The Railwayman (2013)

Eric Lomax was an engineer and a railway enthusiast who was captured by the Japanese in the Second World War. He was put into forced labour to help build the railroad across South East Asia. The British had wanted to build this before the war but abandoned the plan because it would have been inhuman in such extreme conditions to undertake the project without treating a workforce as slaves. This is what the Japanese Imperial Army decided to do.

The book upon which the film is based tells the story of what happened to Lomax particularly from the point of view of the torture that he endured and his post traumatic stress disorder after the war. The manifestation of which prompts his new wife to get him to face the cause of it. This is through a return visit to South East Asia to meet face to face with his tormentor who they discover is not only still alive but working at the site of the prison camp as a tour guide at the visitor centre that was created to tell the history of the prison camp.

The key players are Colin Firth as Lomax and Nicole Kidman as his wife with Jeremy Irvine as the younger Lomax. Hiroyuki Sanada plays the Japanese prison guard and torturer. The narrative is told in layers – how Lomax meets his wife – how she discovers his support system to deal with his stress disorder (via his comrades) – flashbacks of the events in the prison camp – and the resolution of his stress disorder. There is criticism about the absence of other background information, such as Lomax’s first wife and children. However, to include all of this would have detracted from the purpose of the film which was to tell the story of his torture and the resolution to his post war trauma.

This is not a fictional account of Lomax’s story. The facts of the story have been proven and so this film is a factual account and Lomax’s frame of reference on what happened to him is that he was the subject of cruel and inhuman torture the brutality of which had scarred his ability to function properly after the war. This detail we need to know because the resolution to his personal conflict is what makes this film work. Without it, it might have become another David Lean adventure story.

Meeting his tormentor face to face and putting him through the motions of Lomax’s own torture, enables the audience to see how the need for truth and reconciliation is at the heart of all conflict resolution. In this story that resolution is powerfully told and portrayed by Colin Firth and his tormentor.

A good and powerful story translated into film is what cinema is good at and in this case, it doesn’t come much better.

12 Years A Slave (2013)

Based upon a book published in 1853, a memoir by Solomon Northup, this film brings the story alive in a direct manner. The narrative is simple; a free African American living and working in New York state is kidnapped and sold into slavery to a Washington slave trader and auctioneer. He is then sold on first to a benevolent plantation owner and finally to a violently malevolent owner. For 12 years, we see the story unfold via a series of brutal and honestly portrayed episodes that show us something of the total removal of humanity from one race of people.

The director, Steve McQueen, is also known as a Turner Prize winning artist. I recall one of his video installations which was a carefully crafted film of McQueen re-enacting a Buster Keaton scene. This is where the front of a wooden building collapses and falls on top of Keaton but he safely survives where he stands, appearing through the open door as it collapses upon him. The video by McQueen is shot from different angles to show the physicality of the action including the vibration ripples on McQueens face. Unlike the Turner Prize judges, I never “got it” and although it looked interesting – I passed on by.

Seeing this film, which has re-awakened the world’s awareness of the slave trade and slavery during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, I was fully aware of where McQueen was coming from as an artist. We see the physicality of the act of enslavement repeated from every angle until we ourselves in the audience are reduced and stripped, leaving our emotions bare.

The timing of the film’s release is appropriate. Gone with the Wind was released over half a century ago and it portrayed slavery in a benevolent non-violent way, a class ridden plantation pecking order where even slaves had status in their working ways. Last year saw Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in which we were invited to laugh at slavery from a white man’s perspective in a mock spaghetti western style.

On the day of the film’s release in Glasgow, the Herald published an article by Professor Geoff Palmer (Heriot-Watt University). He reminded Scotland of its one time economic dependence on the slave trade. He illustrated this with examples that we live with today all over Glasgow via its street names and buildings. Jamaica Street lies parallel with the River Clyde from where the slave trade was conducted. Not in the trading of the slaves themselves but in the output of their enslavement, sugar and tobacco. These two commoddities were economic foundation stones for three hundred years. In 1800 there were ten thousand Scots involved in running and managing this plantation trade in the West Indies. Professor Geoff Palmer has a Scottish name but he was born in Jamaica.

If this film does anything, it needs to influence the way we see our inheritance as a nation and how we respond to humanity in the 21^st century.

American Hustle (2013)

A hustle is a confidence trick. An audience can feel confident that they are being tricked. Magicians use smoke and mirrors but a hustler has to give you the confidence that although you are being conned, you can still enjoy the process of believing that you are getting something for nothing. Some hustlers could sell sand to the Arabs but in this movie the Arabs are selling the sand.

After two hours of watching American Hustle I had to discuss what I had witnessed with a companion to assure myself that I had understood what I had I seen. Which makes the film more clever than it was an outstanding piece.

