Review - Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)

There are many different types of documentary, and there are many ways in which filmmakers subvert or manipulate the documentary form to get their point across. Some use reconstructions to better illustrate the stories being told, some wilfully use fictional elements to get closer to the essential truth of a subject, while many are less objective than they purport to be, with the director's own beliefs and prejudices often coming through in the picture's point of view. Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir is a particularly daring reinvention of standard documentary techniques, with the director using animation to explore his own memories of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Lebanese Phalangist militia forces murdered thousands of civilians. Waltz with Bashir is, as far as I know, the world's first animated documentary, and as such, it's a curious viewing experience. Folman and his team of animators have utilised a style that conjures some supremely arresting images – be they recreations of war, or imaginative flights of fancy – but when this same approach is applied to the more mundane, talking-heads portion of the picture, Waltz with Bashir's shortcomings are quickly exposed.

The film starts in stirring fashion, with a horde of savage, snarling dogs racing through the moonlit streets to a pulsing soundtrack. These are the dogs that regularly haunt the dreams of a man who Ari Folman served with during the war, representing the 26 dogs he shot in that period, and when he calls Folman to discuss these traumatic recollections, the director realises he has repressed his own memories of that time, pushing them into some deep corner of his subconscious. This conversation, we are told, was the starting point for Waltz with Bashir, the spark that prompted Folman to go on a journey of rediscovery, interviewing friends and fellow soldiers in the hope that their reminiscences would help trigger his own memory. The thing is, we watch this conversation take place in a bar, with an animated Folman and his friend discussing it over a late-night drink, and I couldn't help wondering if this was just a scripted segment of the film, to help kick the narrative along. Folman's film has a tendency to throw up niggling little questions like that, and these instances caused me to question the value of the film's aesthetic, which often seemed to be interfering with my involvement, and causing me to question what I see.

Take the interview segments, for example. These should be the most powerful scenes in Waltz with Bashir, as a number of contributors sit in front of the camera and simply relay their first-hand accounts, but Folman's decision to animate this aspect of the film completely nullifies their effect. The film's animation of people slightly resembles the technique we saw in Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly (Waltz with Bashir wasn't rotoscoped, however. Footage was shot and then animated separately), but these visuals lack the refinement needed to express subtle emotions. The people's faces are flattened out, their movements are oddly stiff, and as well as it stripping any sense of weight from their words, there's also something undeniably disquieting about the fact that their testimonies have been processed through an intermediary before we get to hear them. These portions of Waltz with Bashir would have been so much more involving and emotionally rich if they had been presented just as they had been shot, but the appallingly ill-suited animation saps all life from them.

Conversely, the animation is also Waltz with Bashir's greatest asset. Parts of the film are beautiful and striking, notably the oft-repeated shot of a young Folman and other soldiers rising out of the sea as the sky is illuminated by flares, and in sequences such as this, the bold colours and simplistic nature of the visual scheme creates some haunting images. Often, they contribute towards vivid recreations of Folman's war experience, from timewasting on the beach to watching a fellow soldier collapse after being struck by an unseen sniper, and Folman introduces an unexpected note of bawdy humour into the film, when an officer watches a cheesy porn film. The film's most memorable use of its aesthetic occurs in its more fantastical sequences, though; such as Folman wandering in a daze through an abandoned Beirut airport, the giant blue woman who mysteriously appears at sea to rescue him from a blazing boat, or the sight of an Israeli soldier "dancing" amid gunfire, in a sequence that gives the film its title.

These are great individual moments, but I'm not sure they really cohere with the sketchy narrative line Folman has chosen to pursue. As he drifts from one unilluminating interview to the next, he explores both his own role in the war and the unreliable nature of memory itself, but these explorations fail to really unearth anything particularly insightful on either subject, and Waltz with Bashir too often feels like a contrived and shallow piece of navel-gazing on the director's part. The film is slack, vague and disappointingly dull, and it never seems to get to grips with its central subject in a sufficient manner, although one sequence does successfully ram home the horror of the massacre Folman skirts around. Late in the film, the director inserts a piece of archive footage that shows the aftermath of the massacre, and we see bloody bodies lying in the streets, while inconsolable local women wail and weep in front of the camera as they mourn their loss – and at this moment, for the first time in the picture, I started to feel something. It is telling that it took the insertion of original, unadulterated news footage to finally probe deep enough to touch my emotions, and this is the ultimate paradox of Waltz with Bashir. So much care has been lavished on its visual style, as it attempts to tell us a powerful story in a unique way, but the film only does justice to that story when Folman strips away all of the layers, removing the obstacles that prevented our complete engagement, and simply allowing us to stare directly into an open wound.

