EDINBURGH FILM REVIEW: Hattie Dalton’s ‘Third Star’

Posted on June 27, 2010 by admin

THIRD STAR 6 x650

By Ray Bennett

EDINBURGH – Four men go on a camping trip to Wales seeking a memorable beach from childhood, but one of them is dying and his motives might be different in Hattie Dalton’s gloomy drama “Third Star.”

Screened on the closing night of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 26, the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as James, who has inoperable and terminal cancer and wants his buddies to share one last venture with him. The actor’s sensitive performance, in which he expresses more with his eyes than is in the script, does much to redeem an otherwise dreary exercise.

Such a downbeat tale might not find appreciative audiences at a time when many are seeking respite from difficult days, and box office attention would be appear to be slight.

Writer Vaughan Sivell establishes the four pals without much information but then Davy (Tom Burke), Miles (JJ Field, pictured right with Cumberbatch), Bill (Adam Robertson) and James don’t appear to know each other very well. Their exchanges involve imparting information they should know already even if it’s news to viewers.

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Their banter is at the level of mates off to watch the football even though they should be aware of the significance of carting a dying man to visit a treasured place from when he was a kid.

There’s a drinking scene that leads to a brawl in a pub and arguments over who has brought too much to carry and who has left the important stuff behind. There’s an almost calamitous brush near a cliff (above) and storms that carry away vital equipment.

James’s intentions aren’t much of a mystery and were it not for Cumberbatch’s capacity to generate intelligent sympathy it would be tempting to suggest he get on with it.

As it is, the film trudges on with banal revelations from the three friends and attempts to suggest there will be surprises later on. Right.

Venue: Edinburgh International Film Festival; Cast: Tom Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, JJ Feild, Adam Robertson; Director: Hattie Dalton; Writer: Vaughan Sivell; Director of photography: Carlos Catalan; Production designer: Richard Campling; Music: Stephen Hilton; Costume designer: Marianne Agertoft; Editor: Peter Christelis; Producers: Kelly Broad, Vaughan Sivell; Not rated; running time, 92 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘As You Like It’, ‘The Tempest’

Posted on June 24, 2010 by admin

The Tempest, As You Like it x650By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Sam Mendes brings his Bridge Project back to the Old Vic for the second year but while the pairing of “As You Like It” and “The Tempest” makes enjoyable theater, the productions lack the vitality and artistic merit of last year’s double-bill, “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Winter’s Tale.”

The plays arrive in London after starting out at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and making a world tour, and while the accomplished cast is too professional to let that show, there is an ebullience and artistic ambition that are somehow missing.

The plays are linked in that they deal with brotherly betrayal, power plays and flights for survival, and the characters in each are under the spell of a master manipulator, Rosalind in “As You Like It” and Prospero in “Tempest.”

Performed in repertory, they also play as an almost six-hour marathon on some days with a matinee and an evening show. “As You Like” runs for more than three hours plus an interval but as it is one of Shakespeare’s more indulgent plays there are threads that Mendes might well have done without.

As it is, it seems to take an age for the abandoned Rosalind, played by an effervescent Juliet Rylance, to win the hand of her beloved Orlando (Christian Camargo, playing him as more than a little dim). Ron Cephas Jones makes the Duke’s wrestler sinewy and scary while Michelle Beck is a saucy delight as Rosalind’s best friend Celia. Thomas Sadoski, with droll manner and witty movement, manages to find laughs as the usually tiresome Touchstone.

The biggest laughter, however, comes when Stephen Dillane (centre), playing Jacques as a dispassionate and grouchy observer of life, breaks into song with a voice much like Bob Dylan’s followed by a harmonica riff or two. Jacques has the notable speech, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” and Dillane almost throws it away as if making it up on the spot. It gains even more power as a result.

Dillane also plays Prospero in “The Tempest” and he approaches the role with a similar nonchalance, retreating almost to the wings as the events he’s set in motion take place in a sandy circle at the center of the stage.

