Review: A Serious Man

A SERIOUS MAN is the fourteenth feature film collaboration between Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coen brothers have been critical darlings ever since their debut, the brilliant BLOOD SIMPLE. They won their first Academy Awards with FARGO in 1996, and their two latest films, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and BURN AFTER READING have been their most commercially successful.

It's been a strange career path, one which probably only features one film universally regarded as a failure; the ill-advised remake of THE LADYKILLERS (although INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is unjustly held in low regard by many), but has seen their last decade of work be seen as inferior by most reviewers.

Looking through their filmography, this is probably the case, but only because their 'nineties' were so great. In addition to FARGO, they created stone-cold masterpieces MILLER'S CROSSING, BARTON FINK, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY and THE BIG LEBOWSKI. In comparison, the likes of THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and BURN AFTER READING can't help but feel slight.

Slightness is something that has been attributed to A SERIOUS MAN; albeit wrongly. This is an intensely intimate film, one which asks questions of man's ability to live in a world without levity. Our hero is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a midwestern professor whose wife is preparing to leave him, and whose children are laws unto themselves. He suffers a small crisis of faith, which in addition to an unwell brother (a terrific Richard Kind [cousin Andy from CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM) and problems at work lead him to the brink of a breakdown.

Stuhlbarg delivers a knockout performance. Larry is a sympathetic character, a man unable to see humour in anything in his life. It strikes me that this film is about men like this. Men who allow each slight to compound the previous one. Getting inside the mindset of Larry is no easy task, so filmmakers and actor deserve credit for the breadth of the character study. That the film has little time for any other character aside from as a reflection of Larry is true (the same could be argued of BARTON FINK, of course), but this is no bad thing. It's Larry's world we're inhabiting, and a diversion from it would lessen the impact, although on this note, the film's extended prologue, which takes place many years, and miles away from the main narrative is a delight.

Review: Bright Star

It would be fair to say that Jane Campion and I don’t really get on, cinematically. Someone only has to play a piano for me to begin to have a panic attack. It’s with great surprise then, that BRIGHT STAR will doubtless end up as one of my favourite films of the year. It’s a simple, and brilliant film, graceful, beautiful and profoundly moving.

BRIGHT STAR is the story of the love affair between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish, superb). Shot with immense care and eye for beauty, Bright Star is far and away Campion’s best, and richest film. She has elicited terrific performances, not just from Cornish who is the standout, but from the supporting cast, including Paul Schneider and Kerry Fox.

It is, though, the central relationship that is, as it should be, at the film’s core. Whishaw and Cornish are a hugely appealing couple, and it’s impossible to not have sympathy for their plight as their tentative love affair runs into obstacles such as class, money and social acceptance. While Campion has painstakingly created an atmosphere in which you feel transported back to the nineteenth century, she has thrillingly also managed to make a love story as timeless as it is perfect.

Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

An all-star cast delivers plenty of laughs but little substance in this comedy that suffers from a crisis of identity.

Grant Heslov's directorial debut is an adaptation of Jon Ronson's comic memoir of his time spent in Iraq in the build up to the invasion by the Allied Forces. Ewan McGregor plays journalist Bob Wilton, who heads to Iraq determined to prove himself as a writer and as a man (he's recently been cuckolded by his boss).

When in Iraq, he meets up with Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a self-proclaimed psychic soldier who recounts the story of his life in the US Army, while the two attempt to enter Iraq and find the action each seeks for different reasons.

The film is funny, both leads give good performances, and they are ably supported by Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, but the film loses it's way badly in the final third. What had been an irreverent comedy becomes something more conventional, something in need of closure for characters, which as they were set up, could never have achieved it. As such, it's hard to truly recommend Heslov's film as anything other than a mild diversion.