the property shares a wall with the extermination camp, and it is close enough to hear what is happening on the other side of the wall. 

The scenes at the family home are a mixed bag. The mere proximity of Auschwitz and the audible yet always unseen terror imbue every moment at the Höss home with an undercurrent of tension, despite the seemingly eternal summer weather. Yet, at the same time, Glazer, who also wrote the screenplay, fails to create much drama in these scenes. Life at the Germans’ home is carefree but dull. There is very little to maintain our interest, and many a scene leaves the viewer questioning its inclusion at all.

The only real drama unfolds with Höss’s imminent reassignment to Oranienburg. He has learnt about this but hesitates to inform Hedwig. His wife has dedicated three years to transforming their house into a home, notably commanding Auschwitz prisoners loaned out for labour to fulfil her demands on the property. She also relishes her nickname as the “Queen of Auschwitz”. At home, Höss feels particularly vulnerable, and his high-pitched voice and somewhat effeminate demeanour (despite, or perhaps because of, his undercut hairstyle) weaken his position further. This makes him hesitant to share the news with Hedwig. When he eventually does, her aggressive emotional breakdown confirms his fears were justified.

Hedwig, portrayed by the remarkable Sandra Hüller, embodies a chilling blend of banality and malevolence. Her plain appearance conceals a deep-seated cruelty. Early in the film, she nonchalantly distributes silk panties, plundered from Jewish women, to her maids, while she herself has obtained a giant fur coat with red lipstick in the coat pocket. Neither of the items can work miracles on her bland look, however. Her power over the Jewish labourers in her home enables her sudden shifts to vileness, culminating in a disturbing remark that leaves viewers aghast, wishing upon her the very atrocities her husband perpetrates at Auschwitz.

The rest of the time, however, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the “banality of evil”, we observe life proceeding as usual on the family’s side of the wall, with no acknowledgment of the persistent gunshots, blood-curdling screams or plumes of ash rising from the towering chimneys. Most poignantly, people being cremated alive is described with clinical, emotionless precision, while Höss sends dictation after dictation about mundane issues. This is not the life of someone tormented by the genocide he supervises and implements.

And yet, there are glimmers of complexity. While the film thankfully never tries to portray any of the Germans as having genuine concerns about the misery or torture they are inflicting or allowing to be inflicted on the Jews in and around the house, there are hints that these are flesh-and-blood people with flickers of innate humanity that are being suppressed by their decisions to behave in this abominable manner. One is Hedwig’s mother, who arrives for a short visit, and although she is full of praise for and evidently proud of daughter, she also witnesses the giant red flames at night and hears the screams, leading her to a fateful yet understated decision. Even Höss himself, who seems ill at ease in many a social situation, appears to show an inherent and uncontrollable repulsion (one that manifests in an unforgettable, physical way towards the end) to the mass extermination, although he keeps lunging straight into darkness.

The contrast between the banality in the foreground and the horror in the background is silent but shocking. Every time we see fragments of the Auschwitz camp, its watchtower, its row upon row of tightly packed multi-story prison buildings, it is impossible for our imagination not to conjure the worst possible images of what is happening, even as we are never shown a single thing inside the camp while it is operated by the Nazis. But the ever-present clouds of human remains spread everywhere, and there is some solace to be taken that all of this eventually did come to an end.

In its closing frames, The Zone of Interest aims to cast a fresh perspective on the enthusiastic complicity of Germans in the atrocities of the Second World War yet finds itself caught in a web of stylistic excess that detracts from the depth of drama it seeks to portray, especially within the domestic sphere of the Höss family. The concluding sequences, set against the grim backdrop of Berlin’s bureaucratic machinery orchestrating the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, resort to fish-eye aerial shots that aspire to a godlike surveillance of the unfolding horror, a technique that comes across as both superficial and awkwardly incorporated into the overarching narrative. This emphasis on aesthetic over narrative substance, a hallmark of Glazer’s directorial approach, serves more to obscure than illuminate the film’s core themes, diluting its capacity to engage and disturb its audience.

Despite its bold attempt to navigate the Holocaust’s peripheries with an unyielding gaze, the film ultimately falters, presenting a fragmented tale that fails to resonate on an emotional level. The goal of balancing visual innovation with the monumental scale of its historical subject matter ends in a dissonance that leaves viewers more alienated than enlightened, rendering the film a lamentable venture into Holocaust cinema, its potential dimmed by an overzealous commitment to form at the expense of impactful storytelling, mirroring the disquieting aloofness of its protagonists and falling markedly short of its ambitious goal to make a significant contribution to the narrative of one of history’s bleakest periods.

Django Unchained (2012)

André Crous

In Quentin Tarantino’s best Western, Django Unchained, a slave set free by a German bounty hunter takes the South by storm.

Django UnchainedUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 165 minutes

Django Unchained is an unconventional love letter to the Western. It’s not a popular genre today, although the Coen brothers with some modest success tried to revive it with their 2010 film, True Grit. But Quentin Tarantino, the golden boy of cinema for the past 20 years whose name has unduly become synonymous with the gratuitous depiction of violence, has the magic touch and proves his mastery of the art form once again.

The film is excessively violent, but, among the slow-motion explosions of blood as if from flesh volcanoes, there is an incredible story of one man’s quest to find the woman he loves and reclaim her from her owner. With the exception of the film’s climactic shootout, which puts the bloodletting of The Wild Bunch to shame and ends with a manor house whose walls are covered in blood from the floor to the ceiling, the pace is mostly steady and not a single moment is wasted.