Prospero has the big speech, “Our revels now are ended … ” and Dillane tackles it with similar detachment although in this play he chooses to speak so softly that it’s sometimes difficult to hear him.

Rylance plays Miranda with the same charming energy although she has less to do. Cephas Jones makes Caliban a creature reminiscent of Gollum: considerably taller but with that creature’s grovelling menace. Camargo is imposing as an ethereal Ariel and he features in one of Mendes’ best moments when he towers above the stage with giant wings. It’s a shame there aren’t more scenes just as dynamic.

Venue: The Old Vic, London; runs through Aug. 23; Cast: Stephen Dillane, Juliet Rylance, Edward Bennett, Christian Camargo, Thomas Sadoski, Anthony O’Donnell, Ron Cephas Jones, Michelle Beck; Playwright: William Shakespeare; Director: Sam Mendes; Set designer: Tom Piper; Costume designer: Catherine Zuber; Lighting designer: Paul Pyant; Sound designer: Simon Baker for Autograph.

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EDINBURGH FILM REVIEW: ‘Jackboots on Whitehall’

Posted on June 20, 2010 by admin

jackboots x650By Ray Bennett

EDINBURGH – Some top UK stars, including Ewan McGregor, Alan Cumming, Tom Wilkinson and Rosamund Pike, lend their voices to the characters in “Jackboots on Whitehall,” a puppet animation comedy in the spirit of “Team America” but very British in its humor and cockeyed take on World War II.

Brothers Edward and Rory McHenry wrote and directed the spoof, which sees a group of farmers from Kent save Winston Churchill and take him to a mysterious but impregnable haven known as Scot Land after Germany invades Britain in 1940.

The glassy-eyed puppets – spins on traditional English war film stereotypes with some very camp Nazi leaders – soon take on personalities of their own. The script is filled with puns, one-liners and movie references from “Ice Cold in Alex” to “Zulu” to “Independence Day” that will please audiences with a taste for pythonic or goonish comedy. With insults for everyone and a rousing, if subversive payoff, the production should turn a merry coin.

Jackboots 2 x325In swift but effective brushstrokes, the McHenrys show Dunkirk as a disaster and the Battle of Britain as a defeat. The Nazis devise a scheme to tunnel beneath the English Channel and send German tanks to crunch along the London Underground’s Northern Line to emerge in Trafalgar Square.

Soon, swastikas adorn Buckingham Palace, the Ritz Café becomes the Fritz Café, and an attack is launched on No. 10 Downing Street where Churchill (Timothy Spall) bemoans the loss of the entire British Army save for his trusty Indian Corps.

Meanwhile, in rural Kent, a stalwart lad named Chris (McGregor) curses the fate that left him with hands so large the army says he is unfit for duty. With sweetheart Daisy (Pike), her vicar father (Richard E. Grant), and U.S. flier Billy Fiske (Dominic West) who thinks he’s fighting “the Ruskies,” he rouses the locals. They fire up an old steam engine to drive to London to rescue Churchill.

While Hitler (Cumming) swans about Buckingham Palace in a Queen Elizabeth I gown plotting with hilariously caricatured Himmler (Richard O’Brien), Goebbels (Tom Wilkinson) and Goering (Richard Griffiths), Churchill leads his valiant band to the safety of Hadrian’s Wall. There, Chris meets a blue-faced creature named Braveheart (also Cumming), who has an Australian accent and some lethal weapons, and convinces him to help fight the Nazi horde.

Slick editing keeps the puppets from becoming static and the stars’ voices add greatly to the fun with Grant a standout as the foul-mouthed vicar. Supervising sound editor Mark Taylor and his team make all the mechanical noises, and the bangs, crashes and wallops utterly credible, and that sturdy base makes the silliness even more enjoyable.

