Those who are “Jung and easily Freudened” (to misquote Joyce) need have nothing to fear from David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.
The first time I saw Michael Fassbender (b 1977) in the flesh, it was in Venice, in 2011. I was heading home on the last day of the film festival, where Steve McQueen’s Shame – starring the Irishman as a New York sex addict – had enjoyed an enthusiastically received premiere a week before. As I jumped off a vaporetto at Marco Polo Airport, I noticed Fassbender walking in the opposite direction, towards the water.
Michael Fassbender (Shame) got blanked (maybe Hollywood was put off by his manhood?), as did We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Tilda Swinton, for my money the year’s best performance by an actress, notwithstanding the marvellous Meryl. Gary Oldman, meanwhile, is in as Best Actor for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – his first-ever Oscar nod, incredibly - whereas Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar) is out.
An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch – making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright. Set in 1930s Hollywood and, in flashback, in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, it is a kind of celluloid fantasia that charts a path from the shtetl to the stars. Films, for young Motl and the people of his village, are flickering, silvery dreams; a way of capturing a moment in time forever, of preserving memory, of drawing a connective thread between the present and the future.
The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play. Those nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done will find their prejudices confirmed, preferring the imaginative reach infinitely more easily arrived at by the use of puppets on stage.
Over the year we have reviewed many a new film and television drama in theartsdesk's Disc of the Day slot. As our series of DVD recommendations comes round to the movies, we have chosen to concentrate not on individual titles but box sets. For completists we suggest everything from Harry Potter to Ken Loach, The Avengers to Tarkovsky. If you want more Chaplin or Eisenstein in your life, here, too, is a good place to start. These collections and collations are a worthwhile investment for serious and playful fans of film and drama alike.
It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time towards the very origins of the art form he so reveres. Kids may love the sweep and scope of the visuals, many of them involving timepieces that whir and tick and hum, but Hugo at heart is an extended act of homage toward the miracle that is celluloid itself. Those on Scorsese's palpably appreciative wavelength are sure to return his affection in kind.
For much of its first hour or so, some may wonder whether this is a Scorsese film at all, given the absence of the raw aggression and rage that have marked out so many of his best films. As the camera of the great cinematographer Robert Richardson swoops around and about a Parisian railway station some 70 years ago, an extravagant landscape emerges packed with mechanised instruments, gears and watch faces of all shapes and sizes. The human element includes Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour as putative lovers along with a maniacal station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, pictured below with the film's two young leads) whose black Doberman keeps shooting out of the screen toward us as befits a film shot, rapturously, in 3D: all more Spielberg, surely, than Scorsese?
There's a whiff of Spielberg, too, in the presence of an orphaned boy driving the narrative, and not only because Hugo star Asa Butterfield at times looks disconcertingly like the hero, Tintin, at the heart of that other 3D venture of late (well, minus the quiff). With the height and breadth of the Gare Montparnasse as his playground, Butterfield's shining-eyed Hugo sets about on a mission to put right a broken automaton that was a favourite object of the boy's late father - that role played in a notably warm cameo by Jude Law, who brings real feeling to scant amounts of screen time.
Hugo's quest involves locating the key to a heart-shaped lock, a task that leads him to a bookish girl called Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz, giving the only stiff performance of the film) who uses Cyrano-ish words like "panache" and has a crank of a guardian (Ben Kingsley), a toy store proprietor whose apparent identity gives no sense of his one-time renown. At snarling odds with humankind (and, we discover, with his own past), Isabelle's Pappa Georges needs nothing more than to have his own heart reopened, which Hugo and Isabelle are eventually able to do. Who, in fact, is this ageing scold? No less a legendary figure than Georges Méliès, the celluloid visionary (1861-1938) without whose genius such devoted practitioners and scholars of the form as Scorsese would have had no career.
It's at this point that Hugo goes its own singular way, Scorsese increasingly limiting the comic freneticism of an eyebrow-heavy Baron Cohen in hot pursuit of his pre-teen prey so as to give time to an extended history lesson about the movies, complete with a recreation of the Lumière brothers' 1897 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat that is seen to inform both Hugo's sleeping and waking selves. Effecting his own rehabilitation of the life and work of Méliès, the latter now largely lost to us, Scorsese moves beyond the academicism embodied on screen by Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg's professorial Tabard to proffer a story of rebirth and renewal that works on multiple levels. Even better, the emotions are informed at every turn by visuals that suggest a dizzying hybrid of Harold Lloyd (whose silent 1923 classic Safety Last is specifically referenced), Chaplin's Modern Times and the Sophie Treadwell play Machinal.
The scenes devoted to Méliès's artistry further the screenwriter John Logan's interest in the artistic process as evidenced previously in his London and Broadway hit play, Red, while at the same time reminding us of Scorsese's championing over time of the work of Pressburger and Powell and of his crusading work as a film preservationist - which is to say that Hugo ricochets well beyond the parameters of its narrative, as one might expect from the talents involved. The automaton (pictured above, as Butterfield looks up in awe) is a red herring given a venture that is deeply humane.