What will stir viewers’ attention more than anything else, however, is the language of the film. It is unlikely that the word “nigger” has ever been used this often by white characters in a film. Occurring more than 100 times, it pervades their speech to such an extent that it is tough to remember whether skin colour is ever explicitly mentioned. Tarantino gets away with it because even though the word is used almost as frequently as an article, it never ceases to remind us of the time and place the central character, a freed black slave, is up against.

The former slave is the titular Django (Jamie Foxx), who is set free by the German dentist Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who travels on horseback, followed by a wooden coffin with a plastic tooth on top bobbing up and down as he crosses the South in search of those wanted by the law.

Schultz is a peculiar creature who doesn’t seem to mind violence – besides, he is a perfect shot – as long as he gets the guy. He forms an instant bond with Django, mostly because he needs Django’s help in tracking down three brothers worth a lot of money dead or alive, and Schultz prefers them dead. But when Django tells Schultz about his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (yes, of course, the surname is a reference to the big-name ’70s blaxploitation movie), sold to a big slaveowner, the German bounty hunter has a personal interest in ensuring his friend and colleague gets his wife back.

We thus find ourselves watching a quest, and it is every bit as exciting as Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films, in which the central character pierced and sliced her way with a samurai sword until she reached the object of her affection. However, Django Unchained has about 30 minutes of post-climactic appendage that go off on a tangent.

This final act is separated from the film’s first two hours by an extended shootout, bloody to the point of excess, that sees Tarantino struggle to keep things together. He satisfies us with small details in that final part, including his explosive presence as an Australian slaver and some beautiful shots right before the end credits start to roll, but, in retrospect, this last section seems a big digression that doesn’t have the same driving force as the rest of the film.

The duo of Foxx and Waltz sounds like an odd couple, but Dr. Schultz – a character that calls to mind Waltz’s role in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds – has a playful, almost childlike streak that is captivating, if one can overlook his penchant for shooting people through the head.

Foxx, playing a variety of roles that see him as both a slave and a slaver, a lover and an assassin, is by far the coolest cucumber in the story, though Tarantino uses those (Sergio Leone kind of) extreme close-ups on his eyes for poignant moments, and this tactic works like a charm. It is no coincidence that the music of Ennio Morricone, a composer associated with Leone’s films, also features in Django Unchained.

Aside from the many gunshots and the cussing, the film also has some slave-on-slave ultimate fighting to the death, called “Mandingo”, and as the film takes place shortly before the Civil War, there is an epic scene with Klansmen.

It is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the show, perhaps to the detriment of the film. As a slave who has lived with his master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), for so long that he now shares Candie’s disdain for blacks, he is truly odious, a traitor to all the oppressed people around him, to freedom and justice, too, as he revels in the authority his connection with the white Candie grants him. An Uncle Tom for the ages.

The film is certainly not intended to be a very serious discussion about slavery, but it is a very entertaining one, and it doesn’t ignore the importance of past iniquities. This might come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t, as Inglourious Basterds already proved Tarantino a skilled craftsman even when dealing with the suppression and extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

It is no easy feat for a film to keep our attention for nearly three hours, but the director succeeds effortlessly. His style of entertainment necessarily includes people being shot to a bloody pulp, but when they’re all really bad guys, one tends to have fewer ethical objections, especially when everything is so clearly “just a film”.

Mr Tarantino, to quote Calvin Candie, “You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.”

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2014)

André Crous

The last instalment of popular Hunger Games series ends on a high note but struggles to arrive at the finish line.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Peter Craig
Danny Strong
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 135 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

Katniss is tired, and so are we. The climax has been awaited far too long, mostly because Suzanne Collins’s three novels have been stretched across four films totalling more than nine hours. Jennifer Lawrence has cemented her status as the archer par excellence whose face, three-finger salute and flaming mockingjay pin became the symbols of a revolution against the smiling but devious President Snow (Donald Sutherland).

The first film’s Hunger Games, an annual reality-show event in which two dozen boys and girls from the dystopian country’s 12 districts participate and slowly get killed off until one survives, showed us the rise of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). She had taken part in order to save her younger sister, Prim, from being forced to compete. She befriended Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a fellow competitor and boy from the same district as her, and the two of them undermined the rules, causing President Snow to lose face. This small act of defiance eventually sparked a wider rebellion, whose progress was marked by the subsequent three films in the series.

In terms of atmosphere, this final instalment is spot-on, but dramatically it feels like we have run a marathon only to arrive at the finish line inside the arena and looking around to see no one in the stands. The climactic siege occurs, would you believe it, during an ellipsis marked by a black screen. This is a deeply unsettling move on the part of the filmmakers but is sadly representative of the many missing sections in a film that otherwise has very little plot.

At its core, the narrative comprises only the penetration of the Capitol, the upper-class zone with its style-conscious inhabitants who look down upon the riff-raff, namely those who make up the districts. This is followed by a surprise public spectacle and the requisite “happy ever after” epilogue that is all too reminiscent of the never-ending final moments of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Katniss, Peeta and about a dozen fighters make their way by land and by underground sewer system to advance ever so steadily towards the palace. Inevitably, some of them die, including quite a few we never got to know at all and, thus, to whom we had absolutely no attachment. It goes without saying that all the major players survive until the very end, making the film (even for those who have not read the novels) a tad too predictable. They also confront some slimy monsters (“mutts”) the likes of which we could not have imagined in a world that, in many respects, is similar to ours. But the battle with these creatures is drawn-out and made silly by an overbearing score, causing the viewer to switch off, particularly because we know (ignoring any glimmer of realism) that almost everyone is likely to survive.