Venue: Edinburgh International Film Festival; Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Timothy Spall, Tom Wilkinson, Alan Cumming, Dominic West; Directors: Edward McHenry, Rory McHenry; Screenwriters: Edward McHenry, Rory McHenry; Director of Photography: Michael Connor; Production designer: David McHenry; Music: Guy Michelmore; Editor: Chris Blunden; Producer: Patrick Scoffin; Production: Entertainment Motion Pictures; Sales: Media 8 Entertainment; Not rated; running time, 78 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Ruth Wilson in ‘Through a Glass Darkly’

Posted on June 17, 2010 by admin

through a glass darkly x650

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – A sense of claustrophobia permeates the films of Ingmar Bergman and it’s especially strong in his 1961 Oscar-winner “Through a Glass Darkly” so high marks are due to Michael Attenborough who matches that in his stage version now playing at London’s Almeida Theatre.

A stifling atmosphere is achieved with a sparse set of three walls that seem to close in on the players as the play goes on. In the role of Karin that Harriet Andersson had in the film, Ruth Wilson (pictured, ”Jane Eyre”) switches pace credibly from cheerful openness to glazed distraction as a young wife who is either schizophrenic or enraptured by God but gives every impression that she is going slowly mad.

Ian McElhinney brings arrogance and vulnerability to the role of her father, an author more interested in the characters in his novels than his own family. Justin Salinger has the Max Von Sydow part of her doctor husband who knows that she needs him desperately but cannot get past his instinctive response of prescribing sedatives rather than listen to her.

As the teenaged brother whose churning hormones cause personality swings of his own, Dimitri Leonidis appears a bit too grown up but he overcomes that with a persuasively conflicted performance.

Jenny Worton’s adaptation of Bergman’s screenplay, the only one he allowed to be staged, follows the film although she makes interesting choices with some of the language. She uses the word “descent,” for example, to explain Karin’s mental illness rather than the more emphatic “disintegration” employed in the film’s English subtitles.

Attenborough almost exactly matches several scenes from the movie, most notably the one in which Karin, alone in a strange room, reacts feverishly in the belief that an unearthly spirit has entered her body. Wilson recreates Andersson’s movements precisely and achieves a similarly riveting expression of heightened excitement.

All that’s lacking is the luminosity of the cinema. Colin Grenfell does a fine job with the production’s lighting design and it’s not his fault that onstage he cannot possibly match the lighting genius of the film’s director of photography, Sven Nykvist.

The power of Bergman’s screenplay remains, however, and while not offering any answers, he illuminates the eternal quest of humans yearning to find a reason to believe.

Venue: Almeida Theatre, runs through July 31; Cast: Ruth Wilson, Justin Salinger, Ian McElhinney, Dimitri Leonidas; Playwright: Ingmar Bergman, adapted by Jenny Worton; Director: Michael Attenborough; Set designer: Tom Scutt; Lighting designer: Colin Grenfell; Sound and music: Dan Jones.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Terence Rattigan’s ‘After the Dance’

Posted on June 9, 2010 by admin

AFTER THE DANCE by Rattigan

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Portraying apparent wastrels who actually have genuine character and feelings is never easy but the National Theatre’s production of Terence Rattigan’s seldom produced 1939 play “After the Dance” succeeds wonderfully.

Rattigan’s hit plays included “Separate Tables,” “The Browning Version”, “The Deep Blue Sea” and “The Winslow Boy” and he was also known for writing screenplays for glossy, star-studded 1960s films such as “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” and “The V.I.P.s.”

“After the Dance” was well received when it first ran in the West End but its depiction of a generation that would rather drink and be merry than take seriously the business of living palled, as the shadow of World War II loomed larger.

It plays much more successfully now in director Thea Sharrock’s sumptuous production with designer Hildegard Bechter’s lavish setting of a posh Mayfair apartment and performers gifted in portraying gaiety and gloom.

Benedict Cumberbatch catches the arrogance and vulnerability of David Scott-Fowler, a handsome, rich and successful writer stuck and bored in the middle of his latest book and content to drink to the point of endangering his liver. As his equally careless and effortlessly beautiful wife Joan, Nancy Carroll (pictured top with Cumberbatch) shares his dissolute ways and gives every impression of enjoying them as much as he does.

