Winston Churchill once said “history is written by the victors”, and it is a quote which carries particular resonance when looking at cinema’s various visions of warfare. Over the years Hollywood has turned to war films time and time again to find inspiring tales of courage, or examinations of complex moral issues, but their stories of young men who have fought and died for their country have often tended to ignore those who did the same on the other side. In too many war films the enemy is given a short shrift, they’re little more than a unknowable horde which must be defeated. Letters From Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood’s admirable attempt to redress the balance.
This is, of course, the second half of Eastwood’s hugely ambitious World War II double-bill, with Flags of Our Fathers a very recent memory. That film followed a more traditional route, following the story of the American soldiers who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima, with the director attempting to undermine notions of heroism and glamour which generally surround tales from the battlefield. Flags of Our Fathers was told from a strictly American point of view - we hardly saw a Japanese face aside from the few occasions when one would burst out from his hiding place with murderous zeal - and instead Eastwood has decided to offer a whole second film from the perspective of the vanquished foe.
Letters From Iwo Jima opens in 2005 with the discovery of letters written by the Japanese troops as they spent months in their underground tunnels, and these are the letters which will provide our narration during the course of the film. The picture then flashbacks to the island of Iwo Jima, a few short months before the US invasion, and the Japanese soldiers are already hard at work preparing trenches along the beachfront. One soldier with a shovel in his hand is Saigo (Japanese boy band star Kazunari Ninomiya), and when he begins lamenting his lot a little too loudly he soon finds himself being beaten by stern disciplinarian Lieutenant Fujita (Hiroshi Watanabe). Fortunately for him, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) is walking past as this punishment is being administered, and he puts a stop to it, reminding Fujita that an army with such depleted resources shouldn’t be in the business of crippling their own men.
Kuribayashi has been shipped to Iwo Jima by his superiors in order to co-ordinate the Japanese defence of this tactically crucial island, but it’s clear from the start he is fighting a losing battle. The army at his disposal lacks both the sufficient manpower and firepower to deal with the onslaught ahead of them, and many of their troops are suffering from dysentery with a lack of drinking water making life increasingly difficult. After a survey of the island, Kuribayashi tries to come up with a different tactical approach, ordering the troops to stop working on the trenches and to instead start constructing a series of tunnels inside Mt. Suribachi from which they will they will employ the element of surprise against the Americans. A radio announcement reminds the soldiers that they must fight for their country’s pride at any price, but none of the Japanese expect to survive the forthcoming battle. There is much discussion about the merits of dying with honour, but the reality of the situation is hard to bear for many of the younger soldiers, with Saigo sarcastically referring to a colleague who died of “honourable dysentery”.
This is unusual territory for the war picture, placing us side-by-side with troops whose death looms large on the horizon, and it’s this angle which gives Letters From Iwo Jima the sense of weight and purpose which Flags of Our Fathers lacked. Few films in this genre have created such a sense of what it is to be utterly defeated, and to know that only the end remains. Eastwood’s direction plays on the claustrophobia of the situation, with much of the action taking place inside the dimly-lit tunnels to which the soldiers were confined, and the slow pacing successfully conveys the monotony of waiting for the shooting to start, with a feeling of foreboding gradually growing as the picture progresses. Letters From Iwo Jima contains less action than Flags of Our Fathers did, but it cuts deeper, with the isolated bursts of violence packing more of a punch than the first film’s widespread scenes of carnage. A Japanese private opens a hatch only to be engulfed by an American flamethrower, and another chastises his colleague for sitting around before realising his face has been blown away during an air assault; but the most shocking scene of violence in Letters From Iwo Jima is self-inflicted. With their fortunes looking increasingly bleak, a group of soldiers decide to take their own lives before the Americans have the chance to. Each of them holds a grenade to their chest and screams “Banzai!” before exploding to smithereens. It’s an extraordinarily powerful sequence.
Letters From Iwo Jima’s Japanese-language screenplay has been written by Iris Yamashita in conjunction with Eastwood’s regular collaborator Paul Haggis, and their work mostly hits the right notes, but they resort to unilluminating flashbacks which don’t add a great deal to the picture and only pull us out of the tense and compelling central drama. The central characterisations don’t stray too far from the established template for this kind of film either; Kuribayashi is the wise and humane leader, Fujita is his loyal and patriotic aide, and Saigo is the young innocent whose eyes are opened to the horror of war. It’s to the actors’ credit that they are able to flesh out the characters beyond these clichéd types with strong and authentic performances, but Shidô Nakamura’s Lieutenant Ito is a jarringly one-dimensional figure; a crazed fanatic who races out into the open, laden with mines, to single-handedly take down an enemy tank.
There has been much talk of Letters From Iwo Jima attempting to humanise the notoriously sadistic Japanese soldiers, and there are a few moments when it feels like the film is stretching to highlight their “the enemy are people too” slant instead of letting it develop naturally. One scene sees Baron Takeichi Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) - a famous Olympic gold medallist who fought and died at Iwo Jima - encountering a wounded enemy soldier and, instead of interrogating or killing him, he offers the American the last of their morphine supply and chats with him about horses. That scene feels like pandering, but it isn’t such a bad misstep until it is compared to a later scene which sees a couple of American soldiers shooting their own hostages in cold blood. Such a bald juxtaposition is a disappointingly trite element which feels out of place in an otherwise well-balanced picture.