"He always had this innate sense of live or die, minute by minute, second by second in the ring" - An interview with James Toback

When Mike Tyson visited the set of James Toback's film The Pick-Up Artist in 1985, the pair struck up a friendship that has endured to this day. While dealing with the extraordinary ups and downs that have marked his tumultuous life, Tyson has also taken small roles in two of the director's films – Black and White and When Will I Be Loved – and now the pair have collaborated for a third time, but on this occasion the fighter himself is the star of the show. Tyson is a one-man film, a fascinating documentary in which Toback allows his subject the time to tell his own story in his own words. It is a remarkable piece of work, and I met James Toback recently to discuss it.


I see a lot of documentaries and most of them are structured in the same way, with various interviews cut together to offer different perspectives on a subject, but you've chosen to give us this single monologue. When you first thought about making a film on Tyson, did you always intend to follow this format?

Well, I thought I had two options. One was to be part of it myself and to make a movie about the two of us, but given the history of our friendship and how personal it has been, you'd either have to go all the way in that direction or not at all, and to just pretend that I'm an interviewer would not have worked. I toyed with that idea for a while, but I thought it would be much more powerful if I just went all the way and tried some of these technical things that I wanted to do, like split-screens and overlapping voices. That just seemed the best way to go. You know, I love Kusturica's films and I saw his film about Maradona, and he is very much in that. You could almost say it's a movie about his relationship with Maradona, and even though I love Kusturica and I like Maradona, I have to say it made me glad I hadn't done that. I guess you have to ask who's the subject, and how much can you get from this one person, and Tyson is a massively fascinating person. There is a movie to be made about the two of us, but that's a different movie and it would have been a less impressive one and ultimately a less challenging one for me.

In the film, Tyson talks about how hard he finds it to trust people, but this is a remarkable show of trust in you, to open up to your cameras like this.

I couldn't have done it otherwise, and if I had any doubt whatsoever that he wasn't ready to go 100% I wouldn't have gone ahead. But listen, I've known him since the first night we met 23 years ago, and I know what our relationship is, so it never crossed my mind that he would be coy or resistant. I knew he wouldn't do it unless he was ready to go right in.

Did he take any persuading when you first came to him with the idea?
No, we had been talking about doing it for quite a while, and it was definitely the right time for both of us. At many other junctures along the road it would have been difficult to work it out, but this was just one conversation and we were shooting two weeks later.

Were there any subjects he was reluctant to talk about?
He was ready for anything. There was one story, which I promised him I wouldn't tell, for the same reason he wouldn't tell it in the movie, because it was sort of embarrassing to Brad Pitt, and Mike said, "I like him, there's no reason for me to embarrass him".

Were you worried about getting Brad Pitt's lawyers on your back?
It wasn't the lawyers, he wouldn't have given a fuck about that, he just felt there was no reason to embarrass him. He had told me this story privately and I asked him to elaborate on it, and he started to but then he said, "I don't want to do that, he's a good guy and it's embarrassing". But that was his only inhibition in the whole 30 hours we did.

We're so used to seeing Mike Tyson as a figure of pure aggression, but when we see him so vulnerable and open here it's almost hard to believe he's the same man.

There's that great phrase of André Gide's, "Don't understand me too quickly", and there are certain people of whom that is powerfully true. Tyson is one of them. There's no question he has a very complex, fascinating and contradictory nature, so the minute you think you have him pegged you find something that subverts it. Certainly the conventional notion of him is completely misleading – partly because of certain things he's done, partly because of his physical appearance and presence, partly because of his profession – but he's a very sensitive, articulate and psychologically shrewd person.

One of the most revelatory parts of Tyson is when he talks about his penchant for violence stemming from his incredible fear of humiliation.

Absolutely, and you can see the direct correlation. You can also feel it within; it's a very human response to be driven to either rage or cowering fear by humiliation, fear or negation. You either take it and get whipped by it, or you rebel against it homicidally, and clearly that was his natural response. What comes as a surprise, of course, is the source of it, and seeing him in a very vulnerable state. Then you see him in prison under these very reduced circumstances and the effect that had on him, and how his whole life afterwards has been coloured by that humiliation. I don't know if anybody has ever made prison seem more horrifying than he does in his description of it. Basically, after seeing the movie you'd rather go to a labour camp in Siberia than a regular maximum-security American prison.