The film’s logic is not always on point, however. In one scene, the team escapes from one side of the building, cross a courtyard and enter another side of the building before the previous hideout is blasted into oblivion. On television, President Snow broadcasts the beginning and the end but somehow manages to miss their escape in broad daylight. It is also way too easy for the team to have access to a “Holo”, a machine that points out exactly where in the Capitol hundreds of booby traps, or “pods”, have been placed and allows them a way to circumvent these traps without mass casualties.

The story’s most exciting developments are saved for late in the film, once there is a false sense of calm. While it has been clear from the outset that the rebel leader, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), is slowly becoming used to being in charge, this final film includes a handful of moments that increase our suspicions about her real intentions. To the screenwriters’ credit, her ambitions remain more or less ambiguous. At the same time, it becomes obvious that Snow was not the mastermind of a corrupt system as much as he was its logical extension.

The final moments, before the atrocious coda, are by far the most interesting, as they allow Katniss to reflect on her actions and the changes that have occurred since she first stepped forward to enter the ring in the first film. Katniss’s determination to make the right decision despite the ambiguity of the facts (“real or not real?” is a game she and Peeta plays throughout the film, and for good reason) signals her as an adult capable of critical reflection and aware of the consequences of her actions. At the end of a revolution, that is exactly what we want, even if the road to get there has been long and taxing.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, director openly mocks the audience with a flat, unresolved storyline, because apparently buying two tickets is better than buying one.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1USA
3*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Danny Strong
Peter Craig
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 120 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Besides having a title that is a mouthful, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I will also make very little sense to those unfamiliar with the world of Katniss Everdeen. We start in medias res and have to fill in much of the story for ourselves if we never read the books or saw the two previous instalments of the series.

This hurdle may have been easy to clear if the film itself wasn’t also stretched and contorted to tell a story whose central action only takes place in Part 2. The tactic of splitting the last book of a series into two final films, the first obviously ending on a cliffhanger, is one that was also deployed by Harry Potter and Twilight. If Peter Jackson had made his Lord of the Rings trilogy 10 years later, we likely would have been saddled with a four-parter, too.

A quick recap is in order: Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), co-winner of the annual Hunger Games two films ago, and her mockingjay pin have become the symbols of a brewing revolution against the upper-class bubble, the Capitol, which controls territory as far as the eye can see in a post-apocalyptic world. This fight-to-the-death contest provides entertainment to the masses, and the victor gets lifetime compensation, although this often comes at some cost to their mental health. In the previous two films, Katniss became a warrior and beacon of hope for the downtrodden masses not only of her own district but also of the others. When she caused havoc inside the game world at the end of an evidently rigged game in Catching Fire (she shot a lightning-charged arrow into the arena’s force field), the wrath of the Capitol was brought down on her. She managed to escape, but her Hunger Games partner, Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson), was captured.

The forces of the revolution, comprising generations of marginalised individuals living from hand to mouth outside the Capitol, are slowly gathering on the outskirts of the “heart” of Panem, roughly the dystopian future version of the United States. All the while, however, despite her recent rebelliousness, Katniss remains a reluctant warrior and leader of the obviously imminent uprising. Were it not that Peeta, her fellow competitor and budding romantic interest, had been captured by the government at the end of Catching Fire and her home district razed to the ground, she probably would not have shown much interest in leading the charge against the odious President Snow.

This entire film is just buildup to the inevitable showdown of which we sadly don’t even catch a glimpse. All will be revealed in Part 2. For now, we have to be content with the very slow process of Katniss gathering her inner strength, getting Peeta back into her life and planning the attack on Snow and his power-hungry constituency.

But unlike the first two films, both of which centred on an iteration of the Hunger Games contest, this instalment has no focal event. The narrative is left with little oxygen and has to rely mostly on Jennifer Lawrence’s charisma, albeit undeniable. One particularly bad aspect of the film is the young “director” Cressida (Natalie Dormer), who is supposed to be an up-and-coming filmmaker from the Capitol who has joined the rebellion, but her approach to her craft is laughable and beyond irritating, as it seems she has never worked with actors before and grew up on a staple of propaganda films with transparent metaphors: When she notices Katniss standing in front of the ruins of her district’s Justice Building, she proudly turns to her cameraman and says, “There’s your first shot.” This group of terrible filmmakers who follow Katniss around like puppies often undermines our suspension of disbelief because we ask ourselves whether Katniss’s emotions and speeches are real or put on for show in front of the camera, which we never would have contemplated in the previous films.

Speaking of emotions, the biggest problem resulting from this instalment’s negligible sketching of past events is the character of Katniss’s friend, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), who was clearly pining for her while she was spending so much time with Peeta. Now that Peeta is in the hands of the enemy and Katniss only thinks of him, Gale is a strong but silent mess who only hints at being hurt but never stands up to fight for her. Hemsworth manages not to make Gale seem like too much of a victim, but instead of having the storyline plod along by having no one speak their mind, director Francis Lawrence could have revealed a bit more about this important character’s disposition.

Perhaps The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 will eventually be absolutely riveting when it forms a coherent unit with Part 2. However, because it lacks a major action scene or any kind of story arc that would show development and proper resolution during this particular film, it feels like more of a footnote than a proper page, never mind half a novel. We can usually forgive a film for a slow beginning if the last part takes our breath away, but if that first section suddenly vaults to prominence as its own thing, we have to call a spade a spade.

Lawrence, Hemsworth, Hutchinson and especially Woody Harrelson, who absolutely steals the show, all do excellent work in this film and keep the audience relatively interested, but the story just doesn’t get us worked up the way a film about injustice and revolution ought to.

