Live (12A, 102 min)
Rating: *****
Verdict: A Quiet Masterpiece
Call Jane (12A, 121 minutes)
Qualification: ***
Verdict: A good story, well told.
His was shaping up to be a distinctly nondescript year for movies until the last few weeks when, at least from where I’ve been sitting, something almost miraculous happened: Our theaters began to fill up with some proper gems.
They include the fabulous Emily Bronte biopic, Emily and Martin McDonagh’s wonderful The Banshees Of Inisherin, with quite a few more delights to come just this month, including the hugely thought-provoking Matilda The Musical.
Living is set in 1953 and stars Bill Nighy as a dry-as-dust, bowler-hatted, striped-dress bureaucrat who learns he’s dying.
Meanwhile, this week will see the release of a movie that is anything but exciting and another bona fide cinematic treat.
Living is set in 1953 and stars Bill Nighy as a dry-as-dust, bowler-hatted, striped-dress bureaucrat who learns he’s dying. Not much happens but what doesn’t happen, if you know what I mean, doesn’t happen exquisitely. And Nighy is just excellent.
He can be a mannered actor; even sometimes a bit of ham. But as Mr. Williams, the reserved and rigidly venerable head of London County Council’s Parks Department, he has found, improbably the role of a lifetime.
Nighy was also splendid in Pride (2014), another film in which he suppressed those fluttering-hand, jerky-head mannerisms of his. But this is one of those blessed convergences of actor, role, and performance that rarely happens on screen, and for the audience, it feels like a privilege when it does.
Director Oliver Hermanus begins the film with a series of evocatively retro opening titles that transport us directly to post-war London, a city still recovering. We are introduced to LCC’s austere County Hall offices through the eyes of a nervous new guy, Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp). Given names, by the way, are largely avoided, helping to convey the stifling, repressed formality of the time.
A widower, Mr. Williams is a benign and authoritative presence in the office and politely tolerated in the home he shares, in Esher, Surrey, with his impassive son and daughter-in-law. She is the most boring of lives and soon discovers that she is coming to an end.
A doctor tells him he has terminal cancer in a scene that reminded me very much of a Betjeman poem, Devonshire Street W1: ‘There is no hope. And the iron pommel of this palisade/So cold to the touch, now luckier than he.’
Mr. Williams keeps the terrible news to himself, but decides to use it as an incentive to add some color to his monochrome existence. He skips work, in itself an act as subversive as he’s ever contemplated, and heads to the beach, where he confesses to a strange louche (Tom Burke) that “I came here to live a little.” . . but realize I don’t know how’.
For the rest of the movie, we see him learning how, as late in life as possible, to quit. He forms a sweet, platonic but nonetheless slightly scandalous friendship with a former subordinate at the LCC, the perky Miss Harris (charmingly played by Aimee Lou Wood).
Duly emboldened, he then champions the efforts of a group of East End mothers to build a children’s playground on the site of a bomb, ultimately giving his life a purpose that is rapidly dwindling.
Not much happens but what doesn’t happen, if you know what I mean, doesn’t happen exquisitely. And Nighy is just excellent. He can be a mannered actor; even sometimes a bit of ham. But as Mr. Williams, the reserved and rigidly venerable head of London County Council’s Parks Department, he has, improbably found, the role of a lifetime from him.
Living is impeccably written by Kazuo Ishiguro, whose brilliant novel The Remains Of The Day (and the 1993 picture it inspired) had the same unerring grasp of the era and social nuances. It’s a new take on Ikiru, a quietly profound masterpiece from powerful Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
Ikiru (meaning ‘to live’) came out in 1953, which certainly helps explain why it’s set in the same year. Whatever, it was an inspired decision. By the way, living isn’t the first Kurosawa classic to inspire something comparably memorable: In 1960, his Seven Samurai were westernized into The Magnificent Seven.
But together, Hermanus, Ishiguro and Nighy have done it again. A respectful piece of advice from the bowler hat to all of them, for this melancholic but beautiful film.
Call Jane is another period drama, this time taking us back to Chicago in 1968. Joy (Elizabeth Banks) is a well-to-do housewife with a teenage daughter who learns that a surprise late-term pregnancy could kill her.
But this is the United States five years before the landmark Roe v Wade ruling legalized abortion. So when the board at her local hospital refuses to back a “therapeutic termination,” Joy has to find another way.
She stays away from a street ‘clinic’ and doesn’t throw herself down the stairs, as one person advises.
Instead, he encounters an underground group of women, calling themselves ‘Janes’, who, urged on by the courageous Virginia (Sigourney Weaver), facilitate safe but illicit abortions at the hands of a nasty but trustworthy rogue doctor (Cory Michael Smith). ). . In her own time, and without telling her husband, a criminal lawyer (Chris Messina), Joy joins the Janes.
An excellent cast also includes an underutilized Kate Mara, and Call Jane is altogether a stylish feature film debut for director Phyllis Nagy (Oscar nominee for writing 2016’s Carol).
In the wake of the controversial overturning of Roe v Wade, it’s also powerfully relevant, of course. Indeed, the film is on a solid footing—the Janes did exist—but the script occasionally stumbles, selling its abortion rights agenda too hard.
It’s a good story though, for the most part very well told.
Home alone… and the creepy neighbor is watching
Watcher (****, 15, 91 min) is a gripping psychological thriller set in Bucharest, where an American couple, Francis (Karl Glusman) and Julia (Maika Monroe), are settling down.
He’s half Romanian, speaks the language, and was sent there by his US marketing company, leaving Julia home alone all day and for a (somewhat unlikely) number of nights.
When she notices a man in the building across the street watching her at night and possibly following her during the day, she becomes increasingly anxious. Her nerves aren’t helped either by the news that a serial killer is on the loose, beheading young women.
In an impressively confident film debut, writer-director Chloe Okuno builds the suspense splendidly and cleverly doesn’t subtitle the sequences in Romanian, helping us relate to Julia’s sense of alienation.
Caught: Maika Monroe in Watcher
Any resemblance to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is, I suspect, entirely deliberate.
I also enjoyed Enola Holmes 2 (***, 12A, 129 minutes), recently available on Netflix and aimed squarely at those under 18.
Millie Bobby Brown once again stars as Sherlock’s fearsome detective sister, breaking the fourth wall with all she’s worth while searching for a missing woman in beautifully recreated Victorian London. She has Helena Bonham Carter and Henry Cavill for support and it’s fun.
Broadcasting on the Roku channel, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (***, 108 minutes) chronicles the life of the American pop parodist (Daniel Radcliffe), who enjoyed hits like Like A Surgeon, after Madonna’s Like A Virgin. The joke is that the movie itself is a parody of the biopic and it works. Radcliffe, such an awkward actor, for once seems pretty well cast.
Good Night Oppy (****, PG, 105 min), in theaters and arriving this month on Amazon Prime, is a documentary about the robot Opportunity, sent to Mars in 2003. It was meant to be functional for 90 days. however, he ended up exploring the planet for 14 years. Fascinating stuff.