He is very moving when he talks about Cus D'Amato, and his death appears to be the major turning point for Tyson. When he died, Tyson no longer had anyone to guide him, and to show him the right path.
Right, and I think some people are never fortunate enough to have anybody who's as ultimately reliable, who will always be there for them, and who always has their best interests at heart. Anyone of exceptional skills is tremendously aided by that, because it gives you a field in which to develop, when you have someone behind you who is basically saying, "Don't worry, everything's covered, I'll take care of everything, just become what you need to become". Clearly he had it with Cus D'Amato and he took advantage of it, he flourished as a result of it, so when Cus died, there was a void and that's where his future was forged, both positively and negatively. It enabled him to succeed in a way he never would have succeeded otherwise, but on the other hand his early death and absence almost guaranteed the fall that there was as well.

It's as if he's a classical tragic figure, destroyed by his own flaws and doomed to repeat his mistakes.

Absolutely, and in his case it's a kind of double tragedy because he starts at this incredibly low point, then through his ambition he becomes unimaginably successful, he destroys himself through hubris, and then he is resurrected again through will and determination. You think "OK, this time he'll keep it", and then of course he subverts it a second time. You basically say, "How did I get this chance? How did I come from that and develop into this?" It's almost unreal, and something about the unreality of it drives one to destroy it, as if to say "I knew that was too good to be true, I knew I should really be down here", and then getting furious at being down there and striving to get back, before falling down again. It leaves a kind of shellshock, and the Tyson you see at the end of the movie is almost like someone who is a veteran of two world wars, and is now in a kind of post-death syndrome, like he went into death and came back.

The film ends on a very ambiguous note, with Tyson saying, "The past is history, the rest is a mystery", and we wonder where he will go from here. He's at the crossroads again.

It's literally on a day-by-day basis, he doesn't know. Obviously everybody is subject to fate, and I was noting with no small degree of satisfaction the sudden and untimely death of Jörg Haider, who had just shown up very well in that election in Austria. He was in his 40's [note-he was actually 58], and he certainly looked to be in physically good shape – and then boom! Dead. Do you know where he was headed? His mother's 90th birthday celebration. So what are the odds? He's in his forties, she's 90, and if one of them is going to die in the next 48 hours, what are the odds that it's going to be him? One in 5,000? It's not even a price. So there is this sense of ongoing uncertainty in everybody's life, but people make assumptions, like he's in his 40's, she's 90, so she's going to die first. But with Mike Tyson it's almost an asterisk case, because you can't make any assumptions, anything is possible, and if I made any statement imaginable about his fate you would almost nod in acceptance at whatever that may be.

You talked about Tyson living on a day-by-day basis, and I assume that's an effect of his rehab programme. How is he handling that?
Everybody in these 12-step process is taught to say and believe "One day at a time", so you never stop and think, "I'm great". As of today, everything seems to be ok, and you're going to say the same thing tomorrow and that's as far as it goes. I don't know what kind of fragility is there with him, but there's certainly some, and this sense of fragility of time and the potential of dying by some self-inflicted wound or something all made him such a liberated, great fighter psychologically. He always had this innate sense of live or die, minute by minute, second by second in the ring. To a degree, every boxer does, but he did it in the spirit of that and there wasn't any of the calculation or strategising that there is in most fighters. He talks about early knockouts and his bronchial condition, and he knew he had to get rid of them right away, he had to intimidate them and terrify them before they got in the ring, and he expected a knockout right away so every second is heightened. If it goes too far down the road he loses that advantage, and having that mentality is a way of overcoming fear, which is the underlying imprisoning notion that's lurking there all the time.

When you mentioned him intimidating opponents before he got in the ring, you reminded me of one of my favourite moments, when he narrates over his fight footage and we see him staring down an opponent, waiting for him to flinch.

Yes, we did that editorially. I had a great collaboration with my editor Aaron Yanes, who was my assistant editor on When Will I be Loved, and he totally got what I was up to and what I wanted to do, and he was a really terrific editor. I would almost say I'd never use anybody else.

It must be a major challenge to do that, to boil down all of those interviews and the hours of archive footage into a single coherent 90 minute feature.

First of all it was difficult to get a balance between the unique stuff that we shot now and the older footage, and we ended up having around an hour on him and 25 minutes of fights and stuff, so that was part of the task. Also we had to know what was great, as when you have a movie like this with so much great stuff, both archival and present, you want to avoid ever needing some dead weight. There's a phrase in movies which is "Shoe Leather" – we need this for exposition; we have to show that; this isn't the best part and I can't wait for it to end so we can get to that. You didn't need anything like that in this movie, it's all just highlights. We went through everything at the beginning and weeded out anything that didn't work, so there's literally nothing in the movie where you say "alright, this is 45 seconds I could do without, but we have to have it". There's really nothing like that and it keeps the movie at a certain pitch.

Having worked with Tyson on both Black and White and When Will I be Loved, what's his take on the filmmaking experience? Is it a process he enjoys?