There had to be a worst one in the Hunger Games tetralogy, and by the looks of it, that dubious title belongs to Mockingjay – Part 1.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

André Crous

A change in the director’s chair ensures that the second instalment of popular Hunger Games franchise is just as entertaining as the first.

The Hunger Games: Catching FireUSA
4*

Director:
Francis Lawrence
Screenwriters:
Simon Beaufoy
Michael deBruyn
Director of Photography:
Jo Willems

Running time: 145 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

When The Hunger Games was released in 2012, everyone knew it was going to shatter a few records. Based on the novel series by Suzanne Collins, the film eventually went on to make more than $680 million at the box office. The only other films with greater earnings that year were The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers, both of which had budgets nearly three times as big as that of The Hunger Games.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the second in a four-film series based on Collins’s trilogy – as was the case with the film adaptation of the Harry Potter series, the final Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay, would ultimately be split into two films, released over two years.

Drawing heavily on the influence of reality television on our lives, which pretends to epitomise the evolutionary race to the top with programmes named Survivor or The Apprentice, the first film centred on the titular life-and-death competition. The Hunger Games is a contest in which 24 individuals, “tributes”, from the world’s less-fortunate districts take part for the benefit of those living in the decadent Capitol. For them, this game in which people kill each other off until only one remains is the television event of the year.

In the first film, the teenage Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the impoverished District 12 volunteered to take the place of her younger sister whose name had been selected. She participated in the gory activities alongside Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who may just be the nicest guy you’ve ever met. Sooner or later, they realised they have to form an alliance and perhaps even a fake relationship to garner the support from the audience, which would give them a better shot at staying on the show because they provide entertainment.

At the end of the first film, the creators changed the rules of the game and decided that only one (instead of two) would be crowned victor. In rebellion, Katniss and Peeta, the two remaining contestants, made up their minds to swallow poisonous berries and thereby forfeit the game. The pressure on Gamemaker Seneca Crane resulted in them both crowned winners.

Catching Fire has a few very strong themes that may not fit together as well as in the first film, but it is a marvellous, informative piece of entertainment that does its best to do the duty of telling only the second act of the overarching tale.

First off, the tension between reality and illusion is foregrounded again, as we see Katniss agreeing under duress to play up her relationship with Peeta for the sake of entertainment and to convince the viewers (and more importantly, those in the districts) that this is pure love rather than a streak of rebellion that could destabilise the entire country of Panem. Because Katniss is not exactly an open book, it is not always easy to see where her acting ends and her true feelings for Peeta, whom we like very much, may begin, and this uncertainty is naturally a magnet for attention.

The other very evident theme is that of standing up against oppression. Small but powerful moments include the scenes in which the granddaughter of President Snow suggests an admiration for Katniss, as well as the many showings of a three-finger salute by the people of the districts, indicating their resistance to the rule of the Capitol.

The first half of Catching Fire shows the brewing unrest and Katniss’s and Peeta’s desire to quell the resistance even as they want things to change. The second half is the 75th Hunger Games, known as the third Quarter Quell, in which past winners of the games take part – like an All-Stars edition – to remind the districts of their past transgressions and the transience of life.

Although this happens every 25 years, and 75 is neatly divisible by 25, this comes as a great shock to everyone, and in this respect, the film makes little sense. But we have confidence in Katniss and Peeta because they are the most recent victors and are at a slight advantage over their opponents. It is too bad that the opponents, for the most part, are rather simplistically drawn as either good or bad (or what is supposed to be a grey middle ground of “provocative”, as in the case of Johanna) and don’t surprise us until, perhaps, the very end.

Another bit of plot that seems odd is the relationship between Katniss and Gale, her best friend and obviously a bit more than that. Despite the rest of the world thinking Katniss and Peeta are in love and would rather die together than have only one of them survive, that is obviously not the case in their home district, and everyone can see that. And yet, there is no uprising as a result.

The Hunger Games series changed hands with this instalment from Gary Ross to Francis Lawrence, whose approach to the material is much more obviously Hollywood than that of Ross, who memorably used a Steve Reich composition at a key moment in the first film. However, “more Hollywood” does have its pluses, as the special effects this time around are noticeably better, particularly during the scenes involving fire.

There are many problems with Catching Fire, but it remains an excellent piece of entertainment (Stanley Tucci’s turn as talk-show host Caesar Flickerman, tanned here to give him a John Boehner–like orange complexion, is as wildly amusing as in the past) that stacks up well enough against its predecessor and makes us impatient to see what happens next.

The Hunger Games (2012)

André Crous

With The Hunger Games, Gary Ross takes reality television shows to the extreme (within the family-friendly limitations of Hollywood entertainment).

The Hunger GamesUSA
4*

Director:
Gary Ross
Screenwriters:
Suzanne Collins
Gary Ross
Billy Ray
Director of Photography:
Tom Stern

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
– The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

The Hunger Games, a film based on the eponymous novel by Suzanne Collins, shares a premise with the notorious Japanese film Battle Royale: A group of teenagers, called “tributes”, are sent to an isolated area where they not only have to survive the elements but survive each other over the course of a severe couple of days. Whoever comes out of the ordeal alive wins the grand prize.

The story is set at some point in the future, and anyone who has not read the book might struggle to figure out exactly why these games take place at all. There are mentions of an uprising in the past that caused the world or the country to be divided into 12 districts, from each of which two children get chosen in an annual gathering called “the reaping”.

The 24 tributes, some with special skills, but most of them with nothing but their innate sense of survival, are shown on television for the duration of the games, and an easy parallel can be drawn to the ubiquitous reality shows we have become so used to. Indeed, the question of whether celebrity is worth the loss of privacy is addressed head-on.