Whatever the merits and flaws of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima there’s no question that the two films represent a remarkable directorial achievement from Eastwood. The overall sense one gets from this double-bill is the sheer pointlessness and waste of even a justified war, and while that isn’t a new notion among films in this genre, the grace and intelligence which Eastwood brings to this film has brought it home with startling clarity. Flags of Our Fathers ultimately felt like just another war film, but Letters From Iwo Jima has shown us the dignity and valour of those on the wrong side of a calamitous loss, and in that respect Eastwood has become the first director in almost a decade to give us something like a new perspective on the conflict.
London has never seen a cop quite like Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg). He’s scarily proficient in hand-to-hand combat, high-speed pursuits and armed response; he treats his job with the utmost seriousness, and he has an arrest record which is 400% better than anyone else on the force. He’s good - in fact, he’s a little bit too good. Angel’s dedication has already cost him his girlfriend, and his startling efficiency is making his colleagues look bad. As a result, Angel’s superiors decide it’s rime to reassign him - he’s going to be the new sergeant in the small town of Sandford, the sleepiest of sleepy English villages.
The big joke in Hot Fuzz, the much-anticipated new film from the team behind 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, is the transposing of Hollywood action movie clichés into a genteel English setting. Alongside the village fetes and missing swans, we get ear-splitting shootouts, car chases, and a series of grisly murders; and the overall effect is like watching Michael Bay direct an episode of Midsomer Murders. It’s a simple conceit, but it’s a funny one too, and it’s one which is well exploited by Director Edgar Wright and co-writer Pegg; but their determination to pack the film with as much action, comedy and cinematic references as possible eventually sees the movie sliding into self-indulgence, with the wheels almost coming off in the second half of its two-hour running time.
Hot Fuzz is undeniably very funny though, and its biggest asset is the double-act of Pegg and Nick Frost, the same pairing whose wonderful chemistry helped gloss over Shaun of the Dead’s similar flaws. Here Frost plays local simpleton Danny Butterman, who has followed his father into the police force even though he is quite obviously unsuited to the task. In fact, Danny often finds himself waking up in the cells after a drunken night, and he seems bored and frustrated by the fact that life as a policeman doesn’t deliver any of the action he’s seen in his favourite Hollywood blockbusters. Danny is thrilled when he is assigned as Angel’s new partner, who he looks at with awe and asks questions like “have you ever fired two guns while leaping through the air?”.
The central relationship in Hot Fuzz mirrors that of many a buddy movie. Over the course of the picture the über-serious Angel gradually starts to soften, learning to lighten up and take life a little less seriously, and the lazy Danny begins to mature, learning to be more responsible in his role as a police officer. The development of these straightforward character arcs occurs in a predictable way, but Pegg and Frost play off each other brilliantly; and the pair’s developing relationship hints at the undercurrents of homosexuality which are evident in most of the films they gleefully pastiche - particularly Point Break and Bad Boys II, Danny’s favourite films and the two pictures which are alluded to most frequently here.
Aside from the fine work provided by Pegg and Frost, there are myriad other delights offered by Hot Fuzz. Sandford seems to be some sort of haven for British character actors, and the likes of Jim Broadbent, Edward Woodward, Olivia Colman, Paddy Considine and a supremely villainous Timothy Dalton all have great fun with their supporting roles. As in Shaun of the Dead and Spaced - the TV show with which this team came to prominence - Wright gives the film a cinematic sheen with his glossy camerawork and slam-bang editing style, and the careful attention paid to Hot Fuzz’s aesthetics is accompanied by an endless stream of film references, with pictures as diverse as Point Blank, Chinatown and The Omen all influencing the action here.
But too much of Hot Fuzz’s energy and invention seems exhausted by the time the film moves into its second hour, and it backs itself into a narrative corner when the motivation behind Sandford’s numerous murders (or “accidents”) is revealed. After piling the film with every cop-movie cliché they can think of for the first hour, the filmmakers suddenly shift the action into Wicker Man territory with some gothic weirdness being uncovered, and I grew more conscious of the film’s excessive running time as the script started running in rather aimless circles. Hot Fuzz does manage to rouse itself slightly in the final third - with a well-executed supermarket shootout leading to a model village face-off - but even then the filmmakers simply don’t know when enough is enough, and they fudge the ending by giving us two climaxes too many.
The best moments in Hot Fuzz are the small touches - gags like Danny’s ‘brain freeze’ or his novel use of a notepad; the inexplicably funny line “I’m all right Andy. It’s just Bolognese!”; or an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet which features a rendition of The Cardigans’ Lovefool. Such inspired moments sometimes feel out of place in the overall bombast of the production, and there’s a tension between the filmmakers’ desire to incorporate explosive action sequences and their fondness for silly gags which makes the final product feel a little unsatisfying. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright have bags of talent - and Hot Fuzz is a very accomplished, entertaining piece of work - but they need to instil some discipline into their work and give their stories a bit more shape before they can really achieve their potential. If they can do that, then they may yet be a comedic force to be reckoned with.