He says he does. I think he enjoys the moments in it, and we've had a lot of fun doing all three movies at different times, but he also is restless and impatient, and I was lucky to get him as concentrated as he was during this movie. I mean, we did some great stuff in Black and White, but it was an hour here and an hour there, and this time we basically went non-stop.

We see in the film that Tyson was a keen student of the game, who studied footage of older fighters to improve himself. Has he any desire to get back into boxing at some point, perhaps in a coaching capacity?

No, he has none. That would be very easy for him to do, and an easy way to make money, but his boxing life is over. You know, he was offered a huge amount of money to fight Klitschko and Holyfield, but he doesn't want to do it anymore, and he doesn't want to do what a lot of old fighters do, like commentary and stuff.

I read a quote from you where you said Mike's plan was always to sell DVDs of this out of the back of a car...

[laughs] Yeah, on street corners in Harlem.

At what point did he realise this was going to be something bigger than that?

I think not until we got this ten-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, which he was totally unprepared for. I was not prepared for it; I thought we might get two minutes, but to get people to stand for ten or eleven minutes, you can't pay people to stand that long. Right up until the end of the movie he didn't know they were going to like the movie, he thought they might dislike both it and him, and even though I told him I'd screened it for a lot of people and there was no chance that was going to happen, he was not convinced. In fact – I didn't know this until his manager told me – he and a bunch of people had gone to dinner while the movie was on, and they were standing outside the theatre where they could hear it was coming to the end. Mike turned to his manager and said "Do you think Jim would be angry if I just went back to the hotel? What if they don't like it, what if they don't like me?" and his manager said it wouldn't happen. But you know the history of the Cannes Film Festival is littered with walkouts and booing and all kinds of negative displays, and had there been that kind of reaction, he would have just bolted. I think if there had been a tepid response he might have gone, he was literally waiting for the response, and when he heard this raucous applause and people yelling "Bravo!" that was it. Because they were responding to him and not his knocking someone out, I think he was genuinely moved, thrilled and shocked.

On the subject of France, your work is very popular over there, and I was wondering what you thought of The Beat that my Heart Skipped?

I thought it was very well directed, very well acted, and flattering to make a movie that has such an impact on someone, so he still has it on his mind thirty years later and feels a need to do his own version. The only two caveats I would have is that he changed a few things that I didn't believe. I didn't believe that he could have beaten up that Russian gangster and cried instead of killing him, and if he does cry you know that gangster's going to have him killed the next day. I mean, come on, what's he going to say, "Well, I've just got to live with it", you know the guy's dead in 24 hours. You see him a year later at the concert, but what happened to the Russian gangster, did he become a pacifist overnight? [laughs] The other thing was the scene in the bathroom with the girl, and the point of the scene in Fingers with Tanya Roberts is not to fuck Tanya Roberts, it's to fuck over her boyfriend – like, "Tell your old man I fucked you". She didn't know he was doing it out of some perverse payback, so there's an added dimension in that dynamic, it wasn't like "I think I'll take a break and fuck this girl in the ladies' room of this health club". So those are the two things, particularly the first one, that bothered me, but other than that I think it's very well done. I think Romain Duris is terrific – I mean, Keitel is the guy – but Duris does a very good job, and overall I like the movie. It's a weird thing to watch a movie that is a re-enactment of all the characters, the world, the relationships, the psychology that you devised, it's a strange experience.

I'd just like to finish by asking what you're planning on doing next.

There's a movie I'm trying to finish now that I'll hopefully be shooting in Paris in the spring with Alain Delon. You know, I've wanted to work with Delon for so long. The British Film Institute publishes this Projections series, and Projections 4 asked all these directors what actor they wanted to work with most, and I had Alain Delon. My three-page paean to Delon started with the sentence "I am not to my knowledge a homosexual..." [laughs]. So I met him in Paris about three weeks ago and he's a phenomenal guy, so I really hope this works out.

Shooting in Paris with Delon is probably as good as it gets.

I know, that's the way I feel. To me, from the first time I saw him I just thought, "That's the guy", and he did The Leopard, Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge, L'Eclisse, Purple Noon, Mr Klein, The Sicilian Clan, so many movies where he wasn't just good, he was memorable. Then you meet him and you know why – it's real, as it usually is with people who are really good over a period time at what they do in some exceptional way. It's not just that they happened to click at a given moment, it's a sustained thing in their life and their work.

Do you feel like you're following in the footsteps of Jean-Pierre Melville?

You know, the greatest thing anyone ever said to me about film, it was Henri Decaë who shot Exposed and who also shot Melville's films. He said to me after we worked together "You remind me very much of my favourite director" – and I was hoping he'd say it – "Jean-Pierre Melville". I gave him a big hug and said, "You couldn't have said anything to make me feel better".