The sobriety that is about to be imposed brutally upon a generation is represented by Helen (Faye Castelow), a willful young woman who goes out with David’s cousin Peter (John Heffernan) and works as David’s secretary. She falls in love with the writer and determines not only to replace Joan but also to force the man to sober up, ditch his party-going friends, and move to the country.

AFTER THE DANCE by Rattigan

Rattigan is so skilled in his stagecraft that initial indifference to the fate of these characters gives way to a considerable investment in their wellbeing. He is very clever at seeing both sides of an argument and his characters are more credible as a result, including two hangers-on played by Adrian Scarborough (pictured with Carroll) and Pandora Colin, who get the funniest lines and deliver them blithely.

Castelow is almost scary as the determined young woman while Hefferman shows the younger man’s stiffened resolve against his elders’ hedonism, but it’s clear they are in the right. Cumberbatch grasps skilfully the author’s ambivalence about electing to be carefree while Carroll is heartbreaking as a woman who dares not show how much she loves her spouse for fear of boring him. Some of the light of the play goes out when she’s not on stage.

Venue: National Theatre, runs through Aug. 11; Cast: Nancy Carroll, Benedict Cumberbatch, Faye Castelow, John Hefferman, Adrian Scarborough, Pandora Colin; Playwright: Terence Rattigan; Director: Thea Sharrock; Set designer: Hildegard Bechtler; Lighting designer: Mark Henderson; Music: Adrian Johnston; Sound designer: Ian Dickinson.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Simon Gray’s ‘The Late Middle Classes’

Posted on June 2, 2010 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Simon Gray’s “The Late Middle Classes” is an exquisite delineation of 1950s English pretensions when snobbery and prejudice strived to hold their own against the post-war shattering of illusions.

It’s a brittle little tale that touches on bad parenting, infidelity, the class system, pedophilia and anti-Semitism and director David Leveaux misses not a scintilla of Gray’s keen observation and subtle wit.

The play is framed by the visit of a man named Holly (Peter Sullivan) to the faded and musty home of his former piano teacher, an Austrian émigré named Brownlow (Robert Glenister, pictured above). Their interplay is indistinct but quickly gives way to a flashback to when Holly (Laurence Belcher) was a boy in short pants attending to his homework and concentrating intensely on his piano studies.

late middle classes 2 x325Holly’s parents are cut clean from the cloth of the English middle class of the time, all posh vowels and clipped phrases. Celia (Helen McCrory, pictured left) chafes within the forced propriety of social mores, restlessly seeking tennis partners and demanding that her son say how much he loves her. Charles (also played by Sullivan) is a pompous bore whose work as a pathologist leaves him thirsty for his afternoon gin and tonic, and a taste for something on the side.

Gray gives them lines that mean little to the characters but speak volumes to the audience, and they are the source of much laughter in the first act. Celia makes amusingly vicious asides as she wheedles on the phone for company and the rare fresh egg from a neighbor while Charles stumbles hilariously over talking to his son about the facts of life.

It all seems perfectly innocent when Brownlow suggests that Holly should get out of his parents’ hair and go to his home for his piano lessons. It becomes slowly apparent that there is something inappropriate about the teacher’s feelings toward the boy but Gray lets suspicion merely hang in the air. Only Brownlow’s mother, Ellie (Eleanor Bron) hints at anything untoward as she rambles in her heavy Austrian accent about the many times they have had to move.

Gray’s view of the time is unblinking and director Leveaux underscores that by drawing acute performances from his cast. Glenister makes the piano teacher both sinister and sympathetic while McCrory and Sullivan bite off sentences as if speaking quickly somehow solves any dilemma. Bron manifests confusion of displacement and loss, and on press night Laurence Belcher, as Holly, displayed astonishing poise and a grip on his portrayal as vivid as Christian Bale’s in “Empire of the Sun.”