Another filmmaker riding the wave of high expectations with his latest picture is Michel Gondry. In 2004 he was in the director’s chair for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a dazzlingly inventive and achingly romantic comedy which quickly established itself as a modern classic; but not much of the credit for that great offering went to Gondry. Instead, Eternal Sunshine was perceived by most as a Charlie Kaufman film, with the screenwriter getting the lion’s share of the attention as well as an Academy Award for his efforts. So is The Science of Sleep Michel Gondry’s attempt to show that he can do anything Kaufman can do? The premise of a man’s dreams becoming indistinguishable from his daily existence certainly sounds a little - forgive me - Kaufman-esque, and the fact that the film follows two quirky characters as they edge towards a hesitant romance can’t help but recall Eternal Sunshine’s narrative trajectory.
Unfortunately, the similarities end there. The Science of Sleep starts of as an intriguingly strange proposition, complemented by beautiful visual effects, but it has none of the romance, none of the subtlety, and none of the heart that was evident in the 2004 film. There’s no doubting the director’s genius for visual trickery - and The Science of Sleep is wonderfully stimulating film on that level - but its interminable trips through various fantastical sequences never land on anything of substance.
The Science of Sleep is a film about the relationship between dreams and reality, but - crucially - it doesn’t try to differentiate between the two states. In this regard it mirrors the fractured psyche of its main protagonist Stéphane (Gael García Bernal ), a twenty-something misfit whose imaginative dreams tend to spill over into his waking hours. We start the film inside his head, watching him explain the genesis of dreams in a makeshift TV studio, and during the next 105 minutes we’re never quite sure whether the events on screen are to be taken as reality or fantasy. Stéphane dreams about a skiing holiday, and wakes up with his feet in a freezer; he needs cellophane to help neighbour Stéphanie (a sweetly understated Charlotte Gainsbourg) with an art project, and he produces it from his taps; he invents a ramshackle one-second ‘time machine’ and - miraculously - it works.
Such moments are occasionally delightful, but with this kind of whimsy a sense of balance is key, and Gondry keeps piling on the magic to the point of overkill. There’s a typically low-tech touch to the film’s visual effects, and the sight of an entire cardboard city coming to life is pure Gondry brilliance, but what do these sequences reveal about the character whose mind is creating them? Few of the film’s flights of fancy enhance our understanding of Stéphane or his relationship with Stéphanie, and the further the film goes into Gondry’s world the less it seems tethered to anything recognisably real. When Stéphane finds himself involved in a cardboard car chase, one of many irrelevant sequences which seem grafted onto the picture, it feels like the director was simply showing off the skills we’re already well aware of. The skills we really needed to see here were more to do with the writing half of Gondry’s credit, the ability to create substantial characters and real relationships, but the film’s central love story never came close to grabbing my emotions.
Gael García Bernal brings all of his usual charm and astuteness to the role of Stéphane, and he also displays some first-rate comic skills in a performance which really couldn’t be better, but there’s little he can do to with a character who grows more infantile and dislikeable by the minute. By the time the film had moved into its final section - a final section which feels twice as long as it is - his behaviour seemed to exhibit signs of genuine mental disability, and it’s hard to know how exactly to respond to his plight. As the film progressed my sympathies gradually shifted to Stéphanie for having to put up with Stéphane’s unpredictable and often obnoxious behaviour.
The Science of Sleep’s ending is opaque and meaningless, and it’s a frustrating conclusion to a gorgeous mess of a film. Gondry’s picture contains more imaginative sequences than any other film this year is likely to contain, but the director of this infuriatingly shallow picture can’t find a sense of truth underneath the surface flair, and he shows a surprising reluctance to dive into the turbulent emotional waters of real-life relationships. Michel Gondry has a special gift for creating dreams on the screen, but how can we make sense of those dreams until the director allows us to wake up?
Spare a thought for Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage), though. He can’t wake up because when night falls he doesn’t sleep like the rest of us, he transforms himself into a seemingly invincible vigilante with a flaming skull where his head should be. This is the Ghost Rider, a character who must collect damned souls at the bidding of Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda), and this is a role Blaze has to play after selling his soul decades earlier to save his father’s life. This is the valuable lesson one takes away from Ghost Rider - always read the small print.
The bar for comic book movies has been set pretty high in recent years by the likes of Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan, and this effort from Mark Steven Johnson - responsible for 2003’s dreadful Daredevil - looks very inadequate in comparison. Sure, the effects are all very impressive, and one or two welcome moments of humour are allowed to shine through the gloom; but so much of it feels so wearyingly familiar. The plot is particularly uninspired, with Mephistopheles’ power-crazed son (Wes Bentley) trying to find some sort of contract which is worth a thousand souls, and the Ghost Rider’s task is to stop him at any cost. This is a particularly inopportune time for Blaze to be called into action - his old flame Roxanne (Eva Mendes) has suddenly reappeared on the scene - but he carries on with his mission when Mephistopheles promises to relinquish control of his soul if he succeeds.