Although only the barest details are given about the historical context of the ferocious spectacle, the viewer quickly enters this world with the help of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), two teenagers who are unwillingly thrust into the limelight and thrown into the lion’s den.

Even before their names are chosen, there is unease in the air. The people from Katniss’s and Peeta’s district live off the land and profit little from the glitz, glamour and riches of the Capitol – a city filled with wealthy people who have brightly coloured hair and wear gaudy outfits. The tension between the two groups of citizens is evident.

Insofar as its depiction of violence is concerned, The Hunger Games is far more Hollywood than Battle Royale. Going for a wide audience, instances of violence are kept to a minimum, and even the few action-packed moments that remain are composed mostly of blurred shots in which it seems the camera – rather than the characters – is under attack. The film’s use of rear projection, during some spectacular scenes in which the tributes are paraded on arrival in the city, is also very poorly executed.

But director Gary Ross, whose Pleasantville transported audiences to a time of nostalgia that was both playful and insightfully critical, here tackles some very timely questions about the nature of celebrity and reality TV. He also stealthily draws contemporary resistance movements (Occupy Wall Street, in particular) into the equation as a way of saying the majority does not have to be victimised by the ruling minority.

The director’s use of the handheld camera, to put us closer to the events, has mixed results, although our uncomfortable closeness to Katniss’ face when she is onstage during an interview with blue-haired talk-show host Caesar Flickerman renders some impressive results. As played by Stanley Tucci, Flickerman has exquisite timing, and his act, close to slapstick, is pushed to its limits. But Tucci never makes the character a joke by going overboard. And this observation is applicable to nearly all the actors in the cast, who are made to be much more human than one would expect.

Even Haymitch Abernathy, who is assigned to mentor Katniss and Peeta, and is a former winner of the Hunger Games, is portrayed as more than a drunk loser who used to be great. In his portrayal, Woody Harrelson credibly conveys the conflicting emotions of hope and hopelessness that can easily crush the spirit of all the contestants.

Another example of the film’s surprising departure from the average fare is the first scene inside this enclosed area in which the tributes will compete: When they all rush toward their gear before heading off into the woods, the music that accompanies this moment is not a glorious orchestral number but a minimalist composition by Steve Reich. Of everything that happens in the film, this combination of audio and visuals is perhaps the most telling of Ross’s desire to make a film that is different from the clusters of forgettable fantasy films we get every year.

The Hunger Games is a cautionary tale about reality television, and it effortlessly mixes in contemporary politics to produce a very intelligent film that never seems like it is trying too hard to be relevant. The focus on the characters inside the world of the game is tight, and the pacing is superb, and few other similar films of this length (142 minutes) go by so quickly.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

André Crous

Despite the two big names with top billing and some good ideas, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a fragmented mess of a film whose literal golden glow cannot save it from mediocrity.

Reflections in a Golden EyeUSA
3*

Director:
John Huston
Screenwriters:
Gladys Hill
Chapman Mortimer
Director of Photography:
Aldo Tonti

Running time: 105 minutes

Everything that is golden isn’t gold. The visuals of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, which not only has two major stars as a dysfunctional couple in the South but also deals with issues of intensely repressed sexuality, are tinted gold. Every now and again, a pink dress or red streak of blood break through, but the rest is a lifeless olive-gold that is perfectly in tune with the beige of the ubiquitous military uniforms.

The film is a very muddled assortment of lust and betrayal. Everything is tenuously held together by identical bookend quotations from the original novel by Carson McCullers, which read: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” Alright, so there will be a murder, but the film’s six characters show so little development that any one of them could be shot and we’d barely even notice.

Marlon Brando plays Major Penderton, who teaches courses on leadership at the local military post. With one or two notable exceptions, he is expressionless, a block of ice completely resistant to the Southern heat. His wife is Leonora, whom Elizabeth Taylor portrays with the same kind of drunken, free-spirited and emotional callousness as she did in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We never learn what the backstory is to this unlikeliest of couples. We meet them when the marriage is already long over, and Leonora is having daily dalliances with their next-door neighbour, Lieutenant Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith).

Langdon’s wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is still traumatised after losing her baby three years ago but is lucid enough to recognise that her husband is having an affair. However, being the polar opposite of extrovert Leonora, she deliberately ignores the obvious signs. She spends her days mostly in the company of the family’s effeminate Filipino “houseboy”, Anacleto, a dreadful bit of acting by Zorro David. The character has one brilliant scene in which he throws a drink at a group of gossiping officers before fading into the wallpaper again. And then there is the taciturn private Williams (Robert Forster), who notices Leonora walking naked through the house and subsequently returns every night to look at her up close and smell her underwear.

For obvious reasons, Major Penderton has the most potential. After Williams does some work in his garden, Penderton spots him on horseback in his birthday suit. Soon, the staring begins, as Penderton simply cannot control himself in public whenever he spots the young private. But these feelings of confusion and anguish are not developed in any serious way. They merely sketch out some vague explanation for the expected murder. At one lecture, Penderton’s mind seems to wonder when he asks the students, “Is leadership learned, is it taught, [or] is man born with it?” At another point, he waxes lyrical about the military life, which is “immaculate in its hard, young fitness”. But he seems to be stuck for good.