Review - W.

Just what is Oliver Stone trying to accomplish with W., his perplexing study of current US president George Walker Bush? Should we take the film as a straight drama, a parody or a satire? Stone flirts with various approaches throughout the picture without ever settling on one. And what are we to make of the timing? W. was rushed through production this summer to arrive in American cinemas just a few weeks before the nation goes to the polls to elect their 44th president (by the time it appears in the UK, the matter will already be settled) and whenever discussion turns to the 43rd, most people are just glad to see the back of him. Perhaps W. is best viewed as a curiosity, as a document of an odd American story, when an under-qualified man inexplicably rose to the highest office in the land, and made a complete hash of things when he got there. For the average cinemagoer, however, its value is more recognisable – this is the most dramatically coherent and entertaining work Oliver Stone has produced for many years.

That's not to say W. is Stone's best film, it's not even close. For all of their flaws, pictures like JFK, Nixon, Any Given Sunday or Born on the Fourth of July have a bombastic sense of daring and complexity that shames W., and this picture lacks the kind of emotional thrust the younger Stone brought to Salvador and Platoon. But after disastrous missteps like Alexander and World Trade Centre, we can take pleasure in the simple things W. gets right; the fact that it is competently directed, highly enjoyable and supremely well acted throughout. Josh Brolin is Stone's Bush, and the film follows his development from the black sheep of the family – a drunken, directionless youth – through his spiritual awakening and governorship of Texas, his first term in office, and right up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That's the period W. covers, but what's possibly more interesting are the events Stone has chosen to ignore. 9/11 takes place off-camera, the 2000 election barely merits a mention, and the film ends before Hurricane Katrina, which is arguably as damning an indictment of the Bush administration as Iraq.

Instead, W. plays as one long oedipal conflict, between Bush and his domineering father (played by James Cromwell). In Stone's thesis, Bush's rise to the top has been propelled by the need to prove himself to the old man, and even to exceed him, with Bush Snr.'s failure to finish Saddam Hussein off in the first Gulf War being a key motivation behind his son's invasion. W.'s early scenes see Bush drinking and carousing and failing to hold down any of the jobs his father's contacts set up for him. "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy?" his dad asks during another angry dressing-down, "You're a Bush. Act like one", and Dubya's situation isn't eased by his brother Jeb, whose steady rise seems to constantly put him in the shade. This relationship, between father and son, forms the backbone of W. – Stone keeps returning to it again and again, as if it holds the key that will provide all of the answers to the Dubya conundrum – and he even stages one late dream sequence, wherein the elder Bush appears in the Oval Office and picks a fight with his now-president son. If these scenes succeed, and they mostly do, it is because Stanley Weiser's screenplay contains some sharply written confrontations, and the actors are excellent, but this narrative thread is far from W.'s most potent element.

W. is at its most compelling and incisive whenever Stone focuses on Bush's time inside the White House, and the film opens in the Oval Office, where Bush and his advisors are meeting to discuss potential terms for the countries they have deemed a threat to America ("How about Axis of Weasels?" Karl Rove, played by Toby Jones, wryly suggests). Most of the best moments in W. occur in scenes like this, that depict the inner workings of the administration, which Stone has re-imagined in a plausible and intriguing way, and the level of performance in these sequences is top-notch. Stone has assembled a first-rate cast to portray these figures, with the actors often bearing an eerie resemblance to the people they're playing, while rarely slipping into easy mimicry. Richard Dreyfuss is great as a sinister, shark-like Dick Cheney; Thandie Newton nails Condoleezza Rice better than anyone could have expected; while the always-great Jeffrey Wright draws a real sense of pathos from his performance as Colin Powell, depicted as calm voice of reason who goes against his own beliefs, and eventually follows orders like a good soldier. Not all of the casting decisions pay off – Ioan Gruffud is an awkwardly unconvincing Blair (where was Michael Sheen?) – but taken as a whole the ensemble work in this picture is remarkable.