The Ghost Rider does cut a rather striking figure, but the best scenes in this film occur when Cage is simply allowed to inhabit the lead role with no special effects getting in the way. The actor’s characterisation here is odd, to say the least. His Johnny Blaze has a hint of Elvis posturing about him, a fondness for The Carpenters, and he likes to unwind by watching monkey videos. While his crew knock back beers, Blaze likes to swig jelly beans from a cocktail glass, and when he wants a coffee he just walks over to the hotplate and drinks straight from the pot. It’s a bizarre performance, full of the actor’s trademark tics and mannerisms, but it’s a blessed relief to see Cage desperately trying to make the film interesting, and his quirky turn gradually grows surprisingly endearing.
Unfortunately Cage’s choices are pretty much the only surprising thing about Ghost Rider, and the rest of the cast bring little to the table. Wes Bentley resorts to staring and snarling in a cartoonish manner, Peter Fonda turns in a bland display, and Eva Mendes offers a dreadfully flat and grating piece of acting as romantic interest. Only Same Elliott can help alleviate the gloom with his enjoyably gruff cameo.
Ghost Rider is at its weakest when it’s at its most hectic. The various action sequences are loud and full of explosive incident, but Johnson’s resolutely unimaginative staging leeches them of any real sense of excitement. The Ghost Rider himself isn’t imbued with the same sense of personality as Cage’s Johnny Blaze, and all of the CGI-enhanced mayhem on show has very little effect, with the insipid churchyard climax being a particularly deflating way to end the picture. One wishes the makers of Ghost Rider had taken their cue from Nicolas Cage and tried to take their film down dome unusual avenues, offering us something a little different instead of more of the same. Alas, the efforts of one actor alone are no match for the relentless monotony of Hollywood formula.
As an act of cinematic trickery, The Illusionist is a nifty piece of work. This latest entry in the suddenly popular turn-of-the-century magicians genre is a film which casts a spell over the viewer; a film which lulls us into the story, even while we remain aware of its numerous flaws. Director Neil Burger pulls off this feat by employing charismatic actors, some gorgeous cinematography, and a lyrical musical score; all aspects which deceive the viewer into thinking there’s more to this old-fashioned drama than meets the eye - what a shame Burger almost blows the whole show right at the end, revealing the basic mechanics behind his act at the worst possible moment.
So The Illusionist isn’t a perfect film by any means, but at least it’s a lot more fun than The Prestige, Christopher Nolan’s magician movie which displayed a distinct lack of magic as it followed the rivalry between two obsessively driven characters. There’s a touch more romance about The Illusionist, and it coveys a beguiling sense of wonder at the magician’s art. In this case, the magician is Eisenheim (Edward Norton) an extraordinarily gifted and enigmatic individual whose spectacular shows are wowing Austrian crowds in the early part of the 20th century. He makes doves appear out of nowhere, he causes an orange tree to grow on stage, and he has a fantastic trick involving a red cape and a mirror, but for this last one he needs a volunteer.
It just so happens that the volunteer emerging from the audience on one particular night is Sophie (Jessica Biel), someone who Eisenheim loved as a child and who was cruelly snatched away from him by her aristocratic family. Now, Sophie is due to marry the Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) and she finds herself torn between the mysterious artist - who she has secretly pined for since their childhood romance was cut short - and the cold, ruthless heir who is tired of waiting for his time on the throne and is planning to stage a coup against his father. Not a tough decision, you might think; and when Leopold gets an inkling of Sophie’s illicit relationship with Eisenheim he orders local police inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to keep a close eye on him, but Eisenheim’s most spectacular tricks are yet to come.
This is a dangerously thin narrative on which to hang a 110-minute movie, and the fact that Steven Millhauser’s screenplay has been adapted from a short story hardly comes as a surprise. The characters are a little on the shallow side, and it’s left to the actors to fill out their parts, something they do with some skill. Eisenheim is an unlikely role for Norton, but it turns out to be one perfectly suited to his intelligent and somewhat inscrutable screen presence. The actor plays the inscrutable protagonist in an understated fashion, his watchful eyes and carefully-chosen words always suggesting a keen intelligence and some unknown motives lurking behind his cool exterior. He’s more than matched by Giamatti, who has fun with his part as the conflicted police officer. Uhl is conflicted because he respects and perhaps even likes Eisenheim, but he must follow the orders of Leopold, a man for whom such respect and likeability are in short supply. Giamatti brings a lot of charm to the movie, and the interplay between Uhl and Eisenheim is where the film works best.
The love story, though, doesn’t really work as it should do. Biel is an appealing, attractive presence - and perhaps the only person in the film not sporting some impressive facial hair - but she can’t do a great deal with the stock ‘romantic interest’ part she has been saddled with. The romantic angle of The Illusionist feels pretty rote and clichéd, and the third point in the central love triangle - Sewell’s Leopold - never grows into anything more than a cold and predictable villain.
But despite the laborious nature of these scenes, The Illusionist always manages to hold the attention, and it’s always pleasing on the eye. Dick Pope’s photography is absolutely spellbinding: he paints the film with a sepia-toned brush, the slight haziness and flickering nature of his camerawork recalling early silent pictures, and The Illusionist always maintains a strangely beguiling quality because of its lovingly crafted atmosphere. The film also delights in the act of magic itself, with some lovely low-key special effects utilised to bring Eisenheim’s illusions to the screen. These tricks are adventurous, stretching credibility without being entirely outside the realms of possibility, but when Eisenheim’s act starts to include apparent necromancy in the film’s second half - bringing ghosts to life on the stage, and causing them to walk amidst the public - the picture starts to wobble badly.
