Film
Stephen Soderbergh, fresh from the multiple Oscar winning (but vastly overrated) Traffic, has come in for a bit of criticism for remaking the 1961 Rat Pack movie Ocean's Eleven. Beneath all the glitzy hype, and the all-star cast, critics have wondered whether this really is a film of substance.
Well, it isn't. But that doesn't stop it from being an instantly likeable movie. Soderbergh introduces the characters and tells the story with a panache and style reminiscent of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Danny Ocean (George Clooney) has just been released from prison, and intends to pull off the biggest heist in the history of Las Vegas (we are comically given a run through of the three most 'successful' heists so far, with only one actually getting out of the door, only to be shot).
Ocean then proceeds to put together his crack team of eleven, with the aid of his buddy Rusty (Brad Pitt). We are in classic A-Team territory from here on in, with Clooney playing Hannibal in all but the cigar-chomping, and for anyone who can remember those halcyon days and those magic words "I've got a plan", this is sterling work from Soderbergh. The plot becomes more personal when it is revealed that the proprietor of the casinos they intend to rob, Terry Benedict (played to a cool and calculating perfection by Andy Garcia), has taken up with Danny Ocean's ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts), during his spell behind bars. The heist is now more than a job and the trials and tribulations of their daring escapades combined with Danny Ocean's personal motives sustain the tension and excitement through the movie. As with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, this film is, with its male camaraderie, gadgets and stunts, perhaps more orientated towards a male audience.
The star-studded cast play their roles to comic perfection, with the supporting members of the ensemble being particularly good. Elliot Gould's Jewish maestro, with his gold chains, track suit and seventies chest hair shines as brightly as Clooney and Pitt, and Carl Reiner's Saul Bloom transforms himself completely into the rich European arms dealer they need to pull the heist. But at the centre of the drama lies Clooney's Danny Ocean, with his personal motives. Needless to say, this is no deep psychological character study, nor does it pretend to be, but a comedy of archetypes and stereotypes.
Las Vegas, with its coloured lights and tacky glamour is a film-makers's dream, and as in Traffic, Soderbergh uses it to exhaustion, with his pastel blues and yellows. Whilst in the latter, the effect was self-consciously arty, here the colours, rather than looking like some kind of Impressionistic painting (some of which the film shows in the casino gallery which Tess curates), serve to highlight the superficiality of Vegas.
If the plot slackened at all, the illusion, the all-star cast, the flashy 'look-Ma-I'm-directing' style, would all come crashing down in a pile of glitter. But thankfully they don't, and this film remains an entertaining romp. If you want to go to the cinema for a bit of swanky escapism and a few laughs, then this is the movie for you. Ignore the critics and have a ball: you deserve it.
You sort of expect good behaviour from cinema audiences in Oxford. They slap their thighs to the in-jokes, are perennially up for a canny little dab of intertext, and nothing embarrasses them - not even sex scenes. But people guffawed at this film. One whiskery old man (he used to give me French lectures, I think) decided to cackle at it from start to finish. How has Eric Rohmer, the film's widely respected Nouvelle Vague director, got things so very badly wrong?
The plot's not to blame. The Lady and the Duke comes out of the memoirs of Grace Elliot (played by Lucy Russell), a Scottish noblewoman who went to France in 1786 as the lover of Philippe, the Duc d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), and decided to stay there, hoping to make France her adopted country. During the Revolution, she remained a staunch royalist, while the Duc allied himself with the Third Estate, going so far as to vote for the death of the King (his cousin), before seeing his own head clean-sliced off.
It ought to be fascinating to see a French film taking this sort of anti-Revolutionary angle - and at times it nearly is. A sense of the tragedy of the Revolution does begin to surface in the letter sent via Grace from the British ambassador in Naples to Charles James Fox. It nearly brings Grace to the scaffold, and then saves her from it, when a Jacobin translator reveals its full of praise for the Revolution.
The problems start with the dialogue, which is appallingly slow and mannered. But far, far worse is the overwhelming cheapness of it all. French films all look like TV movies these days anyway; yet this one - with its supposedly state-of-the-art digital interiors and exteriors - looks like an early-90s role-playing game. Some of the acting just about passes muster, but on the whole you can't help thinking that no-one involved in the film believed in it (least of all its financiers). A courageous, important film might have emerged from Grace Elliot's memoirs. It emphatically doesn't happen here.
It is nearly thirty years since Nanni Moretti first got his hands on a film camera, bought in exchange for his stamp collection in 1972. In these thirty years he has scarcely given a single interview to the press and is zealously guarded about his private life, yet through his films, which he writes, directs and stars in, he effectively reveals all. The Son's Room is his most critically lauded work to date, providing Italy with its first Palme D'Or winner in 23 years, and marks the coming of age for a film maker often lazily referred to as 'the Woody Allen of Italy'.
Set in small town Italy, The Son's Room is as much about family life as it is loss and grief. The film focuses on Giovanni (Moretti), a successful psychoanalyst and doting father, whose idyllic home life sits in sharp contrast to the neuroses of his various patients. Around the search for a missing ammonite Moretti weaves a portrait of a father coming to terms with the fact that his teenage children, son Andrea and daughter Irene, are growing up. Meals prepared by Giovanni's beloved wife Paola (Morante) play a central role in this depiction of family life, and are always eaten with all four together, seated around a dining table.
At breakfast one Sunday morning Giovanni is forced to put duty before his family when an emergency call from a distant patient causes him to cancel a run he had planned to take with Andrea. What follows is an eerie and almost dialogue- free, tone poem, where fate's glance flits between the family members: On a winding country road Giovanni nearly collides with a truck while checking his map; Irene tussles with friends while scootering into town; Paola witnesses a mugging in the local market; while Andrea prepares to go scuba-diving with friends. An unbearable tension mounts, aided by Nicola Piovanni's delicate score, until Moretti pulls the rug from beneath our feet, revealing that Andrea has died.
The outpouring of grief that follows is unsentimental and stark There is no graveside wake and there are no tearful speeches; in one excruciating scene Andrea's coffin is soldered shut as Giovanni watches on. The family's grief is seldom collective and relationships begin to crumble under the weight of its solitude. Giovanni replays that fateful Sunday over and over in his mind longing to turn back the clock and take Andrea jogging. The cruel hand dealt him by chance leads Giovanni to question his rational, analytical approach to an irrational world. As the distance between him and his patients vanishes Giovanni finds himself unable to listen to their interminable monologues, and it is only after he severs all professional ties and takes the family on an unexpected trip that the family can begin to rebuild all that has been lost.
Never mawkish or sermonising, The Son's Room is a genuinely moving and deeply affecting film. Giuseppe Lanci's photography, whilst beautiful, is delicate and unfussy, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the subtle and authentic performances of the cast. Moretti's vision and integrity shimmer and are reflected in the use of Brian Eno's 'By This River' at the film's conclusion, a sparse and minimal piece. Its repetitive piano figure provides one last spine tingle as the credits roll.
21st Feb 2002