As good as these supporting turns are, however, Josh Brolin is astounding. Just as Anthony Hopkins did with Richard Nixon, Brolin overcomes the lack of physical resemblance to the man he's playing by delving deep within himself to pull out a real performance, not an impersonation. He builds the character from the inside out, ensuring there is a sense of depth and development underneath the vocal tics and mannerisms that he has mastered. His relationship with wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks, excellent if underused) is warm and touching, and he is particularly impressive in the private moments: watch him just after he loses the Texas congressional seat to Kent Hance, for example, or the "Road to Damascus" moment just before renouncing drink and finding God. Late in the picture, Stone present the press conference in which Bush was asked to name his biggest mistakes, and we watch for an agonisingly long period as he gropes for an answer. "I don’t want to sound like I haven’t made no mistakes, I’m confident I have, it’s just that I haven’t... you really put me on the spot here, John. Perhaps I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one... but... uh..." Bush mumbles and sputters, and Stone's tight camera angles make us share in his queasy embarrassment. The scene isn't played for laughs, though, and instead the effect is one of sympathy for a man totally out of his depth. Such a sense of empathy will undoubtedly come as a major shock to those who expected Stone's Bush biopic to be a hatchet job, for W. takes a surprisingly even-handed view of its subject. It depicts him as a well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve goof, who was easy prey for the warmongers among his inner circle. Throw in a dollop of daddy issues and that's as far as the psychological portrait of Bush goes, but at least Stone has genuinely tried to get to grips with this character, to flesh him out, and to find out what makes him tick.

Perhaps W. is ultimately defeated by its lack of perspective, and one can't help imagining the picture Stone might have made a few years down the line, when he could take a breath and assess the whole of Bush's presidency at a distance. The film bears all the hallmarks of a picture made in a hurry, with much of it being painted in broad strokes and plenty of areas in which the editing could have been tightened; and without the great Robert Richardson behind the camera, W. lacks the expressive visual scheme of JFK or Nixon. But W. does feel accurate and honest – unlike the revisionist approach to history Stone has been accused of in the past – and if it achieves anything, it makes us take a fresh look at the man who will shortly be departing office after a bewildering eight years. George W. Bush's legacy as president has been defined by war, unrest, financial meltdown, skulduggery and general incompetence, and W. stands as a flawed but fascinating record of a very weird period in American history. Weird, with a capital Dubya.

LFF Update: Part 4

My final round-up from the 2008 London Film Festival...



Synecdoche New York
Charlie Kaufman is one of the great creative minds currently at work in cinema, but I'm not sure he's the best person to direct screenplays written by Charlie Kaufman. The acclaimed screenwriter's directorial debut is an astonishingly ambitious film that starts promisingly before losing its way in its second hour, and one wonders if an objective director with a more disciplined approach to storytelling and editing may have been able to draw out the masterpiece that is surely buried in here somewhere. Philip Seymour Hoffman (in a committed performance that isn't allowed to go anywhere) is a neurotic, hypochondriac theatre director who sets about staging a play inside a cavernous abandoned space, a play that involves building a life-size reproduction of New York and hiring actors to play himself and those around him. This project gradually consumes him to the point where he (and we) can't tell reality from fiction anymore, and Kaufman continues to pile on fresh, bewildering layers until it becomes almost impenetrable. There are brilliant moments throughout the film, and so many ideas you're just dying to see developed to their maximum potential, but the lugubrious pacing sucks the life out of the thing, and the film lacks the kind of emotional resonance that distinguished Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine. Credit must go to Hoffman for toiling away manfully in the lead role, and Kaufman has surrounded himself with an impressive array of female acting talent, in which Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson and Hope Davis are the standouts.

There are few things more upsetting in cinema than watching a film as adventurous and imaginative as this implode in the way Synecdoche does, particularly when Charlie Kaufman was so gracious and polite during the Q+A after the film. He certainly deserved better than some dick shouting out "Rubbish!" as he walked past, or to face idiotic questions like "Why don't your films have any proper structure?" Mike Leigh, who was sitting a few seats away from me, clapped loudly and vigorously when Kaufman explained that his films actually have a very intricate structure, but the whole atmosphere in the cinema seemed to be one of disappointment, frustration and awkwardness, and it was a sad way to end one of my most eagerly anticipated screenings.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson
I was originally supposed to see this at the 10am press screening on Sunday morning, but when I woke up and saw the torrential rain outside my window, I decided my bed was a much more enticing proposition. Instead, I made time to catch Gonzo at its afternoon screening later in the week, and I'm very glad I did, because this is a fantastically enjoyable film. An eclectic collection of interviewees – including Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, Tom Wolfe and Sonny Barger – all have funny anecdotes or interesting perspectives to offer, while extracts from Thompson's work, read by Johnny Depp, provide the narration. Director Alex Gibney blends these elements brilliantly with a wide variety of archive footage, and some clever reconstructions, and the film is perfectly paced as it zips through Hunter's remarkable life. As someone who doesn't know a great deal about Hunter S Thompson, I found much of it terrifically funny and surprising (particularly the segments involving the '72 election campaign, which prompted me to seek out his book); and while the film pays tribute to Thompson's idealistic vision and his gifts as a writer, it doesn't ignore his darker, more difficult moments. Gonzo is a very conventional piece of documentary filmmaking, and the soundtrack choices are disappointingly rote, but I had a great time watching it, and it's another hit for Gibney, one of the most interesting directors currently at work in America.