You could argue that the film sometimes gets a bit gushy ("come and dream with me" goes an exhortation revisited in varying soundbites during the last reel or two), rather in the manner of those sonorous voiceovers we hear at places like the Oscars, at which point the tuxedoed assemblage turns all dewy-eyed. But there's nothing remotely faux about a movie that eats, sleeps and breathes the cinema and invites viewers to do the same. How will such passions square with a filmgoing community today that is more acclimatised to the likes of (God forbid) rival 3D entry Immortals? Well, Scorsese was eight when he saw The Red Shoes, and look what happened there. Or, to co-opt the language of Hugo, when it comes to this film's possible imprint upon its audience, one can only dream.
MORE MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Taxi Driver (1976). Talking to me? Scorsese's classic starring Robert De Niro (pictured) is restored and re-released on its 35th anniversary
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). Con brio: Scorsese and DiCaprio tell of the rise and fall of a broker
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Hugo
It’s always struck me as an odd sort of desire: to go to see a movie in which you know someone is going to die a long and painful death, while someone else – or maybe a whole gaggle of people – stand and watch, shedding tears and beating breasts. Of all genres, the “terminal illness movie”, if we can call it that, seems altogether perverse.
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the rich," as Oakland's general manager Billy Beane puts it.
A true story based on the bestselling book by bond-trader-turned-author Michael Lewis, Moneyball is a baseball movie that breaks the mould of baseball movies, just as Beane himself upended ingrained precepts of baseball management as he set about dragging his team out of the low-rent mire. Instead of the starry-eyed wish fulfilment of The Rookie or the nostalgia of Field of Dreams (even if Beane is fond of wondering ironically, "How can you not be romantic about baseball?"), it's a hard-boiled account of how he realised that tradition wasn't going to save him, and so pioneered a radical new system for building success. It's baseball's own Winning Ugly.
Among the joys the film affords is the way it gives Brad Pitt an opportunity to stretch out and display a battle-hardened maturity previously not associated with the telegenic star. As Beane, he combines laconic pragmatism and bloody-minded determination, while deriving buckets of motivational fuel from his frustrated past as a hotly tipped baseball star who never delivered on his potential. Maybe there's an implicit wry contrast between Pitt's role here and his sometime mentor Robert Redford's portrayal of baseball hero Roy Hobbs in The Natural.
On a visit to the Cleveland Indians to try to buy players (pictured above), Beane is treated with contempt, but with brilliant intuition he snatches away the Indians' geeky theoretician Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). He's an economist with a degree from Yale who has developed a new method of assessing the value of baseball players by using computerised analysis of their performances. He hadn't convinced Cleveland, but Beane perceives that this could be his lifeline. The clinching evidence is when Brand's assessment of Beane's past abilities as a player corresponds with the deflating reality rather than the hopeful hype he was fed.
Using Brand's calculations, he recruits a seemingly motley crew of lame, over-the-hill or temperamental players written off by other teams, and sets about proving that they can become match-winners when deployed in ways that maximise their overlooked strengths. "We are card counters at the blackjack table," is how Beane sums up their audacious plan to subvert the supposed natural order of things. And, crucially, his unfancied squad comes cheap.
Director Bennett Miller gives the film ballast and guts with his unsparing depiction of the decrepit male gerontocracy running Major League baseball (pictured above), its authenticity enhanced by the casting of several real-life professional scouts. Beane's outlandish new theories are treated like Satanists at a prayer meeting, and no one is more hostile than Oakland's field manager Art Howe (played like a dour, thick-necked old Marine colonel by Philip Seymour Hoffman [pictured below]). The story of how the underdogs battled this ossified hierarchy with a mixture of brains and bravado is a sure-fire winner, and the physical contrast between the still dashing Brad and Hill's bespectacled swot lends an unlikely-lads charm to the proceedings. Scenes where Beane nonchalantly sends the flabbergasted Brand to sack failing Oakland players lob some enjoyable black comedy into the mix, while Beane's motormouth, take-it-or-leave-it phone calls as he hustles rival team managers are a recurring motif.
However, although screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian have done their persuasive best to put characterisation and the long climb against the odds centre stage, at some point the fact has to be faced that at its core this is a story about the analysis of reams of baseball statistics. I had the vague notion that there was some similarity between baseball and cricket - they both have batters, fielders and pitchers, for instance, if we make allowances for transatlantic nomenclature - but baseball's fixation with blizzards of stats and averages might tax even the intellectual resources of Stephen Hawking. The game's terminology (walk, bunt, top of the ninth etc) may also present a few problems to the European viewer, since you can lose sight of the keen edge of the action.
But such caveats aside, what carries Moneyball triumphantly to the tape is Miller's refusal to lapse into rose-tinted melodrama, a stance exemplified by his use (with one prominent exception) of real game footage instead of the usual sports movie re-enactments. Even when the A's have won a historic 20 matches on the trot and it looks like there's a Seabiscuit-style climax looming, Miller still has an ace and a couple of jokers up his sleeve. Despite its Academy-pleasing cast, this manages to be film-making a little bit outside the Hollywood box.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Moneyball
Everyone is working against type, or so it would seem, in Roland Emmerich's deeply bizarre Anonymous, which asks us to accept a celluloid slob (Rhys Ifans) as an aristocrat, a vaunted republican (Vanessa Redgrave) as Elizabeth I and a highly successful action film-maker (Emmerich) as a putative man of letters: well, one has to have something to read between set-up shots on Godzilla and Independence Day, so why shouldn't it be a Shakespeare sonnet or two to the Earl of Southampton?