I’ll try to explain. A seasoned and professional hustler teams up with a pole dancer to enter into a bond raising scam which works for them until they are caught out by an FBI investigator. He strikes a deal with the pair which will let them off if they can finger three corrupt local and national politicians for fraud. The pair devise a plan which will involve a colleague disguised as an Arab who is prepared to fund a money laundering casino in Atlantic City for the Mafia but it will require $2 million of FBI money to set the scam up. They succeed in this via a wild and funny route involving the hustler’s wife and the seduction of the FBI investigator by the pole dancer. The denouement is the arrest of the three politicians and the disappearance of the $2 million by the hustling couple.

So, how did a story that could have been effectively aired on the British TV series, Hustle, become a multi Oscar nominated film which has a Hollywood A list in its casting ? Well that could be the clue. It would have been reduced to a TV series had it not got the A list. Bradley Cooper does excel as the FBI investigator in a really OTT performance of a man carried away by his own confidence. Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams are superb and carry the film. Christian Bale commands attention in an eccentric way that reflects the ra of the story, namely the 1970’s. This is reflected in the careful detail of the sets and and good selection of music.

There is a brilliant cameo from Robert de Niro as a scary Mafia boss who did not play the part for laughs. The rest of the film is fast, furious and funny in parts and enfuriatingly confusing in others. You have to keep up or you will get lost – or hustled.

Saving Mr Banks (2013

Mary Poppins passed me by when it came out. I was not young enough and not quite old enough to be able ever to say that I sneaked in to see it when the film was released. And it would be many years before it was shown on TV. In fact, the first time that I saw it was shortly after watching Saving Mr Banks. Thus completing the story for me.

Saving Mr Banks is a film with two stories tracking each other with a denouement that is cleverly created by Walt Disney himself – not just in the film but also in Mary Poppins.

Emma Thompson plays P.L.Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, which was a very popular childrens book on both sides of the pond. Although not impoverished, her agent uses the lack of funds coming in as a lever to persuade Travers to travel to America to oversee the script and music preparation that Walt Disney is commissioning. He has yet to secure the rights of her treasured book. Treasured in the sense that Travers is reluctant to have any creative embellishments made to her story. Walt Disney, played by Tom Hanks in his second big acting role this year (Captain Phillips was the other) has yet to get Travers’s signature on the contract to give him the film rights. He devotes his time humouring her and trying to win her over to allow him to use imaginative, creative methods to put the story over to a young and old audience alike – with music and song. The latter proposition is a painful one for Travers and provides a number of funny and frustrating moments for the composing and song writing team.

Two characters, Hanks and Paul Giametti, chauffeur to Travers in Hollywood, are used to good effect as vehicles for engaging with humanity with Travers to help her unpick her uncertainties. For the audience we also have the second thread of the film. This is the episodic flashback of her childhood story and her relationship with her father, and to a certain degree, her mother and aunt. This is not an untypical childhood story, set in 19^th century Australia, where adult truths are not always clear and sometimes hidden from children growing up.

Hanks has begun to understand that Travers’s reluctance to let go of her master piece (and I use that phrase in its literal sense) because the book is synonymous with her experience and relationship with her father. The film is neatly brought to its finale with Disney travelling to London to complete this analysis in her living room over a cup of tea (milk in first). This is a touching and thoughtful scene that is beautifully and sensitively filmed and scripted. We could not end without some acknowledgement of her home truths and we see Travers inviting herself to the premier of Mary Poppins (she had previously been overlooked to save any embarrassing criticisms from her). In true Hollywood tear jerk fashion we see her in the stalls acknowledging the end result with her own tears.

The acting is very good, the script is well crafted, the two stories converge properly, and most amateur psychologists will be pleased with the conclusion.

However, a spoonful of sugar will never take away the fact that Walt Disney was a ruthless businessman who knew the power of money especially when he knew the artist was in need of an income.

Gravity (2013)

This is Sandra Bullock’s film; George Clooney is there for the ride. To be fair he does do a good job to introduce us to space and the mechanics of floating around to make repairs to the spacecraft.

Within the space of 90 minutes we are taken on a dramatic ride in orbit first on a space shuttle craft, then the international space station and lastly a Russian space craft that is leaving orbit to return to earth. From the beginning we sit in awesome wonder at film of the earth and the firmament as seen from the spaceman and woman’s perspective. She is servicing an exterior gadget and hooked up to the craft while he is whooshing about using a rocket pack and having inane Clooney type conversations with Ed Harris who we don’t see because he is the voice from Houston.

Then bang! It may not be Big Bang but for Bullock and Clooney it may just have been.

A collision in space has caused a Chinese satellite to smash into the Russian space craft and the remnants are hurtling on the same orbit as our heroes.

From minute to minute we watch almost in real time as our space crew try to find and make sense of a way out after losing any hope of getting their craft to work and floating into – gravity.

What is gravity ? It is nothing. It feels almost indescribable and that it is what looks like when we watch the attempts to home in on other spacecraft to find some method of rescue. Gravity is not just weightlessness; it is the physics of movement, the transfer of force from one moving object to another. It is also the sheer beauty of a tear drop as it leaves Bullock’s face and floats towards the audience looking like a glistening cut diamond. On this occasion 3D really works.