The Illusionist eventually builds to a twist ending which is a cinematic crime on two fronts. First of all, it’s a painfully obvious piece of rug-pulling which most viewers will have seen coming a long time before, and most will have been hoping in vain for something more original; and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s also an ending which is explained to the viewer in a bewildering Usual Suspects-style avalanche of flashbacks, the effect of which is confusion as much as enlightenment. This an extraordinarily clumsy manner in which to end such a graceful piece of filmmaking, and it’s almost as if the filmmakers got cold feet at the thought of hiding the workings of their plot, instead deciding at a late script meeting to throw the audience a bone.
The Illusionist disappoints then, after a pretty strong opening hour, but it remains an enjoyable picture which is different enough from the norm to merit a recommendation. Fans of The Prestige may argue that Christopher Nolan’s film is more strongly scripted and more ambitious - and they’d probably be right in many ways - but I preferred The Illusionist because it feels like a film which possesses a greater sense of wit and invention, and seems to contain a little of that rare magical quality which was notable by its absence in The Prestige. Neil Burger certainly knows how to hold an audience’s attention, he knows how to dazzle them with some smart conjuring or misdirection, but he doesn’t quite know how to end his act; and The Illusionist would have been a much stronger film if it had resisted the urge to spill everything it had concealed up its sleeves just before the curtain fell. As any good magician should know, a trick never feels quite as special when the sense of mystery has been spoiled.
With a story encompassing 22 years and a number of continents, a cast stuffed with first-rate talent, one of cinema’s most iconic figures behind the camera, and a running time approaching three hours, The Good Shepherd has the look and feel of an epic. This ambitious drama tells the story of the birth of the CIA, by focusing on a man who devoted his life to it, and it’s Robert De Niro’s first film as a director since his promising debut A Bronx Tale 13 years ago. One would like to see this long-gestating project rekindling De Niro’s passion for movies - his recent acting displays have seemed increasingly disinterested in the whole business - but I can’t see it getting a passionate response from anyone else.
The Good Shepherd is a film which has been made with great skill and care, but it’s an emotionally stunted picture which always keeps the viewers outside the story, never letting us get under the skin of the supposedly tortured figure at its centre. That figure is Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a CIA agent who goes about his business with the utmost seriousness and dedication. He rarely displays a spark of humour, he keeps his emotions firmly in check, and he doesn’t speak unless he feels it’s absolutely necessary. As we see over the course of the picture, careless talk costs lives.
The film opens in 1961, with Wilson involved in secret plans for a US invasion of Cuba. Of course, we all know how that particular misadventure panned out, and a few days later, after the Bay of Pigs has become a very public fiasco, Wilson and his colleague Ray Brocco (John Turturro) are tasked with finding the mole who informed Castro of the impending attack. That night, Wilson finds a package on his doorstep containing a grainy photograph and a muffled audio reel seemingly recorded during a lovemaking session. Could this be the “stranger in the house”? As the CIA’s technical boffins begin filtering the evidence to try and find some clues, the story flashes back to 1939, to find a young Edward Wilson at Yale University.
The Good Shepherd continues to employ this structure over the course of the movie; the 1961 narrative is frequently interrupted by significant incidents from Edward’s past, until the two strands of the story finally dovetail in the climactic act. Our first glimpse of young Mr Wilson is a surprising one - fully dragged-up as Buttercup in a student production of HMS Pinafore - but the frivolity ends there. Wilson is invited into the University’s ultra-secret Skull and Bones society, after an weirdly homoerotic induction featuring cast-offs from Eyes Wide Shut and a spot of nude mud wrestling. Wilson’s watchful nature and fierce concentration doesn’t go unnoticed, and he is soon recruited by the FBI (represented by Alec Baldwin) to help expose the Nazi beliefs of his benevolent literary professor (Michael Gambon). From here, Edward’s path is set; a Skull and Bones party brings him into contact with Clover (Angelina Jolie), his future wife, and he also has a fateful meeting with General Bill Sullivan (De Niro) who asks him to go to London on a mission for the OSS.
There is a lot of potential on show in The Good Shepherd; and indeed, individual chunks of the film do live up to that potential. De Niro’s direction is confident and elegant: there are scenes here - such as a murder on a foggy London street, or the interrogation of a Russian agent - which really hit the mark, and he shows great judgement in the way his images and music are edited together. The whole film looks superb, with Robert Richardson’s typically excellent cinematography and Jeannine Oppewall’s production design proving particularly impressive, and as he showed in A Bronx Tale, De Niro has a good feel for the rhythms of a particular time and place.
