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Hello and welcome to this week’s film review wrap – the big movies landing in cinemas this week.
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By Sandra Hall
Jimpa
★★★½
(MA), 113 minutes
When the main character in a film is a filmmaker herself, it can look like a red flag. But a willingness to risk self-indulgence is part of the daring of Jimpa, the latest from the adventurous Australian writer-director Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays).
Co-scripted by Hyde’s regular collaborator Matthew Cormack, Jimpa shouldn’t be mistaken for literal autobiography – but Hyde has acknowledged in interviews that the overlap of truth and fiction is considerable.
Most of the fictionalised action takes place in the vicinity of Amsterdam, where Hyde’s alter ego Hannah (Olivia Colman) has travelled with her husband Harry (Daniel Henshall), and their non-binary teenager Frances, played by the director’s own 20-year-old child Aud Mason-Cole (as Frances points out, the word “child” in this context has its drawbacks – but so does “daughter”).
They’ve come to visit Hannah’s dad Jim (John Lithgow), known within the family as Jimpa, a pioneering gay activist and academic who came out of the closet in the early 1970s but stuck around for another decade before leaving both Australia and his family behind.
In a script inspired by her parents’ marriage, Hannah has set out to put a positive spin on their gradual uncoupling. But faced with Jimpa in the flesh, she hesitates to tell him what she’s been working on – while Frances, who has idolised their granddad from afar, is taken aback by his way of laying down the law about sex and gender with the exuberant insensitivity of the alien Lithgow played in Third Rock From The Sun.
Does Hyde share Hannah’s goal of telling a compelling story without conflict, or is the character’s insistently rose-coloured view of the past a sign of her underlying neurosis? It’s not wholly clear, nor was I always sure what to make of the brief, often cloying flashbacks spliced into the present-day sequences, the film’s most irritating stylistic tic.
A further complication is that Colman and Lithgow, great actors though they are, self-evidently aren’t Australian, unlike their co-stars playing members of the same family.
Indeed, Hannah’s aversion to conflict is decidedly British-coded, especially in comparison to her pugnacious sister Emily (Kate Box), who breezes in near the end and instantly made me wish she’d been there all along.
But many of these problems evaporate if we think of Jimpa as a kind of sketchbook, where Hyde gives herself the freedom to try out different approaches to the material and bat ideas back and forth.
One debate that recurs in the dialogue concerns the importance of subtext, in both art and life. Is it best to spell out everything as precisely as possible, as Frances and others in their generation seem to believe? Or are there times when language is redundant, or bound to fall short?
Here at least we don’t have to wonder where Hyde stands. The true subject of Jimpa is the endless complexity of love, both within the so-called nuclear family and beyond – and especially where Frances and their parents are concerned, the close-ups of the characters’ fond, anxious, inquisitive faces say far more than words could.
By Sandra Hall
Baz Luhrmann’s EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert
★★★½
(PG), 96 minutes
Baz Luhrmann’s latest foray into the life and career of Elvis Presley is for anyone who felt cheated by his 2022 Elvis biopic because of its focus on Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker at the expense of the man himself.
The new film is a blending of profile and performance, put together jigsaw-style from footage of Elvis onstage and in the rehearsal studio with the help of the wunderkinder at Peter Jackson’s post-production company. Some of it has never been aired before and Elvis supplies the narration, which is stitched together from audio recordings also found in the archives.
Fans of the earlier Elvis documentaries, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour, may feel that they’ve been here before as much of the new material is made up of outtakes from those films. But in the incidental asides between Elvis, his audiences and his fellow musicians you’ll find a greater display of charm, humour and intimacy than in all two-and-a-half hours of Luhrmann’s biopic.
We go right back to the beginnings of his Hollywood career which falls far short of his ambitions for himself as an actor, and in1957, we watch him onstage in Honolulu, still riding competing waves of adulation and indignation while showing off his developing taste for glitz in his well-remembered gold lame jacket. About to go into the army, he’s wondering if he will still have a career when he gets out, but two years later, the fans are still waiting, as is his acting career, as Parker pushes him into doing two or three pictures a year even though they grow progressively worse.
The pounding heart of the film is in Las Vegas where Elvis sets up shop in the early 1970s. His ’68 Comeback Special has revitalised his fanbase and restored his taste for performing and he’s been given the chance to take up Las Vegas “residencies” during which he plays two shows a day seven days a week for four weeks straight.
He keeps up this routine for seven-and-a-half years, mixing it up with a series of national tours, and the film conjures up the freneticism of such a schedule with the pace of its editing, intercutting different versions of the same song and flipping between the Las Vegas footage and scenes from the tours.
Luhrmann has a history of imposing his own hectic rhythms on musical numbers. Moulin Rouge’s cascading close-ups of arms, feet and twisting torsos left me longing for an uninterrupted view of a single dance routine. But he’s relatively restrained this time.
He gives us a chance to appreciate the range and warmth of Elvis’s singing voice, his finesse as a guitarist and the pleasure he took in performing. The shaking and the hip-swinging which catapulted him to the top was motivated by nothing more sinful than an inability to keep still when rock ’n roll was in the air, he tells us, and his joie de vivre is so evident onstage and in the studio that you can believe him.
When we leave him, the body is still lithe and trim thanks to the kilos he’s shedding with each show but his face is losing the sculpted lines of his youth and getting pudgy.
It’s a poignant forewarning of his later descent into obesity and addiction but Luhrmann isn’t interested in getting into all that. He’s skimming lightly across the surface of Elvis’s life during his heyday and it’s great as far as it goes but the lack of footage dealing with events backstage and offstage eventually makes the film feel overlong yet incomplete.
