Film
The difficult second album is a familiar concept. The Pledge, however, is one of a rarer breed: the difficult third movie. Directed by the newly-credible Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson in a more subdued role than is usual, the film deals with such sunny subjects as child murder and paranoic obsession.
The plot may seem pretty thin at first: retired detective Jerry (Nicholson) promises the parents of a murdered 10-year-old that he will catch the man responsible for her death. The prime suspect confesses under duress, then shoots himself, leaving Jerry doubtful as to whether he got the right man. There are no hurried calls on cell-phones, though, and no glamorous gun-toting raids on the homes of demonic suspects. Instead, the action takes place in small-town America, following Jerry as he painstakingly pieces together the fragments of clues that come his way: a murdered child's drawing featuring the man she called the "wizard", a black station-wagon, and the fact that the killer's blonde victims were all dressed in red when they died. Running parallel to this is Jerry's acquisition of a new family, consisting of a young mum (Robin Wright Penn) and her eight-year-old daughter Chrissie (Pauline Roberts). The child is the centre of the film, and the focus of Jerry's, and eventually our, paranoia. She's also the catalyst for the climax of the plot, which is as disturbing as that of a Greek tragedy in its inevitability and its heart-breaking effects.
What makes The Pledge interesting as well as just disturbing, though, is the way in which it takes an almost nihilistic pleasure in confounding the viewer's expectations at every turn. You think you've got it pegged as a run-of-the-mill detective thriller, until it throws in a scene of consummate weirdness in which two parents are told of the death of their daughter while surrounded by several thousand squawking turkeys. You re-evaluate it as the story of a deluded cop, obsessed by the possibility a serial killer will target his stepdaughter, and then begin to realise that his seemingly improbable fear may not be so far-fetched after all.
It's in the context of the tortuous plot that the film's frenetic visuals are effective. Bleak, bare snowscapes are spliced with gaudy scenes of urban celebration, and neurotic close-ups of numerous black station wagons are balanced by shots of the wide lakes and rainbowed skies of Nevada. The effect is that we are submerged utterly in Jerry's tortured psyche, and left unsure of where reality ends and delusion begins.
Nicholson is magnificent as Jerry, giving a tightly-controlled and almost austere performance that makes the most of the viewer's uncertainty regarding Jerry's mental state. Robin Wright is suitably fragile as Chrissie's put-upon mother, and the cameos from Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave and Mickey Rourke are all excellent.
It's hardly a laugh-a-minute at any point, but the end of the film is truly uncompromising, undercutting our naive expectations with a cynical laugh that reminds us we knew all along this would happen; the last scene of the film is also shown right at the start, although we don't understand it yet. The overall effect is disorienting and disturbing. The Pledge is a fiercely intelligent, beautifully shot film that makes for uncomfortable, although essential, viewing.
Heleina Postings
"Now they're done for!" squealed the six-year-old child next to me as Milo Thatch and his band of intrepid explorers were attacked en route to Atlantis by a metallic sea-monster who had taken a dislike to their submarine.
Well, us hardened reviewers know that the main character isn't likely to get gobbled up twenty minutes into the film. We also know that he isn't likely to fall into the abyss underneath that rickety bridge from which he's hanging. And we are fully aware that in a film called Atlantis: the lost empire, the protagonist is highly likely to overcome the obstacles that face him and find Atlantis: the lost empire
Atlantis, however, is the sort of movie that makes cynicism evaporate. So before long, I had joined the six-year-old, and was sitting on the edge of my seat with my fingers crossed hoping that that those creatures in the tribal masks would listen to reason. I laughed at the slapstick violence, I jumped at the loud bangs, and I struggled to suppress a sniffle as the princess recalled the death of her mother.
Originality, however, certainly isn't what makes this film so enjoyable. The stock elements of the feel-good Disney movie are out in force- there's a bumbling hero, a dashing traitor, an eccentric millionaire and a supporting cast of lovable misfits. Then there's the soppy subplot, albeit with a couple of unique twists; boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl reveals she is 8000 years old and destined to be transmogrified into crystal, thereby awakening the ancient gods of her lost culture... you know the sort of thing. But it's all done with such flair that you soon forget you're watching an underwater version of, well, every Disney cartoon ever made.
As is often the case with Disney's animations, however, there's a distinct feeling of claustrophobia to the visuals. This is partly because the plot rarely takes the film above ground, but it's also because the colour scheme is uninspiring, centring around khaki and brown, and the movement sometimes seems a bit clunky. Still, the film's vision of Atlantis is impressive, and there are several witty visual touches which give it a polished and assured feel. Gritty realism comes in the form of the hero heading away from his tent with loo roll and a trowel, and full-blown weirdness is invoked by the Mole, a Frenchman with an earth fixation.
If you've seen The Pledge and decided your existence is no longer worthwhile, or if you're just depressed about that essay you haven't started, go and see Atlantis. Forget about the news, eat far too many sweets and regress for all you're worth.