Brando’s best moments come either when he is on his own or when he demolishes his character’s icy exterior. When he is on his own, he gallantly but rather pathetically tries to lift weights, he stares into a mirror to rehearse his witty lines and facial expressions for a social event at his own home. Or he spreads a handful of rejuvenating cream over his face, not unlike a clown before a show. These are sad but intimate moments that allow us a glimpse of Penderton’s melancholy existence as an act that might allow him to blend in. But the scenes in which his well-kept façade disintegrates are equally powerful. The way his face contorts when Leonore taunts him, or when his horse refuses to listen to him, makes for very compelling cinema.

The scene with the horse is absolutely astonishing. When Penderton had earlier gone riding with his wife and her lover, he fell off the horse. Now he takes his wife’s prize stallion, Thunderbird, but when he kicks in the side, it bolts into the forest. The thick foliage scratches and scrapes his face. He holds on for dear life. And Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score kicks into high gear. But it is the low-angle, titled camerawork and the rapid editing, in particular, that draw attention. The confused, all-too-human look of utter desperation on Brando’s face and his violent but futile response are pitiful but make him the most interesting character of all.

The title ostensibly refers to a drawing by Anacleto of a peacock, which has a “tiny and grotesque” golden eye. But as with so much else in the film, this inference also goes nowhere. While some moments are reflected (in gold) in Williams’s left eye, especially when he is leering at Leonore from afar, the metaphor is impenetrable.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a terribly uneven film that unspools in fits and starts. It has enough characters with promising storylines to fit three feature-length films, but it doesn’t dig into any of them. The tensest scenes are the ones between Taylor and Brando, but they are few and far between. The plot ultimately explodes with an unintentionally hilarious final shot (multiple whip pans between murderer and murdered, with a startled bystander sandwiched in between). The film has the makings of a fascinating social study, but its fragments never cohere into anything resembling a whole.

Red River (1948)

André Crous

Thanks to Montgomery Clift, here appearing in his first-ever role on film, Howard Hawks’s classic Red River has more than its fair share of male bonding on the plains.

Red RiverUSA
3.5*

Director:
Howard Hawks
Screenwriters:
Borden Chase
Charles Schnee
Director of Photography:
Russell Harlan

Running time: 130 minutes

Almost everyone has seen that scene where a 25-year-old Montgomery Clift, in his film début, and John Ireland stroke each other’s pistols. “There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun”, the latter tells Clift, “a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.” Clearly aware that Clift’s character has never had a woman, he simply asks, “You ever had a good Swiss watch?” Within seconds, they start shooting their guns to confirm that they do things the same way. It is a moment so playful, friendly and gay (happy) that one can’t help but see it as an example of very intimate male bonding bordering on a sexual metaphor.

At their meeting in the previous scene, Ireland already couldn’t keep his eyes off Clift. But the gunplay, in particular, has been cited countless times as an example of underlying homoeroticism between men in Westerns – and not only because, in fact, one of these actors was gay. But this is far from the only intimate moment between men in Howard Hawks’s classic Red River.

The film’s central relationship – and source of conflict – involves Clift’s character, Matt Garth, and the much older Thomas Dunson, played by John Wayne with his trademark velvet voice but lack of emotion or acting talent. Dunson is like a father to Garth, whom he basically adopts as his own after the latter loses his family in a raid by the Indians. The year is 1851, and white expansion out West is in full swing. In the process, Dunson also loses Fen, the only woman he ever loved, to unnamed and unseen Indians. The only trace of their misdeeds is the plumes of black smoke wafting over the prairie.

Dunson lays his eyes on a beautiful piece of land in Texas, which he colonisingly proclaims as his own, and within 14 years, he has established a ranch boasting thousands of head of cattle. But 14 years after 1851 is 1865, and with the Civil War having just wrapped up, the South is in ruins, so Dunson’s beef needs to travel elsewhere for profit. Thus begins a cattle drive over hundreds of miles to the middle of Missouri. John Ireland’s character, Cherry Valance, accompanies Dunson and Garth and eventually leads to a brutal split in their relationship just as Dunson grows more and more domineering on the journey.

The film delivers spectacular images not only of wide-open vistas and a cowherd stretching as far as the eye can see but also from the position of the covered wagons as they cross a river. Although the shots are strikingly similar to John Ford’s Stagecoach, this perspective is thrilling for the viewer, who is suddenly in the middle of the action.

Not unlike the Mutiny on the Bounty, the protégé takes the side of the crew when their leader’s authoritarian streak becomes unbearable. Together they rebel against the seemingly callous Dunson and leave him behind while they plough on. Red River hints at how exhausting it can be to be a leader, but it chickens out by preserving Garth as a stand-up citizen whose tiredness never interferes with his judgment or social tact. Where parallels are drawn, however, is with the women.

In the opening scene, Dunson leaves his sweetheart behind but tells her that he will send for her. Within hours, the Indians kill her. At the beginning of the third act, Garth meets Tess and immediately saves her from an Indian arrow. The moment she sees him, she falls in love. We can’t blame her, but Garth’s reaction is curious, as he seems to fall for her because he knows that Valance (whose pistol he held so firmly earlier in the film) had his eye on her, too. When he sucks the poison out of her neck or when he kisses her, it is hard not to think of her as a substitute for Valance.

The world of the film is almost entirely devoid of female characters. The two that do feature – Tess and Dunson’s girlfriend, Fen – are either weepy or can’t stop talking or both. Tess could easily have been a strong character, but from the very first moment she spends with Garth, she is overcome with emotion and practically talks herself into a stupor. Meanwhile, for a large part of the film, Garth wears a particular bracelet that Dunson had once given Fen. And then I haven’t even mentioned the love fest that is the long-anticipated climactic shootout between Dunson and Garth… These are small details, but they create very fertile ground for anyone looking to study the bonding between cowboys in the hypermasculine worlds of American Westerns.