“….you just point it to the earth…..it’s not rocket science…..” Clooney tells Bullock. But when you know your way around a space craft and can read a manual on how to operate it, he is probably right.

There is a poignant scene where viewers of a spiritual persuasion will summon up their beliefs. But all you need is your humanity to understand the sense of longing and loss. The fight for survival is a human one, not a godly one, and everything we see is what any human being with a longing for life would do, including old world heroics that Captain Oates reminds us of.

After this film, I don’t want to go up into space. Been there, seen the film.

Philomena (2013)

Films such as The Magdelene Sisters (2002) gave us an introduction and insight to the cruel culture of Ireland during the 20^th century up to and including the 1970’s whereby pregnant unmarried girls were removed from their community and placed in convent run laundries. Until the stories began to be exposed in recent years, this picture of pregnancy being seen as a terrible sin requiring God’s punishment, was unknown to everyone outside of Ireland. How could you challenge or criticise sisters of charity for their support of unmarried mothers? Especially when you could not see what the regime was like or see what happened to their children.

What in fact they were doing was keeping young women captive and forcing them to work in commercial size laundries while their babies were being nurtured and prepared for adoption – in some cases in return for big money.

Philomena comes into this genre of storytelling from the point of an ageing woman who is now a grandparent and who in the 1950’s had been placed into such a convent laundry after becoming pregnant. Her mother had died and there was nobody to care for her and a baby. The convent sisters will now regard her as having “fallen” pregnant and will ensure that she will be judged accordingly. “Did you take your nickers down, girl?”

We come into the story after Philomena’s daughter has met ex BBC news reporter Martin Sixsmith at a social function. He is offered the chance to take an interest in Philomena’s story on the day that her daughter had discovered that her mother had given birth to a boy fifty years ago to the day, who at the age of three had been removed and given to an American couple for adoption. Would Sixsmith write a human interest story about her mother and her lost boy? The only way in which he could agree would be to find out what happened to him. This will take them to America.

The story is driven by the two central characters, Philomena who is played by Judi Dench and Sixsmith who is played by Steve Coogan. Both put in non-competing performances which deliver emotional scenes of anger and depression in the story climax. The early scenes are developed around a warm and caring relationship with wry humour as a mortar for their characters. Philomena has a dry, caring and forgiving nature founded on her Catholic faith. Coogan plays his part with alarming straightness, only once maybe showing a tiny glimpse of his earlier Alan Partridge days. The combination of Philomena’s forgiveness, tempered by doubt which frequently helps to change her mind and make quick turnaround decisions, and Sixsmith’s frustration driven by his determination to seek the truth, delivers the perfect story.

At one point in the story we discover what actually happened to Philomena’s (now adult) son and we wonder where the story will now go. However, the point of the film and this story is in the ending,  where confrontation to expose the truth leads to resolution and from Philomena, forgiveness.

“She might forgive you”, says Sixsmith, “…..but I can’t”.

Captain Phillips (2013)

We know that the world is changing and that this story will lead to an event of extreme danger. We know this because Captain Phillips tells his wife in the opening scene that the world is changing as they drive in heavy traffic to the docks to board his new ship. The drive on the motorway has echoes of the opening scene in Falling Down where Michael Douglas’s character is seen abandoning his car.

Abandonment is the last thing Captain Phillips has on his mind when Somali pirates, poor fishermen press ganged into kidnapping big ships for big money, board his ship.

The filming of the action is dramatically authentic and this is especially so in the first half of the film when the ship is chased by small speed boats and – even when the hoses are turned on full pressure all around the vessel and rapid course changes are made to out manoeuvre them – the pirates risk their lives in getting a ladder hooked onto the side and they board the ship.

The capture of the ship and the subsequent escape by the pirates with a hostage (no spoilers!) dominates the story narrative. The characterisation, particularly of the Captain and the pirate leader, Muse, is delivered in sweat and blood by Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi.

From setting the scene initially on a massive container ship, progressing to a tiny motorised life boat is a stroke of genius. The camera work is tight and this ratchets up the tension. To then make certain that we are under no illusion that the story is taking place at sea in the middle of a vast ocean – we see images of the sky leading down to the horizon and then the ocean, ending in aerial shots of whatever vessels are in the action. This is not innovative camera work – just skilful. Showing us, not telling us.

This camera technique is put to excellent use at the end when we get to realise that the US is not going to allow Captain Phillips to be kidnapped and sends out what seems to be a significant percentage of its naval fleet plus a platoon of navy SEALS.

Tom Hanks performance as a seasoned merchant shipping master is remarkable for its measured delivery. This is not one of his stereotypical, treacly big movie roles. This is an actor performing at the top of his craft and career. As Phillips, his leadership skills are put to the test when he congratulates his crew for fending off the pirates and their response is to remind him that as union members they are not contracted to defend the ship against pirates in the way he is asking them to. This is a do or die moment which he ably deals with, knowing that, by being at sea, he has the upper hand.

This is a roller coaster of a film gripping the audience from beginning to end, in true naval fashion requiring a stiff drink afterwards.