Venue: Donmar Warehouse, runs through July 17; Cast: Robert Glenister, Helen McCrory, Peter Sullivan, Eleanor Bron, Harvey Allpress, Laurence Belcher, Felix Zadek-Ewing; Playwright: Simon Gray; Director: David Leveaux; Set designer: Mike Britton; Lighting designer: Hugh Vanstone; Music: Corin Buckeridge; Sound designer: Simon Baker for Autograph.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons’

Posted on May 28, 2010 by admin

all my sons x650By Ray Bennett

LONDON – In Howard Davies’s suspenseful and moving production, Arthur Miller’s 1947 play “All My Sons,” which tells of a man who puts his own and his family’s well being above his responsibility to others, remains as powerful today as it was coming right after World War II.

Providing the proper safe equipment to the military in combat is as important today as it was back then and when Joe Keller (David Suchet) decides to let cracked cylinder heads be shipped out he sends 21 airman to their deaths. Then he lies about it and blames his hapless partner who is prosecuted and sent to prison.

Miller lets the truth of Keller’s crime emerge gradually as the play first presents Joe as a hearty soul and successful businessman well liked by his neighbors. Designer William Dudley places the Keller family in the backyard of a comfortable suburban home with tall, embracing trees and real grass.

Joe lounges with the paper and smokes his pipe, sharing banter with the folks next door and playing games with the local kids. The only cloud in the picture is that Joe’s wife Kate (Zoe Wanamaker) clings to the belief that their oldest son Larry, whose plane went down in the war, will one day return.

That’s a particular problem for younger son Chris (Stephen Campbell Moore) who has waited patiently for three years to ask Larry’s girl, Ann (Jemima Rooper) to marry him. Ann arrives having accepted Larry’s death but then George (Daniel Lapaine), the son of Joe’s imprisoned partner, shows up demanding a showdown.

With genuine artistry, Miller unpeels the onion of Keller’s life to its decaying core and director Davies keeps the revelations coming with escalating suspense. Miller’s theme of how profit and the desire for good standing in the community can swamp personal responsibility and destroy families plays out with growing tension and sadness.

Suchet shows with great skill all sides of Keller’s character from the cheery bonhomie of a man at ease in his personal domain to a sharp-suited businessman quick to make hard decisions to a frail, crumpled creature whose fabrications have finally been undone.

Wanamaker uses sly glances to obscure the reasons for Kate clinging to the belief that her son is still alive and manifests keening grief when the truth emerges.

Rooper combines prettiness with hints of steel, Lepaine is credibly angry and Steven Elder adds a balancing note of suburban angst as a neighboring doctor too settled for his own liking.

Best of all is Campbell Moore who tackles commandingly the difficult role of the decent and idealistic son. In a memorable performance, he appears to grow physically from being a genial fellow who goes along to a man with the backbone to demand honesty and learn how to deal with it.

Venue: Apollo Theatre, runs through Sept. 11; Cast: David Suchet, Zoe Wanamaker, Stephen Campbell Moore, Jemima Rooper, Daniel Lapaine; Playwright: Arthur Miller; Director: Howard Davies; Set and costume designer: William Dudley; Lighting designer: Mark Henderson; Music: Dominic Muldowney; Sound designer Paul Groothuis.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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CANNES FILM REVIEW: Julie Bertucelli’s ‘The Tree’

Posted on May 23, 2010 by admin

Morgana Davies shines as a girl who misses her father in Julie Bertucelli’s ‘The Tree’

By Ray Bennett

French-born filmmaker  Julie Bertucelli’s “The Tree” takes tree hugging to extremes. It will appeal to those who like to believe that upon death human beings take other forms, in this case a towering woody perennial, and bore those who do not.

Screened on Closing Night at the 2010 Festival de Cannes, the French and Australian production is based on Julie Pascoe’s popular Australian novel “Our Father Who Art In the Tree”. It opens in the UK on Aug. 5 from Artificial Eye.

Those who cringe at the title should stay away from the film but given the many who enjoy touchy-feely themes, box office potential is high.

Certainly, it’s well worth seeing the performance of young Morgana Davies as Simone, a child who becomes convinced that her late father speaks and listens to her through the comforting branches of the tree next to her house.

