SPENCER

Kristen Stewart     Timothy Spall     Sally Hawkins     Jack Nielen     Freddy Spry

Jack Farthing     Sean Harris     Stella Gomet     Richard Sommel

 

            The film begins by noting that it is “a fable”, and that does describe it as what I take to be a diatribe against the tradition of royalty.  It is not a bio-pic about Diana;  many/most scenes are made up by writer Steven Knight and presumably Director Larrain.  Not only does Spencer portray Diana as a spoiled, pouty diva-like person, it doesn’t show royal family members in a much better light.  (They’re shown as unempathetic.)  Diana’s costumes are beautiful (one of her marks in real life), but go over the top, seemingly to show the ridiculousness of royal dress in general.  The same goes for highlighting the elegant dining—I think it’s meant to be a criticism of a lavish lifestyle.

            Setting the film in the Christmas weekend Diana is deciding to part with Prince Charles is known as a stressful time, and one can imagine a very difficult one for Diana.  It’s hard for me to believe, though, that Diana’s behavior was so off-kilter that she was hallucinating.  It’s plausible that she was suspicious of the family’s motives toward her, but I find it hard to believe that she was as paranoid as shown.  One chilly scene that is supposed to capture the mood of the family and that weekend is Christmas dinner with almost no conversation and family members eyeing one another.  I find that hard to believe as well.

            Spencer implies that Diana was obsessed with her childhood home which, incidentally, is where she was born, but she only lived there a short time.  Much is made of her attachment to a scarecrow on the property and her taking its jacket and instructing her maid to clean it.  In the end, the scarecrow is dressed in a brilliant yellow outfit that Diana is shown to have worn at one time, a caricature of a royal family’s indulgences, I assume.

            The only part of Spencer I really enjoyed is the acting, particularly that of Kristen Stewart and Sally Hawkins, Diana’s waiting maid and confidante.  Stewart, who apparently has a positive attitude toward Diana researched the woman’s life and stated that her intention was to portray her as realistically and sympathetically as she could.  She achieves that, and the viewer can easily see her as Diana.  I haven’t been able to discern exactly what she thought of the script, but I wonder what she really thought about it, given its portrayal of a narcissistic, oppositional wounded woman.  Hawkins comes across as a servant devoted to her charge, always with kind and sensible responses to Diana’s upsets.  And their conversations are the only ones that seem to have a ring of truth to them.

            I adored Pablo Larrain’s portrait of Jackie (Kennedy), but this portrait of Diana simply doesn’t ring true—not that I knew her personally, as I’m going by my reading of news reports.  It must be that Larrain’s liberal political beliefs as in No, along with perhaps those of his writer Steven Wright (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises) brought out sentiments against a privileged class, which I appreciate, and can say spoke truth to me.  But I’m at a loss to understand the presentation of Diana Spencer as such a losing kind of woman.

            In sum, it seems unfair to concoct such a picture as this one of one weekend in a well-known, complex, multi-layered person’s life.

 

A princess new to royalty and deceived by her prince is portrayed as an oppositional, resentful woman, despite her being generally known as a real, caring person.

 

Grade:  C                              By Donna R. Copeland

THE PARTY

Timothy Spall     Kristin Scott Thomas     Patricia Clarkson     Bruno Ganz    

Cherry Jones     Emily Mortimer     Cillian Murphy

     This is a British comedy, probably not to American tastes, that presents as a staged theatre production in black and white film.  It starts as a drama among a group of intelligent academic types, and quickly transforms into a satirical comedy.  Janet (Thomas) is celebrating a political victory with a party in her home with close friends after she wins the position of shadow health minister.  With the support of her friends, she has aspirations eventually for party leadership and even prime minister.  Her husband Bill (Spall), a professor, seems a bit out of it, sitting in his rocking chair and drinking wine, until their friends April (Clarkson) and Gottfried (Ganz) arrive and he spends most of the rest of the time talking and drinking with Gottfried.  April is rather cynical, and satisfyingly reports that she and Gottfried are separated.  Gottfried is a “healer” of some kind who always takes an optimistic view of whatever is confronting him; hence his and April’s conflicts.  She constantly puts him down, but he never seems to notice.

     Janet is in the kitchen preparing canapes, while periodically taking calls from an apparent lover, when financier Tom (Murphy) arrives, looking very agitated, disappearing into the bathroom repeatedly, and conflicted about a gun he is carrying/hiding.  The other two guests at the party are Lesbians, Martha (Jones) and Jinny (Mortimer), who announce they are having triplets.  Jinny is the pregnant one, and she also has to disappear into the bathroom now and then, where she runs into Tom.

     The “fun” comes when crises erupt and secrets emerge, which seem to be related to all their relationships.  It turns out that the group is enmeshed with a colorful history that is impinging on their current lives.  As the secrets unfold, we see the reactions of each, and in the process are greatly entertained by their all-too-human reactions and solutions. 

     The Party does not contain profound observations, but it has sharp-witted conversation and striking characters played by top-tier actors.

Sit and enjoy the banter and barbs of long-time friends gathering for a celebration, which gets completely lost in the revelations of so many secrets.