Unfortunately, the problems inherent in The Good Shepherd are ultimately too serious for the merits to compensate, and one of its main disadvantages is right at the front and centre of the picture. The character of Edward Wilson is supposed to be a man who loses his soul in the fight for his country’s freedom, a man who gradually shrinks into himself and pushes away all those close to him in the process; but Wilson begins the film as a stiff, colourless blank, and there’s nowhere for his character to go. We get scraps of information about Wilson’s inner life, like his fondness for ships in bottles, or the trauma he still feels over the suicide of his father, but aside from that early Gilbert & Sullivan sojourn there’s no life about him. He keeps his feelings contained, often with good reason (every sexual encounter in the film has bad consequences), but De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can’t figure out a way to let us peek behind the mask.
The frustrating opaqueness of Wilson isn’t Matt Damon’s fault, he gives a very intelligent and measured performance under the circumstances, but he can’t overcome his character’s essential coldness and it’s left to his co-stars to give the movie a human face. De Niro has assembled some of the most reliable supporting players in the business, and the turns offered by Baldwin, Gambon, Turturro, William Hurt (as Damon’s superior) and John Sessions (as a KGB defector, no less!) are top-notch. The director has even coaxed Joe Pesci out of semi-retirement to make his first screen appearance since 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4, but his one-scene cameo is too brief to really make an impression; and despite the generally fine casting instincts displayed by De Niro, he does leave a few actors stranded with roles they are ill-suited to. Angelina Jolie’s flirtatious performance brightens up the screen when she first appears, but she remains far too glamorous and sexualised for her gradual transformation into a neglected housewife. Billy Crudup is ridiculously misplaced as an upper-crust British spy, with his attempt at a English accent sounding more German than anything, and the director’s own cameo is as flat as we’ve come to expect from his recent screen appearances.
The Good Shepherd’s biggest flaw has nothing to do with the cast, though, and it has everything to do with the film’s scale. At 167 minutes the somnambulant pacing De Niro imposes on the picture becomes increasingly hard to take, with the unwaveringly serious, downbeat tone making it something of a slog; and while the director shows himself to be capable of shooting some excellent scenes, he has little idea how to fit the pieces together into a seamless whole. It’s a clumsily cluttered picture, and despite the surface complexity of the narrative, there’s not enough meat on the film’s bones to justify its epic length. The film’s central theme - fathers continually failing their sons - is depicted in a simplistic and literate manner which carries little resonance, and by the time the source of the leak is discovered in the late stages it’s hard to really care about any of the characters’ prospects.
There’s an impressively authentic feel to much of The Good Shepherd. The painstaking methods used by the CIA technicians to filter a photo or audio recording for clues are fascinating to watch, and the scenes in which spies surreptitiously pass information to each other are hugely enjoyable in a classic spy thriller way (Damon is asked for change of a dollar on the bus, when he gets to the office he uses the dollar’s serial number to decode vital information); but these are merely small moments of relief in a film which otherwise denies most of the standard filmgoing pleasures. It’s a character study with no character; a grim slog through the shadowy underworld of espionage which takes its cue from its central figure and ends up being nothing more than a heartless empty shell. As Edward Wilson walks down a grey corridor at the film’s climax, we’re supposed to be pondering the fate of a broken man, but we can’t bring ourselves to care because he remains such a remote figure. He could be any ordinary Joe walking to work, just another anonymous spoke in the wheel, and after spending 167 arduous minutes in his company, it’s not hard to feel a little cheated.
So, that’s the whole jamboree over for another year. The 79th Annual Academy Awards have come and gone, and here’s how it all happened….
1.30am - The show kicks off with a resolutely unfunny montage featuring some of the nominees in which Clint’s effortless cool - “we’re nominated for picture, director, things like that” - outshines much of the showboating around him. Then we get to see the nominees applauding themselves - nice. Ellen Degeneres appears on stage with an opening monologue apparently co-written by Carrie Fisher. She seems a little nervous initially, but she grows into a fairly endearing and amusing performance, and her line “if there weren’t any blacks, Jews and gays there would be no Oscars, or even anyone called Oscar” gets a laugh. Unfortunately she ends on a rather flat note with a half-hearted song-and-dance bit. The sight of a completely shaven-headed Jack Nicholson is the most startling moment of this opening segment.
1.45 - Best Art Direction
A very pretty Nicole Kidman and a very serious Daniel Craig present the first Oscar of the night to Pan’s Labyrinth, which will hopefully bode well for its chances tonight. Eugenio Caballero gives a heartfelt and brief speech.
1.48 - Technical Awards
Maggie Gyllenhaal talks about the technical Oscars which were handed out at a secret bunker somewhere last week - well away from any of the beautiful people, of course. “It was a wild night” she says, apparently without a hint of irony.
1.50 - What the hell was that? Some silhouettes roll together and make a big Oscar statuette. A rather pointless interlude.
1.53 - Best Makeup
Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C Reilly turn up for a musical skit about Oscars’ lack of recognition for comedy films, which is an unexpected highlight, and then they announce the second award of the night for Pan’s Labyrinth! That’s two out of two so far for one of last year’s best films. One of the winners thanks Guillermo del Toro about three times, and then gets played off by the orchestra before he can thank anyone else.
2.00 - Best Animated and Live Action Short
Awww…. Pint-sized stars Abigail Breslin and Jaden Smith are on stage to announce the winner for Best Animated Short. There’s some stumbling over lines and giggling before The Danish Poet is announced as the winner. Director Torill Kove bizarrely apologises to Tom Hanks during her speech, and then the Oscar for Best Live Action Short goes to West Bank Story.