By Sandra Hall
FILM
Pillion ★★★
(R18+) 107 minutes
Films have taken me to some strange corners of the world but I’ve never felt quite as disoriented as I did while watching Pillion.
It takes us into the studs and leather community of a British gay bikers’ club to focus on the S&M affair between droll, sweet-natured and self-deprecating Colin (Harry Melling) and his “master”, Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a tall, handsome, taciturn bore whose dog receives more affection from him than poor besotted Colin.
The film is an adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s novel, Box Hill (2020) which takes a slightly bleaker view of the story than writer-director Harry Lighton does here. Mars-Jones’s Colin comes to the relationship with a long-held store of self-loathing while the film’s Colin is just fearful– of risk, change and life outside the cocoon he shares with his loving parents, Pete (Douglas Hodge) and Peggy (Lesley Sharp).
Colin catches Ray’s eye one night in the Bromley pub where he sings with his father and brother in a barbershop quartet. We never find out if Ray is attracted by the boater, the striped blazer or his unmistakeable aura of innocence but it’s not long before Colin is losing his virginity in a back alley with Ray consummating their union by ordering him to lick his boots.
Colin eventually moves into Ray’s flat, only slightly disconcerted to discover that he’ll be doing all the cooking and shopping and that he’ll be sleeping on the floor at the foot of his host’s bed.
One of his few rewards is his initiation into the bikers’ club with its weekend programme of fishing, swimming, picnicking and outdoor sex. There are several other “submissives” in the group and Lighton doesn’t hold back on the kinkiness that goes with the role. Their “masters”, however, don’t display the same uncompromising attitude to their partners that Ray does. With them, kissing is not taboo. They also give out clear signs of liking one another.
The humour – and the film does have its funny moments – lies in Colin’s wonder at the contrast between his previously banal existence and the exoticism of his new life. He also begins to learn that the balance of power between him and Ray can be shifted.
When his mother dies he has a meltdown to which Ray responds by briefly behaving like a human being and Colin dares to hope that they could enjoy some companionable times together – when Ray’s moods permit. Yet we can see the foundations of their bond are never going to alter. Nor would Colin want them to. For him, Ray’s physical beauty is not the only attraction. Even more potent is the fact that, whatever happens, he will always be unattainable – a mystery which defies solution.
Lighton is remind us that human sexuality manifests itself in an infinite variety of ways and he sends us out on an upbeat ending of sorts, ignoring the fact that this is basically a tragedy. At the depressing root of it all is Colin’s chronic case of low self-esteem which we can see is incurable.
By Jake Wilson
FILM
Fackham Hall ★★½
(M), 97 minutes
The hero and heroine of Fackham Hall come from different social spheres, but find common ground in their love of great literature.
“When we read, we meet unknown friends.”
“That’s Balzac’s.”
“No, it’s true.”
That’s a fairly highbrow gag by the standards of a fairly lowbrow film, albeit one that relies on a certain knowledge of middlebrow TV. The game being played is a parody of Downton Abbey and the whole genre of stodgy British period drama (say the title fast, and what you get is a concise expression of the attitude of the gentry towards their social inferiors).
The lowly hero is Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe) pronounced “no-one,” a grown-up Artful Dodger raised in a London orphanage who finds his way down to Fackham Hall, “the most lavish manor house in all of Shropcestershire”.
Here he squeezes into the exceedingly cramped servants’ quarters, while seizing his opportunity to court Rose Davenport (Thomasin McKenzie), the youngest daughter of his new employers, who’s under pressure to marry her unlovely cousin (Tom Felton).
The burlesque humour is openly indebted to the Naked Gun films and other Hollywood productions in the same vein, though it’s not as if British culture doesn’t have its own long tradition of this kind of spoofing, going back through Monty Python to Gilbert and Sullivan (the plot is resolved through a familiar Gilbertian wheeze).
There’s also more than a trace of the off-colour humour associated with stand-up comic Jimmy Carr, who’s one of five credited writers as well as a producer, and probably deserves as much credit or blame for the finished product as anybody (the director is Jim O’Hanlon, who did the spoof crime series A Touch of Cloth).
Carr’s domain is the 21st-century equivalent of the realm of the seaside postcard, where, as George Orwell wrote, “the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser”. Here, it’s similarly axiomatic that posh people are inbred ninnies and the clergy are closely associated with paedophilia: Carr himself has a cameo as a wittering vicar prone to double entendres, who also wears a Hitler moustache, one of a handful of reminders that the action takes place in 1932.
None of this is to be mistaken for cutting satire. A different creative team might have come up with a version of the film that spoke as bluntly about colonialism and the British Empire as Blazing Saddles in its day spoke about race. But that just isn’t the direction Carr and company are thinking in, though thankfully there’s also little of the “ironic” racism Carr has dabbled in as a stand-up.
The gags I liked best were mostly the abstract ones, seemingly aimed at bright 10-year-olds: a mostly blank newspaper with a headline reading “National Ink Shortage” is closer to the original Naked Gun than most things in the Naked Gun reboot. The strike rate to my mind is about one successful gag in 20, but the delivery rate is rapid enough I never had to wait more than a few minutes for something to smirk at.
That said, there are ways in which the joke density might have been increased, especially visually. Half the fun of the Naked Gun films used to be watching out for what was happening in the background, and O’Hanlon emulates this approach to a point: a car on fire here, a Trainspotting poster there.
But the dull landscape paintings on the walls of Fackham Hall seem mostly to be just dull landscapes. During the lulls in the dialogue, I often found myself staring at them, wondering if there was something I’d missed.
Fackham Hall, in cinemas from Thursday.
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