Lion's Den
Towards the end of the festival, I always like to take a leap of faith on a couple of films that I know nothing about, and after Lion's Den was recommended to me by Silence of Lorna star Arta Dobroshi, it seemed a good place to start. Pablo Trapero's film opens with Julia (Martina Gusman) waking up in her upturned apartment covered in blood, and with two lifeless bodies lying on the floor. Charged with the murder of one of them, Julie is sent jail, but as she is pregnant she is consigned to a separate section of the prison set aside for mothers and pregnant women, and that's where she stays for the next couple of years, giving birth to her child and raising it within the confines of the jail. As Julie learns how to cope with both prison life and her child, Trapero directs in an understated fashion, quickly undercutting any scenes that threaten to get too hysterical. The film is raw and authentic, with the relationships between the prisoners (particularly between Julie and Laura García's Marta) being convincingly written. At its core, however, the film is elevated above the ordinary by a supreme performance from Martina Gusman, the director's partner, who is stunningly forceful and empathetic throughout.

Revanche
This haunting Austrian thriller starts with the build-up to a bank robbery, before moving into a surprising new direction halfway through, and developing into an absorbing study of revenge and guilt. Johannes Krisch is excellent as the ex-con working for a pimp, who is in love with Ukrainian prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko), and at the start of the film, the pair are making plans for a new life together. Alex's plan involves robbing a bank, which Tamara reluctantly goes along with, but when the robbery is botched, the film shifts gears, and brings Alex into contact with a local cop (Andreas Lust) and his wife (Ursula Strauss). From this point, the drama becomes more about what these characters know about each other, and how they intend to exploit that knowledge, and director Götz Spielmann moves the story forward at a measured pace, allowing the tension and intrigue to steadily develop. Martin Gschlacht provides cold, crisp cinematography that adds considerably to the film's atmosphere, and the performances are outstanding. I'm not sure about the way in which Revanche finally resolves itself – it felt a little neat to me – but this is still a complex and engrossing thriller, that's driven by the emotions and needs of its characters.

Victoire Terminus (Winner of the LFF Grierson Award for the Best Feature-Length Documentary)
Shot in Kinshasa, Congo during the summer of 2006, this fine documentary follows a group of women who have taken to boxing, and who train in the bowels of the stadium that hosted the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974. They do it for sport, and to stay fit, but more important is the fact that for many of these women, this is the only way they can achieve empowerment and assert themselves in a male-dominated society, and there's a real feeling of solidarity among these fighters. Filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent De La Tullaye create a sense of intimacy with their subjects, encouraging them to speak with candour about their lives, and they keep an astute eye on the bigger picture too, with the tumultuous presidential elections becoming an increasingly important element of the story as it progresses. "Any Congolese man who takes power instantly becomes corrupt" a woman says during the film, and all of the interviewees seem to be hoping for the best while expecting the worst. Considering the horrific images that we're currently seeing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one wonders where these women are now.

Slumdog Millionaire
I've never been a huge fan of Danny Boyle. His best work came early in his career, with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, but those two pictures were very much of their time, and his subsequent output was of a very inconsistent quality. So it's safe to say I wasn't altogether enthusiastic about Slumdog Millionaire (despite, or perhaps because of, the adjectives like "crowd-pleasing" or "heart-warming" that had been attached to it) as I made my way towards Leicester Square early on Thursday morning, but whatever cynicism I had was quickly washed away – the film is a stunner. It is the story of 18 year-old Jamal (Dev Patel), a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, who is on the verge of answering the final big-money question. His progress unsettles the show's producers who immediately smell a rat – how can a kid from the slums know so much? – and the police drag him in for questioning, determined to find out how he is cheating. It turns out that each of the questions is linked in some way to a specific incident from Jamal's past, and in this manner we see his story unfold in a series of flashbacks, that follow him, his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), and the love of his life Latika (Freida Pinto), from the slums to the present day. This set-up initially appears contrived and clumsy, but I was delighted by the clean, ingenious methods that screenwriter Simon Beaufoy found to slip seamlessly between the narrative strands, while developing a sustained level of tension that pays dividends at the climax. The three main characters are portrayed by different actors at the ages of 7, 13 and 18 – supplying flawless performances across the board – and the film is stunningly shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, with Boyle bringing an invigorating energy and panache to his direction. By the time the exuberant, emotionally satisfying ending came round, I was fully convinced – Slumdog Millionaire is easily the best work of Boyle's career, it's one of the best films of the year, and it's the perfect way to close this year's London Film Festival.