Rebecca Bunberry
Science fiction writers are hardly pithy with their titles. Just as Blade Runner was based on Philip K. Dick's story 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', A.I. sprouted from Brian Aldiss's 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long', and the parallels between the two films are obvious: man's gung-ho attempts to create artificial humans gloriously backfires. But rather than a grimacing Harrison Ford, A.I. boasts a little, pleading all-American robot kid, Haley Joel Osment, fresh from his Sixth Sense turn. And thanks to Stephen Spielberg, A.I. should win him another Oscar nomination.
But you see, this is the thing about A.I. (Artificial Intelligence). Spielberg directed it - not Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick, of course, got the project off the ground before his untimely death, leaving the other maestro to take the reins. And - without wishing to sound morbidly tasteless - thank heavens for that. A.I. is a film about emotion, and when it comes to emotion, Spielberg really knows his game.
Haley Joel Osment plays David, the cute boy-robot whom the Swinton family buys to replace their own child, who is on the verge of death in some sort of futuristic hospital. David, however, is programmed to love his mother. I mean really, wholeheartedly love his mother. (His father, strangely, doesn't get a look in and spends the film moodily pacing in the background.) Then, oh dear, the real son comes back and the upshot is that David is abandoned in a wood with - and here's the real stroke of genius - a wise little talking teddy bear, a 'supertoy'. Thus David begins his journey through the sort of familiar, futuristic world we've seen plenty of before, with a heartbreaking quest to become human so that his mother will love him back. Pinocchio, right? Absolutely, but the film is entirely aware of this and constantly refers to it, so David, on hearing the story of Pinocchio, sets out to find his own blue fairy.
It's touching, beautiful, magnificent, wise... all these things. Probably Spielberg's best film. It's not intellectual in the way that some sci-fi tries to be, nor is it particularly moralising. It has the quiet pace of a Kubrick film, but the perfectly pitched emotion of Spielberg at his best. Jude Law, for example, plays a 'lover robot' who befriends David, and whose impossible optimism and wonderful not-quite-human performance is callously destroyed in a striking moment by the evil 'real people'. Whatever you think of Hollywood and Spielberg, A.I. cannot be beaten for good, old-fashioned, epic awe.
Adrian Cornell du Houx
October 22 sees the release of Philip Kaufman's provocative, enthralling film about the Marquis de Sade on DVD, a happy event save for the DVD aspect: if God had intended us to spend hours watching trailers, preview-trailers, animated menus, and feeble 'making-of' documentaries, he would surely never have given us social skills. The hollow world of multi-formatting aside, this is a fine opportunity to reconsider the tortuous experience that is Quills, a film that follows the (fictional) imprisonment of de Sade in the Charenton lunatic asylum, and his consequent life within the oppressive walls. De Sade is inspiringly played by Geoffrey Rush, as a figure who oscillates between erratic, tantrum-like outbursts and friendly dandiness, his sadism now extant only on the page. Sent to 'cure' de Sade is Michael Caine's Dr Royer-Collard; a masterpiece of malevolence, self-righteously Christian and hypocrisy incarnate, with his child-bride locked away and prohibited from reading.
The potency of the written word is the subject of Kaufman's most sublimely profound moments, cutting from the blood dripping from a freshly-used guillotine to the red ink dripping from de Sade's quill. De Sade's struggle for a creative outlet is a remarkable motif: banned from writing his scandalous (and thus hugely popular) novels, he is stripped of all his quills and parchment, but does not give up. This gives us some of Quills', and especially Rush's, finest moments: the visual energy is palpable as de Sade resorts first to writing in red wine on his sheets, secondly to dictating his book sentence by sentence to the lunatic in the next cell, who passes it on Chinese Whispers-style to Madeleine, waiting with quill and ink, and then finally, and most poignantly, de Sade scrawls his dementia in excrement on the walls of the ghastly dungeon he has been sent to; only part of a horrifying dénouement.
We are as angry at the utterly loathsome Dr Collard's horrific treatment of de Sade, and his ever worsening dementia, as the Napoleonic moralisers claim to be angry at the latter's erotic fiction. Its an appealing idea for a post-ideological world: that we should feel more antipathy towards the sententious hypocrite than the self-aware and honest sinner, however depraved he may be; an idea Kaufman implants with gusto.
What is perhaps even more affecting and memorable than the explicitness of Collard's brutality towards de Sade is the film's narrative pace. Having idly and flippantly trundled (the generic norm for costume dramas, of course), Quills moves into a gallop, and then in the final half an hour reaches a terrifying, hurtling velocity. With astonishing disregard for the stomach of the movie-goer, all are dragged down into Collard's cycle of viciousness, even Joaquin Phoenix's sympathetic yet hardy asylum grandee, Abbé Coulmier. The sense of bitterness engendered by the hypocrites' pyrrhic victory serves only to highlight Quills' success as a provocative, powerful film.
Daniel Hancox
18th Oct 2001