Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, David Strathairn
Director: Ewan McGregor
108 mins
Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral is a comic tragedy which seeks to explore the conflict between an older and a younger generation. However, Ewan McGregor's screen adaption clears the novel's passages of self-loathing and doubt, with just a few empty and vacuous areas of conflict. The director himself plays Seymour “Swede” Levov, a Jewish hero whose seemingly idyllic family and public life is destroyed when Merry (Dakota Fanning) bombs a building and in so doing kills a man. Regrettably this is only the first of many problems in the film. McGregor, a fine actor in so many previously diverse roles, is totally miscast and completely out of his depth here, failing to even remotely embody Roth's character. Swede's gentile wife, Dawn (Jennifer Connelly) appears at the outset to offer more in terms of being a more compelling character - someone whose position in society has never been threatened and as a result of the miscreant behaviour of their daughter Merry, she therefore feels the pressure of exile more acutely. As news of Merry's terrorist activity spreads, Dawn retreats within herself, carefully walking through her own home to avoid coming into contact with whatever elements of her daughter remain behind. Eventually, however, Dawn's breakdown becomes nothing more than a series of melodramatic twitches that transform her into an object of pity.
The character of Merry, too, has also been drastically simplified for the screen. On the page, her physical form is subject to endless, erratic fluctuations of weight and hygiene, and her stutter comes and goes depending on her surroundings. She should epitomise the pressures of living up to the previous generation and struggling to make her own way in hers – which in turn makes Fanning's one-note performance all the more frustrating, as her interpretation comes across as nothing more than that of a spoiled brat. McGregor's look at the Vietnam war lacks the ferocity which Roth volcanically described in his novel. The war here is nothing more than trite political talk, and an excuse for McGregor to predictably bung in the ubiquitous Buffalo Springfield piece “For What It's Worth (What's That Sound?)” into the soundtrack. Vietnam was the catalyst that forced Merry's decisive break from normality, but here it's lazily conveyed as a collection of images already burned into the cultural memory. McGregor's film although in parts extremely well framed and directed has alas veered some considerable distance from its source material.
Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
Director: Denis Villeneuve
116 mins
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival launches into the realms of political and social satire by way of unexpected means.
It’s not an invasion film – it’s a
study of humanity from the perspective of eyeless beings in a hovering black oval
pod. If you’re on the look-out for huge expansive Independence Day-type action
sequences then I’d avoid purchasing a ticket. Villeneuve starts and ends his
film with human and behavioural interaction. Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks,
a linguistics professor whose life changes forever when an alien race enters Earth’s
atmosphere and ominously hovers at selected locations several metres from the
surface. Louise reluctantly accepts a governmental position at the American landing
site in Montana, and along with the help of scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy
Renner), she finds her task is to establish contact and uncover the true
intentions of the aliens within. It is, it has to be said, a slow and tedious
process – which somewhat irks the military grump in charge - Colonel
Weber (Forest Whitaker). Session
by session however, Banks gradually begins to understanding their odd language,
but can she finally resolve the code therein before the barking mad far east nations
launch the inevitable nuclear bombs?
Villeneuve offers tight suspense by utilising the power of theories, formulae and cranial deduction. The inhabitants of the craft display splashed ink symbols towards a mutual gateway to understanding, which eventually leads to real warnings about our inability to work together collectively. Writer Eric Heisserer taps into an extremely emotional core buried deep inside Arrival, as besides obvious questions about apocalyptic doom, Louise is also dealing with the death of her young daughter (Hannah) due to a rare disease. Her investment in an alien language becomes more about the connection to the loss of her daughter than it is about saving Earth. Villeneuve cuts back-and-forth between preachy news anchors and online radicals proclaiming end of the world prophecies, but it’s our age-old fear of uncertainty that abolishes any sense of sanity, which seeps its way into Arrival during an odd ending that rapidly skips through wrapped-up explanations suffering from a coincidental neatness. Despite this odd conclusion, Arrival is a thought-provoking, socially responsible film – and we’ve certainly seen more than enough previous space-fighting, alien-bashing action. The director provides us with tension through discovery, and suspense through understanding – so do try this, it is certainly worth the few lectures that may well teach you a thing or two.