Davies gives the kid a great deal of spunk and character. Gifted with poise and considerable acting range, the young performer makes Simone attractive, sympathetic and vulnerable while remaining fiercely independent and prickly.

Her siblings also benefit from strong performances and writer-director Bertucelli deserves great credit for making them appear so natural and credible.

Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Dawn, their mother, who also comes to believe she can visit with her late husband Peter amongst the leaves of a tree that is handsome but causes a great deal of disruption with its roots spreading out for water.

The family’s home is in danger and also that of a fussy neighbor who petitions for the tree to be torn down. A year after Peter’s death, Dawn gets a job and falls for her handy-man boss George (Marton Csokas). Things come to a head when George is enlisted to chop down the tree and the land is threatened by a ferocious cyclone.

Nigel Bluck’s cinematography has sweep and style, and Bertucelli wisely focuses on Simone as the center of the film. That’s a good thing as Gainsbourg makes the woman appear more drippy than necessary. It’s Davies who comes closest to melting the hearts of those immune to the cloying tale.

UK distributor: Artificial Eye; Sales: Memento Films International; Production companies: Les Films du Poisson, Taylor Media; Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marton Csokas, Morgana Davies, Aden Young; Director and screenwriter: Julie Bertucelli; Director of photography: Nigel Bluck; Production designer: Steven Jones-Evans; Music: Gregoire Hetzel; Costume designer: Joanna Mae Park; Editor: Francois Gedigier; UK rating 12A, 100 minutes

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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CANNES FILM REVIEW: ‘Carlos’ by Olivier Assayas

Posted on May 20, 2010 by admin

CARLOS

By Ray Bennett

CANNES – Long, but illuminating and engrossing, “Carlos” directed by Olivier Assayas, details the extraordinary career of the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal.

Shot in three parts for television, the five-hour and 33-minute production was screened in full at the Festival de Cannes and it will air on the Sundance Channel in the United States.

It is a tremendous achievement that shines a light on the way many countries use criminals to further their domestic and international goals. Politically informative, it also offers great drama with excitement and suspense, and no little tragedy. It will attract viewers and cinema audiences around the world.

Based on extensive research by Assayas, co-writer Dan Franck and producer Daniel Leconte, the film is presented as fiction because so much of the life of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, who became known as Carlos, remains unknown.

The man, who is serving a life sentence in a French prison for murder, remains an enigma despite a dynamic performance in the title role by Edgar Ramirez (pictured). His violent activities as a killer for hire at the service of assorted nations and secret service agencies made headlines throughout the 1970s and ’80s until his arrest in 1997.

With full cinematic production values, Assayas relates his story covering many locations in Europe, South America and the Middle East. There are a great number of characters involved on both sides of the law and the director introduces them and follows their machinations with remarkable clarity.

Born in Venezuela to a lawyer who espoused Marxism, the man who became Carlos was educated in England and the Soviet Union before joining the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Beirut in 1970. Over the next two decades, he organized and carried out bombings, hostage takings and murders from London to the Hague to Paris and Vienna. In Austria in 1975, he led a group of terrorists in a raid on OPEC headquarters that resulted in tension-filled flights back and forth from Algiers to Tripoli as he attempted to flee to Baghdad.

Throughout, he surrounded himself with various adventurers and killers and many women. The film portrays him as sophisticated and intelligent with the capacity to be charming but always dangerous. He imposed his will on men and women with utter belief in his right to leadership while boasting that he knew he would die violently and it could happen at any time.

Assayas is assured in showing how Carlos manipulated people and organisations, and the small details of how he planned and carried out his raids are meticulously examined and made to serve dramatic ends.

He and his cast succeed in bringing the huge number of characters to life, and in Venezuelan actor Ramirez he has found a performer who captures the man’s enormous ego, considerable charm and manifest criminality. Carlos gives voice to idealism and claims his actions are to help the oppressed, but he lives high on the hog and there’s always plenty of money, women and luxury.