Review - Quantum of Solace

Quantum of Solace is the new James Bond film, or is it? For much of its truncated running time the film feels more like the latest instalment in the Jason Bourne franchise, with many of the tropes that made Bond the character he is having been coolly stripped away from this hard-edged picture. This transformation began in Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig being introduced as a tougher, more complex Bond than his predecessors, but it is taken a step further in Marc Forster's film, which jettisons the quips, love scenes and catchphrases altogether to focus on non-stop action. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, as the action scenes in Quantum of Solace do occasionally get the pulse racing, but it does make one wonder where this series of films is going. Have the Bourne movies so revolutionised the mechanics of action filmmaking that cinema's longest running franchise feels the need to completely overhaul its own identity to keep up the pace?

Another alteration made to the series for this film is the fact that it acts as a direct sequel to the last picture, picking up mere moments after the credits rolled on Casino Royale. When we last saw Bond, he was heartbroken by both the betrayal and death of his lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), and he was determined to avenge her by finding the man she was working for. To that end, we now find him speeding through the tight streets of Siena, with Mr White (Jesper Christensen) bound and gagged in his boot, and trying to shake off a few gun-toting pursuers before he and M (Judi Dench) can interrogate him. That's the brief, hectically edited opening sequence in a nutshell, and after the unimpressive credits (complete with another dull song), we can settle down into the story itself, although the film won't give us a minute to rest. M has barely had a chance to question White before Bond is off again, clambering over rooftops and swinging from the rafters in pursuit of a gunman. Once that skirmish is over, he darts off to Haiti where he encounters the villain of the piece, Dominic Greene, who is played by Mathieu Amalric (great!), but who has been handed a bit of a dull part (shame).

Quantum of Solace is a bit like that all the way through – Bond turns up in a variety of exotic locations (add Austria, Bolivia, Russia and London to those listed above), gets involved in a fight or chase, and then there's just a few minutes left to cram in some plot details before the film moves on. It's relentless, in other words, and it becomes a little wearing, although Forster's handling of the large action element improves throughout the film after a poor start in which he shreds rather than edits, creating confusion where there should be excitement. Forster is an odd choice to take the reins on this movie. Having carved out a niche for himself as a maker of decent, middlebrow entertainments, he would presumably be better suited to the kind of character-driven interludes that occur between explosions, but the screenplay – again by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade – is light on such moments, so he is given little opportunity to stamp any personality on his direction. Quantum of Solace is competently directed and handsomely – occasionally spectacularly – filmed, but that's about par for the course on a major production like this.

What Quantum of Solace needs, and fortunately possesses, is a solid centre, which is provided by Daniel Craig's confident embodiment of Bond. Having grown into the role in Casino Royale, Craig seems completely at home in the part now, and he does well to suggest levels of depth and feeling in a character who, as written, is little more than a brutal, unstoppable killing machine. It's a commanding, introspective piece of acting, although Craig would be capable of giving more if it were asked of him. The film is littered with good actors who are adept at doing a lot with little (Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright and Giancarlo Giannini fall into this category), and the main female cast members meet with mixed results. Olga Kurylenko is a big plus as a tough, engaging Bond girl with her own agenda, who convincingly helps OO7 fight his way through film's latter half; but Gemma Arterton is given practically nothing to do (introduce yourself, have sex with Bond, then disappear), and her credibility as an MI6 agent isn't helped by the fact that she's called – I'm not kidding – Strawberry Fields.

The film flirts with an intriguing subtext about the British and American government being complicit with dictatorships for their own end, but there's no time to explore such avenues when the film is spinning from explosion to explosion at such a rate. Quantum of Solace is OK for what it is. The final set-piece is the film's best: a shootout in a bizarrely designed desert hotel that – you've guessed it – is falling apart around the characters' ears, and it's efficiently entertaining stuff, but the film as a whole is lacking in the kind of advancement that was promised by Casino Royale. One is left to ponder where Bond stands in this new post-Bourne world – many of the sequences here are so similar to scenes already played out in The Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum, it's impossible to ignore the influence – but while the extra grittiness and realism is welcome, it shouldn't come at the expense of the series' hallmarks. We can appreciate that Bond needed to move away from the camp silliness of the Moore era, or the bloated emptiness of films like Die Another Day, but in reinventing the franchise from the ground up, shouldn't they remember that certain elements – the wit, the style, the gadgets, the catchphrases – were what drew many fans to this character in the first place? Can they maintain the essential ingredients while delivering a plausible action hero for the 21st century? These are thorny questions, and there are no easy answers, but we'll find out where Bond is going from here soon enough. As the final credits promise, James Bond will return.