2.11 - The Hollywood Sound Effects Choir, a group of people who make an impressive variety of sound effects with their mouths alone. Sadly, Sgt. Larvell Jones from the Police Academy films is nowhere to be seen.
2.14 - Best Sound Editing
Steve Carrell and Greg Kinnear’s intro, featuring a microphone cutting out, is predictable but fun; and then the Oscar goes to Letters From Iwo Jima. Only one of the recipients gets to make a speech, even though the other has a piece of paper in his hand ready to go. Shame.
2.14 - Best Sound Mixing
Jessica Biel and James McAvoy award the Best Sound Mixing Oscar to Dreamgirls. It’s the first award of the night for the former Best Picture hopeful, but probably not the last.
2.21 - Best Supporting Actor
Rachel Weisz announces the winner of the first big award of the night, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar - and Alan Arkin wins! I’m delighted for him, and his speech warmly pays tribute to the rest of the Little Miss Sunshine team. I’ve been pretty happy with the way the awards have gone so far.
2.30 - James Taylor performs his nominated song from Cars and he’s quickly followed by Melissa Etheridge’s effort for An Inconvenient Truth. I go to the kitchen for a much-needed caffeine injection.
2.36 - Leonardo Di Caprio and Al Gore appear on stage for an environmentally-friendly announcement, and Al displays some razor-sharp comic timing.
2.43 - Best Animated Feature
A darker-than-usual Cameron Diaz announces the winner of this award, and the animated characters appear in the audience, which is a nice touch. The winner is Happy Feet, with George Miller looking rather spiffy in an old-fashioned tuxedo. He offers a good speech too.
2.46 - Best Adapted Screenplay
Helen Mirren and Tom Hanks announce the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay. The full title and list of writers for Borat is quite a mouthful, and it’s weird to hear Hanks and Mirren reading brief excerpts from the screenplays verbatim. Very surreal. Eventually, they get round to the announcement, and the Oscar goes to William Monaghan for The Departed. It’s the first boost of the evening to one of the Best Picture hopefuls, but Monaghan’s rambling speech goes on too long and he eventually gets played off. Keep it brief, people!
3.00 - Best Costume Design
Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway present this award - a bit of a conflict of interest, no? They engage the wonderful Meryl Streep in a little comedy and then the nominated clothes are modelled on stage, which is a tad strange. Finally they hand the Oscar to Milena Canonero for Marie Antoinette. Blunt and Hathaway strain to hide their disappointment. In her speech Canonero says “I want to thank everyone who had anything to do with this movie”, which is surely the best way to go about it.
3.05 - Tom Cruise presents a well-deserved honorary Oscar to Sherry Lansing who gives a rather dry speech.
3.10 - Ellen’s walkabouts among the audience are raising big laughs. She matches her earlier encounter with Martin Scorsese by involving Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg in a nice bit of japery.
3.12 - Best Cinematography
Gwyneth Paltrow gives this Oscar to Pan’s Labyrinth, the film’s third of the night. There’s no doubt that this is the film of the night so far, and I guess the Best Foreign Picture Oscar is looking like a safe bet now. Like all of the film’s winners so far, Guillermo Navarro pays tribute to Guillermo del Toro’s vision. I was hoping Emmanuel Lubezki would collect this award for Children of Men, but for the second year in a row (after The New World) his extraordinary work is overlooked.
3.20 - Best Visual Effects
Naomi Watts and Robert Downey Jr. appears on stage to announce the winner of this year’s CGI-fest. Downey Jr. makes a funny, self-deprecating gag, and then the Oscar predictably goes to the overblown and deathly dull Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. The speeches are almost as smug and humourless as the film itself.
3.23 - Best Foreign Language Picture
Ken Watanabe and Catherine Deneuve add a touch of class to proceedings as they take to the stage to introduce a montage of classic foreign-language films. Oddly, they include clips of people giving each other the finger, and then pixel out the finger! What a curious case of self-censorship. Then Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen turn up to present this year’s award, although why they didn’t allow Watanabe and Deneuve to do it is anyone’s guess. In a shocking twist, Germany’s The Lives of Others beats Pan’s Labyrinth, which had previously swept all before it. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck gives a passionate and excitable speech, and seems rather overwhelmed by the whole thing. I feel sorry for Guillermo del Toro, though.
3.34 - Best Supporting Actress
George Clooney - debonair as ever - is on hand to present this award to Jennifer Hudson, whose victory had been predicted since the dawn of time. Hudson thanks God twice in her speech, and thankfully refrains from turning on the expected waterworks. The long-held foreknowledge of Hudson’s victory seems to have sapped some of the emotion from a presentation which was anticipated as one of the night’s biggest moments.
3.41 - Best Short Documentary
Gael Garcia Bernal is on stage with Eva Green - once again sporting far too much eye makeup - and this award goes to The Blood of the Ying-Zhou District.
3.45 - Best Documentary Feature
Jerry Seinfeld’s intro is typically funny and astute, one of the comic highlights of the evening so far. He announces that the best of the “five incredibly depressing movies” is An Inconvenient Truth, which comes as little surprise. Al Gore joins the director on stage, and he gives a rousing and earnest speech.