Venue: Festival de Cannes, Out of Competition; Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Alexander Scheer, Nora Von Walstatten, Ahmad Kaabour, Christopher Bach; Director: Olivier Assayas; Writers: Olivier Assayas, Dan Franck; Directors of photography: Yorick Le Saux, Denis Lenoir; Production designer: Francois-Renaud Labarthe; Costume designer: Jurgen Doering; Editors: Luc Barnier, Marion Monnier; Producer: Daniel Leconte; Production: Film En Stock, Egoli Tossell Film; Sales: StudioCanal; Not rated; running time, 333 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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CANNES FILM REVIEW: Stephen Frears’s ‘Tamara Drewe’

Posted on May 18, 2010 by admin

tamara-drewe-2 x650By Ray Bennett

CANNES – A film that claims to be a literary comedy set in England’s West Country based loosely on Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd” had better deliver the goods, and Stephen Frears’ new film, “Tamara Drewe,” pretty much does.

Jaunty and entertaining, it’s a faithful rendering of a comic by Posy Simmonds for the upscale British newspaper the Guardian and published subsequently in graphic novel form. Simmonds fans should be happy as Frears and screenwriter Moira Buffini make pleasing work of her material with plenty of laughs.

Ben Davis also makes the heaths, woodland and vale plus the cottages in the county of Dorset look ravishing enough to please Hardy himself. Alexandre Desplat’s agile score employs gifted soloists along with the London Symphony Orchestra to help embroider the pretty pictures.

Like the comic strip, the film includes a couple of unruly teenagers to balance all the adult humour, and while these characters’ antics make the film uneven, they probably widen its demographic potential. Boxoffice potential looks solid as a result.

Gemma Arterton, who shone recently in the title role of Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” for a BBC miniseries, plays Tamara Drewe, drawn from Bathsheba Everdene in Hardy’s “Madding Crowd.”

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Her return as a beauty (thanks to plastic surgery) to the small country village where she grew up an ugly duckling ruffles the feathers of old flames, not least because she brings along her boyfriend, a rock drummer named Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper), who is more or less Sergeant Troy from the Hardy book.

Roger Allam plays successful crime novelist Nicholas Hardiment, filling in for the classic novel’s farmer, William Boldwood, with Luke Evans taking the Gabriel Oak role of stalwart countryman Andy Cobb.

The setting and source of most of the laughs is a literary retreat held at Hardiment’s fancy pile and run mostly by his long-suffering wife, Beth (Tamsin Greig). Several aspiring writers are in residence including a serious American named Glen McGreavy (Bill Camp), who is attempting a sober analysis of the works of … Thomas Hardy.

Writers – their foibles, fallacies and fabrications – are the butt of some excellent jokes, and the affairs of Drewe and her men lead to amusing payoffs. There’s also a witty thread that mocks the plots of commercial crime yarns via a stampede of cows.

Arterton continues to establish herself as a leading lady to be reckoned with, combining mischievous sex appeal with generous self-mockery. Allam ranks with Bill Nighy in sheer drollery and dry but hilarious line readings while Cooper (“Mamma Mia!”) contributes a savvy portrait of a rocker whose seduction technique involves snogging while drumming with his feet.

The heart of the picture belongs to the exquisite Tamsin Greig, who finds comedy in the pain of a much-betrayed wife without demeaning the character. She has an extraordinary ability to move from bemusement to comedy to outrage in one sentence.

The weakest part of the film involves two girls (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie) whose antics, including burglary and sending phoney e-mails, drive the plot. It might work in the comic strip, but on film it appears like pandering in hopes of a younger audience, and takes time away from the very clever fun for grownups.

Venue: Festival de Cannes, Out of Competition; Cast: Gemma Arterton, Roger Allam, Bill Camp, Dominic Cooper, Luke Evans, Tamsin Greig; Director: Stephen Frears; Writer: Moira Buffini, based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds; Director of photography: Ben Davis; Production designer: Alan MacDonald; Music: Alexandre Desplat; Costume designer: Consolata Boyle; Editor: Mich Audlsey; Production: Ruby Films, Notting Hill Films, BBC Films, U.K. Film Council; Not rated; running time, 109 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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