The film was shot in 1946 but only released two years later because Hawks initially had issues with the editing job. In addition, Howard Hughes sued Hawks because he claimed the final scene was too similar to one from The Outlaw, which Hughes had directed a few years earlier with assistance from Hawks.

Although Red River lags when Dunson temporarily disappears from the narrative, Montgomery Clift’s soft-spoken performance as a cowboy who is every bit as skilled as the previous generation is mesmerising. Garth is accused of having a soft heart because he treats people with dignity, and his eyes shine so brightly they sparkle with colour despite the black and white of the image. We are always on his side, even though he is a very different kind of cowboy to the ones we know from other films. And this balance between the new and the old, as well as the ultimate compromise in the final scene, is why Red River is one of the most important works in the pantheon of Westerns.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

André Crous

Thirteen years after Peter Jackson’s first Tolkien film, his sixth offers little proof he has matured as a filmmaker.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five ArmiesUSA/New Zealand
3.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Desolation of Smaug

With the release of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, the sixth and hopefully the last film in Peter Jackson’s canon of J.R.R. Tolkien productions, the New Zealand director has proved decisively that he is not so much a storyteller as he is a choreographer, or more particularly an orchestrator of epic spectacle. He trains his focus on presenting and overwhelming the viewer with the larger-than-life world where the magnificent story is set, but the way in which the characters behave or appear is often riddled with clichés that speak of his immaturity as a teller of tales or a director of actors.

Such an assessment may sound harsh and unjustified, especially because Jackson’s name, in connection with the world of Middle-earth, rouses much admiration for his ability to use or create a vast canvas filled with battles and wizards that seem part of a familiar reality rather than a fantasy. This third instalment is the best of the Hobbit trilogy, but as a whole, these three films are surprisingly disappointing in comparison with his work on The Lord of the Rings, released 2001–03.

The reasons for this are legion and range from the quality and scale of the books themselves to the much-criticised approach of breaking the short novel (The Hobbit) into three separate films. But what is particularly irksome is the almost soap-opera acting in the director’s most recent works.

From characters looking off into the distance as they digest bad news (the elves, in particular, are prone to such conduct, and sometimes the camera tracks in on their faces for even greater emphasis) to histrionic displays of emotion (e.g. the face-pulling that Bain, the son of Lake-town’s Bard, engages in), there is plenty of theatrics to undermine our suspension of disbelief. And the less said about the corrupt councillor, Alfrid, who is an odious fellow that ultimately dresses up in women’s clothing and scampers off with gold coins in his voluptuous bosom, supposedly intended as a source of comedy, the better.

As the title indicates, a giant battle is central to this final part of The Hobbit. It takes place at the Lonely Mountain, where the Dwarves, along with the Elves and the humans, have little time to celebrate the departure of the dragon Smaug, as they soon face hordes of Orcs and Wargs that seek to capitalise on the mountain’s strategic position and the riches that remain inside it.

Smaug, which lent its name to the second instalment, is killed off very early on in the film, and this death firmly establishes Bard’s significance and determination. Played by Luke Evans, this character is a mixture of emotion and bravery, but the actor ensures there is never any doubt about the character’s commitment to justice, and unlike some of the others, we can always take him seriously.

One would expect a film with a sub-title like “Battle of the Five Armies” to be about bloodshed and courage, but while there are such moments involving the two main characters, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), it is in fact more about friendship, loyalty and understanding than anything else. More to the point, it is about the necessity of living together in harmony, avoiding the dark side and allowing others to love whomever they choose. The sentiment is sincere, but Jackson’s attempts to make these ideas visible in his story are overblown.

He handles the relationship between Kíli the Dwarf and Tauriel the Elf slightly better than was the case in The Desolation of Smaug, only because these two spend very little time together. However, the back story to Elvenking Thranduil’s objections to Tauriel’s love offers only superficial psychological insights into his character that culminate in embarrassing final heart-to-hearts between him and his son, Legolas, and him and Tauriel. (He acknowledges he was wrong about the purity of her love when he utters the cringeworthy statement, “It hurts because it was real.”)

And for the most part, Jackson is content to keep using the same cinematic language he used in The Lord of the Rings more than a decade ago to render spirits. He also still clearly enjoys employing slow motion as often as possible. His aerial shots are used somewhat more judiciously than in Smaug, but when it comes to the photography of vast vistas framed on either side by steep mountainsides, we get the feeling of déjà vu.

The world the director depicts can be the same without him having to revert to the same shots and same framing he used on previous outings. Jackson’s back projection in some of his scenes is just terrible, and the composition of the shots is generally the same: Gandalf on a horse, or Legolas hanging onto a cave bat, shot from up close and well lit, with the fuzzy and more sombre background in motion behind them. One would never guess this is the most expensive trilogy in motion picture history: This film alone reportedly cost $250 million, or around $1.7 million a minute.

The titular battle, which starts exactly at the halfway mark and lasts for most of the rest of the film, is not nearly as impressively staged as Jackson’s all-time great, the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, because he focuses too strenuously on Thorin’s development from being a power-hungry king to proving his friendship with Bilbo. And despite the 145-minute running time, there are major gaps in the narrative, especially regarding the movements of Bard during this battle.

As with Return of the King, the ending takes a while and could have been much shorter, because the screenplay keeps dropping intertextual references to Jackson’s earlier trilogy that seek to dovetail this story with the other one. Poor Bilbo returns from his adventure a whimpering, stuttering mess filled with emotion, a sight we certainly could have been spared.