3.50 - Honorary Award to Ennio Morricone
Who deserves this more than Ennio Morricone, creator of some of the most memorable films scores of all time? Clint Eastwood rather fluffs his lines when presenting the award, but the montage of Morricone’s career which plays subsequently speaks for itself. What an extraordinarily diverse and innovative range of musical scores; displaying an ability to blend sound with imagery like few other composers, and giving vital weight to some brilliant films. Frankly, he deserves better than having Celine Dion mangle one of his works in her own inimitable way. Thankfully, Dion isn’t allowed to disrupt matters for too long, and when Morricone takes to the stage he delivers a humble speech in Italian which Clint translates. A remarkable character, and a well-deserved Oscar.
4.05 - Oh, I’m so tired….
4.06 - Best Original Score
This is quite an interesting category, which will be presented by Penelope Cruz and Hugh Jackman. The Oscar goes to Gustavo Santaolalla for Babel, his second victory in the space of two years. It’s not his greatest score, and I thought Pan’s Labyrinth’s music was a much better effort, but Santaolalla gives a nice speech.
4.10 - Sid Ganis tells us everything we cold wish to know about the Academy in under 60 seconds.
4.11 - Best Original Screenplay
Little Miss Sunshine looks to have this category in the bag, and once Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst have gone through the whole rigmarole or reading the scripts out loud, they surprise nobody by giving the award to Michael Arndt for this year’s indie hit. He’s struggling with a bit of a sore throat, but he manages to croak out an efficient speech which thanks all of the notable figures involved in the film as well as his family, whom apparently once drove 600 miles in a busted VW van. Could this award be a signifier for Little Miss Sunshine’s increased Best Picture hopes?
4.20 - Best Original Song
Jennifer Lopez - or J-Lo, to her friends - introduces a medley of Dreamgirls’ three nominated songs. It seems to go on forever with an army of backing singers and a cacophony of screeching from the performers. Poor old James Taylor only got a stool and a man on a piano to work with. When John Travolta and Queen Latifah open the envelope, it’s a fantastic surprise - Melissa Etheridge wins for An Inconvenient Truth. She gives a passionate speech, and seems genuinely stunned by the win. It’s a heartening result, and a very bad night so far for Dreamgirls.
4.35 - Michael Mann has created a short film on diversity in American cinema. An odd, interesting selection of clips, but the sequence has little impact. The standard of montages has been very poor this year.
4.41 - Best Editing
This is a crucial category, with Babel and The Departed looking for success here to give them an edge in the Best Picture chase. Kate Winslet - looking lovely as ever - is on presenting duties, and she calls out the name of Thelma Schoonmaker, giving her a third Academy Award. Once again, her speech is gracious and touching, and The Departed’s chances of taking the big prize now seem stronger than ever.
4.45 - In Memoriam
Jodie Foster introduces a film featuring the cinematic figures who have passed on in the last 12 months.
4.51 - Best Actress
If Helen Mirren doesn’t win this Oscar it would surely be the biggest shock since…well…ever. She has collected pretty much every award on offer over recent months, and her win here seems to be the safest possible bet. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s announcement doesn’t shock anyone, and Mirren accepts her award with customary grace and humour, dedicating her Oscar to The Queen herself. Mirren fully deserves this honour for an exceptional performance. In fact this has been a tremendous year for actresses, with a number of hugely impressive displays in this category.
5.00 - Ellen Degeneres, who has done well tonight after a shaky start, is hoovering under the nominees’ feet.
5.01 - Best Actor
Forest Whitaker seems set for this one, but can that crafty old Peter O’Toole stage a late run at the prize? Reese Witherspoon opens the envelope…. And indeed it is Forest Whitaker who makes his way up to the stage. He seems incredibly nervous and humbled by the award, but he holds it together long enough to give a moving speech. It’s nice to see one of the most consistent, and consistently underrated, actors of the past two decades finally gaining some recognition. Like the Best Actress award, it's a performance which richly merits an Oscar
5.07 - Best Director
As soon as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas appeared on stage to present this Oscar, any doubts about its destination completely evaporated. This was three of the 70’s ’Movie Brats’ generation honouring one of their own. Finally, after thirty years of waiting, Martin Scorsese was announced as Best Director. “Could you double-check the envelope?” he asked after his standing ovation abated, and he then gave a lovely speech which was full of joy and gratitude. It was wonderful to see him there with that award in his hand, and unquestionably the highlight of the evening.
5.13 - Best Picture
Jack Nicholson is joined on stage by Diane Keaton, who proceeds to shout the nominees’ names in a rather disconcerting way. After victories in the Screenplay, Editing and Direction fields, there was no surprise when The Departed was announced as Best Picture. Was it the best picture released in 2006? Probably not. Was it the best of the five nominees? Yes, I think it was. It’s a brash, sharp, thrilling film - superbly made and acted - and it manages to do something too few films can do these days: it guarantees a highly entertaining time at the cinema.
And that was that. A relatively enjoyable night which ultimately ended on a high note. Martin Scorsese’s triumph will live long in the memory, and that moment alone made the decision to stay up to an absurd hour in the morning very worthwhile.