Grade:  B                                    By Donna R. Copeland

EARLY MAN

Voices of:  Tom Hiddleston     Maisie Williams   Eddie Redmayne   Timothy Spall   Nick Park

     Nick Park and the Aardman Animation Studios bring us another enchanted story that entertains while it inspires hope and the achievement of dreams.  Dug (Redmayne) is an aspiring young man who tries to convince Bobnar (Spall), chief of the cavemen, that they should go beyond being a tribe of rabbit hunters and start searching for big mammoths instead. Unrealistic expectations, perhaps?  Bobnar indulges him by saying he will think about it, but in the meantime, Lord Nooth (Hiddleston), whose tribe has advanced to the Bronze Age and are deep into mining, is driving them out of their precious valley to get to the rich ore deposits lying beneath it. 

     Then an element of fanciful story telling is inserted into the drama.  Dug has found cave drawings that indicate that their ancestors played some kind of game with a ball similar to one he has stumbled upon near the mines.  (The “Bronzios” are the champion football team at the time).  Dug and his friends kick the ball around playfully for a time, but through strange coincidences they encounter someone who actually knows about the Bronze Age people’s game of football (soccer to Americans).  Who is this someone?  She is a girl(!) named Goona (Williams) who is barred from her people’s team because she is a girl.  But she is passionate about the sport and spends many hours watching the game and playing it in her imagination.  When she sees an opportunity to coach the cavemen and transform them into a disciplined team, she jumps at the chance to get back at the Bronzios who were never very nice to her.

     Much excitement and intrigue follow when Dug negotiates with Lord Nooth to get back their land.  The outcome of these negotiations will be determined by the winner of a football game between the scrappy “Brutes” and the expert “Bronzios.”  (Lord Nooth is not being magnanimous; he plans to reap more entry fees at the gate from the cavemen.  Little does he know that his wife Queen Oofeefa will have a role to play in the contest.)

     This movie is up to the quality of the famed “Wallace & Gromit” TV series and video games and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run feature films, as well as other awarded productions by the same filmmakers.  It is beautifully animated and the story is full of humor, clever puns, and substance (story by Park, screenplay by Mark Burton and James Higginson.  An added bonus is that the story incorporates critical roles played by females—an issue close to our current political preoccupations.

     The voices of Hiddleston, Williams, Redmayne, Spall, Brydon, Margolyes, and even Director Park himself fit perfectly with their characters. 

From Nick Park and Aardman Animations fans, a new release à la “Wallace & Gromit”, The Curse of the Were Rabbit, and Chicken Run.

Grade:  A By Donna R. Copeland

DENIAL

Rachel Weisz     Timothy Spall     Tom Wilkinson     Andrew Scott

          Picture an intelligent, attractive young woman who is a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta.  Deborah Lipstadt’s (Weisz) area of expertise is the Holocaust, and she has written a book about it.  She is gutsy, organized and articulate, and it’s obvious that her students respect her.  Suddenly, an odd looking gentleman begins lurking at the top of the theater style auditorium where she is lecturing, and during the Q&A intrudes on her class.  As a Hitler apologist, he starts arguing that she is wrong about the Jews being persecuted.  She knows who David Irving (Spall) is, a “pretend” historian she has previously criticized by drawing a distinction between the facts and his opinion.  He won’t shut up, so security is called.  Unbeknownst to her, he has an accomplice film her making critical statements about him, and two years later she receives notice that he is suing her for defamation and ruining his reputation. 

          The interesting part of the film is that he is suing her in a British court, where, unlike in the U.S., where a defendant is innocent until proven guilty; in London, it is upon her to prove her innocence.  I say this is interesting because an aspect of this film is showing legal procedurals, some distinctly British, but some I take it are common to both countries.  But the director (Mick Jackson) has made a very intelligent film based on Deborah Lipstadt’s novel (David Hare, screenplay) in which the legal strategies are entertaining and instructive, but in addition, we see how they affect an independent, outspoken, learned woman who is emotionally/culturally sensitive.  So in all, there is conflict in legal approach as well as conflict between Lipstadt and Irving, with social sensitivities and concerns mixed in.  Not only does Deborah want to testify, she wants Holocaust survivors to appear on the stand as well.

        Her team of lawyers, Anthony Julius (Scott), Richard Rampton (Wilkinson), and their assistants have a different plan, one based on logic in which emotion is minimized.  She is incredulous that they don’t want her on the stand, or talking to reporters, or bringing in survivors.  Moreover, they want to go before a judge rather than a jury.  “What?!”, says Deborah, “the truth of the Holocaust is to be decided by one man?”  She wrestles with the team every step of the way, and the naïve (to law) viewer will feel sympathy for her.  This provides the tension in the film; is the legal team’s strategy hair-brained or is it brilliant? Her attorneys explain the difference between putting the Holocaust on trial vs. keeping the focus on Irving, his veracity, and his motivations.

          I am impressed with Rachel Weisz’s acting range through the years, and notably this year, she plays an aggrieved mother in The Light between Oceans, a chameleon figure in Complete Unknown, and now a university professor in Denial.  In all three, she lights up the stage with immersion in her character.  Tom Wilkinson is his usual expert actor here, showing his character’s unassuming manner, dedication to his work, occasional self-doubts, and warm compassion.  Andrew Scott lends flash and charisma to a complicated character who can be playful as well as deadly serious.  The music by Howard Shore and cinematography by Hares Zumbarloukas contribute greatly to the mood, beauty, and drama in Denial.

      Denial falters a bit at the end when closing scenes are dragged out beyond a reasonable length, as if audience suspense needed to be hyped up.

An intelligent picture with legal strategy, personality, and social conscience all interacting.

Grade:  A-                  By Donna R. Copeland