While the best (and, thankfully, the shortest) of the trilogy, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies underlines what should have been obvious by now: Peter Jackson has substantial imagination and obviously enough technical know-how to conjure a world of wonder, but he lacks the ability to tell his stories without reverting to the most banal narrative clichés. Moreover, his actors are more or less left to their own (all too often defective) devices. The film will make a generous profit despite its astronomical budget, and filmmakers like James Cameron will likely follow the same path of simplifying their stories while maximising the visuals of the world they offer for the viewer’s consumption.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

André Crous

In The Desolation of Smaug, the second Hobbit instalment, Peter Jackson takes an unfortunate page from Spielberg’s book.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of SmaugUSA/New Zealand
3*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 160 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Battle of the Five Armies

When the first film in the Hobbit trilogy was released, everyone kept talking about the disproportionate length of the films (totalling around nine hours) compared with the size of the source text, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 300-page novel. If War and Peace could be made into a three-hour film, what prevented Jackson from producing a film length commensurate with the size of his story?

It doesn’t take an outsized intellect to recognise financial considerations playing an important role here, and one would expect that, if anyone could entertain us for such an extended period of time, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson would be the man for the job. But just as The Hobbit precedes the story contained in The Lord of the Rings, so too does this current batch of films seem to be the work of a much less experienced director.

Because this second instalment of The Hobbit, titled The Desolation of Smaug, is the second film of a three-part series, we cannot have expected there to be much to get excited about, as it functions mostly as a bridge between the first and last parts of the story. But the same was true of the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, and yet Jackson used majestic battle scenes and spectacular locations to his advantage to keep our attention.

Very little happens in Smaug, at least until the very end, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarfs reach the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), where Smaug the dragon has lain in a chamber full of gold ever since he chased out the dwarfs, to whose kingdom he had laid waste. For the most part, we are on a journey with the dozen characters as they travel through Mirkwood Forest, arrive at Lake-town thanks to a complicated and conflicted widower and cross Long Lake to Erebor, where Bilbo is charged with stealing the Arkenstone gem from Smaug. On a parallel track, we see Gandalf the Grey’s realisation that he and his companions are up against something much more evil than they had anticipated.

But our unease with this film has as much to do with the thin storyline – once more spread over some two hours and 40 minutes – as it does with the embarrassingly amateurish presentation of romance onscreen.

We can all remember the weepy relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Return of the King; in Smaug, the focus is on Kíli the Dwarf (Aidan Turner), the nephew of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a female elf from Mirkwood who is the object of Elven Prince Legolas’ affections. In the film, at any rate, Kíli certainly stands out among his band of brothers as he is the only dwarf without a beard, and when he and his fellow dwarfs are taken prisoner by Elvenking Thranduil, Legolas’ father, he immediately hits it off with Tauriel.

This initial attraction, in no way hidden, will quickly lead to the two swooning over each other. Jackson, for all his filmmaking prowess, simply cannot resist the temptation to go melodramatic on us. When Kíli is struck by a poisoned arrow in the thigh, it is up to Tauriel to rub the healing herb into his flesh while intoning a spell, and when Kíli looks up at her, would you believe, she seems to shimmer with a blinding angelic light. It is difficult not to laugh, as we get unfortunate flashbacks to the worst film in the Jackson canon, his calamitous The Lovely Bones from 2009.

Jackson’s camera also flies all over the place, often making us nauseous when a wild helicopter shot is inserted between much calmer visuals. For the director, it would seem that “coverage” implies catapulting his machinery in every direction and using that footage whenever he needs to cut away from someone for a brief moment. Reckless track-ins, especially in one of the opening scenes, in the Prancing Pony inn in Bree, are also tiresome because their use speaks to Jackson’s apparent inability to come up with creative solutions to creating tension – in this case, to suggest the potential dangers around Thorin.

One truly adventurous scene, however, occurs during the dwarfs’ escape from Mirkwood: At one point, the camera seems to be floating on the wild river and pans from side to side as one of the dwarfs rolls around in a barrel, mowing down the Orcs on the riverbank as he careers full-speed across the river bends. It is a breathtakingly choreographed bit of action, all in a single take, thoroughly reminiscent of the epic single-take chase scene in the Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg–directed The Adventures of Tintin.

Smaug may be Bilbo’s tale, but it belongs entirely to the titular dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is much more clever than he appears to be, and while he certainly poses a threat to the existence of all in Middle-earth – and the glint in his eye looks almost exactly like Sauron – we cannot help but respect his intelligence and even his wiliness, and Cumberbatch’s work here is mesmerizing.

While Smaug isn’t at the same level as Jackson’s three films from the beginning of the millennium, and despite the often amateurish representation of romance or infatuation, it is certainly an improvement on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and time goes by more quickly (that might be because the film is nearly 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor).

Unfortunately, Bilbo is not as active as we would like him to be, and he all but completely disappears from view in the Lake-town scenes. After we had lost Gandalf in The Two Towers, he reappeared towards the end with reinforcements at Helm’s Deep and provided one of the most memorable moments of that extraordinary film. But by the end of Smaug, Bilbo has done so little that we forget about him, and the film literally leaves him hanging – in a cage at Dol Guldur, where he discovers the Necromancer.

The Desolation of Smaug showcases little of the imagination we have come to associate with Jackson and his previous depictions of Middle-earth. At times Spielbergian with his sentimentality, here he rarely awes us with the breadth of his vision. The scenes with Bilbo or Smaug – and especially with the two of them – are marvellous, and so is an early scene with giant spiders, but overall it would seem Jackson has lost his Midas touch.