Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light

The Empire Theatre is troubled, but the movies it books are not part of the problem. During the course of this film, we will see it screening Chariots of Fire, The Blues Brothers, Smoky and the Bandit, and Being There. Unfortunately, this release is not nearly as good as those that it references in passing. It is presented as a tribute to the movie-going experience, but like a bad projectionist, focus is a problem for Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, which opens tomorrow.

Hilary Small is the one who keeps things running at the Empire, in the coastal town of Margate. However, she is easily dominated by her exploitative boss, Mr. Ellis, who also uses her for quickies in his office, much to the disgust of the other employees. Her life of quiet desperation leads to a breakdown, but after her brief hospitalization, she returns for more of the same, just with more medication. Things only start to change when Stephen joins the staff. The smart teen aging into adulthood should be going to university, but he lacks sufficient funds and the proper skin color (according to Mendes’ didactic screenplay).

He and Small are drawn together, as fellow outsiders. Their rapport will take a turn towards the romantic, despite vast differences between them. However, Stephen will eventually figure out Small’s emotional issues have only been masked, rather than cured.

If you want to watch the great cinematographer Roger Deakins paint pretty pictures with light, then Empire will certainly deliver. However, the melodrama reeks of sentimentality and the periodic attacks on Thatcherism (which reversed the UK’s decline into economic stagnation and international insignificance) are gratingly unnecessary distractions.

Frankly, despite some rather lovely scenes of projectors streaming down on the movie palace’s screen, Empire could have just as easily been set in a fish & chips shop, without losing much beyond Deakin’s visuals. Small’s relationship with her co-worker stays on the right (legal) side of Summer of ’42, but it is hard to buy them as a romantic couple. At times, Stephen gets lost in the film, overshadowed by Small’s angst and resentments. Focus really is an issue here.

London Road: The Not Really Verbatim Musical

Sometimes innovative musical theater swings for the fences and knocks the ball out of the part, as happened with Hamilton. Other times, maybe you really just need to see it on stage. Presumably, that must be the case for Alecky Blythe’s “verbatim” musical dramatizing the Ipswich community response to the arrest and prosecution of a serial killer in their midst. Verbatim in this context means the word-for-word transcriptions of interviews and media reports as they were spoken, but duly manipulated to make the speakers sound as petty and narrow-minded as possible. The good people of Ipswich endure another media feeding frenzy in Rufus Norris’s adaptation of London Road (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Before the Ipswich Ripper case, the London Road area was a respectable working class neighborhood with middle class pretensions (Brexit country). It used to be the sort of place you could feel safe raising a family, but the construction of a new stadium changed traffic patterns and brought street walkers into the residential district (literally right in front of their homes). Longtime denizens understandably resented the intrusion, which inevitably colored their response to the brutal murders. Blythe and co-lyricist Adam Cork clearly took pains to cherry pick every “had it coming to them” quote, doing their best to cast the residents as callous moralizers. That is an easy position to take if you live in a coop on Central Park West or a tony flat in the Barbican district. However, anyone who has worried about property values as they worked like a mule to pay their mortgage will take a more forgiving view.

One thing is certain. London Road confirms the greatness of songwriters like Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Yip Harburg, and Dorothy Fields, because it proves memorable lyrics do not “just happen.” Frankly, none of the verbatim libretto rings with either profundity or musicality. Nor is there any natural rhythm to the stray extracts Cork set to music, which gives them all a rather plodding sameness. Good luck trying to hum any of these selections. They are also completely unfair to the neighborhood residents. How would like your awkward words of greeting at a community board meeting set to music and repeated dozens of times over, in the most unflattering manner possible? That’s exactly what happens to poor Julie, the chair, played by Olivia Colman at her iciest.

Throughout London Road, Norris never shows any of the murders or even a whisker on the back of the murderer Steve Wright’s neck. Ironically, that leads to a weird moral equivalency, in which the “good riddances” of Julie and company are as bad or worse than Wright’s murderers, because at least he wasn’t too snobby to mix with his victims. Arguably, this is the most off-key musical since Bialystock & Bloom produced Springtime for Hitler. Not recommended, not even for the novelty cameo of Tom Hardy as a singing cabbie, London Road opens this Friday (9/9) in New York, at the Village East.

The Lobster: Yorgos Lanthimos Gets Dystopian

Evidently, the future will be a lot like Logan’s Run, but for single people. Those who marry and nest together have no worries, but the unpaired will be transformed into animals and released into the wild. It is an extreme dystopian system, but it has its own strange logic. However, desperation will force one unmatched sad sack to think outside the box in Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’s beyond-category English language allegory The Lobster (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

After his wife absconds with another man. David must check into a “last resort” resort for singletons, where he will have forty-five days to find a mate or he be transmuted into a lobster, as per his preference. Obviously, the stakes are high, as he is constantly reminded by his brother Bob, who now accompanies him as his faithful German Shepherd (a Palm Dog Award winner at the Cannes Film Festival). Unfortunately, David is not good at flirting. However, difficult cases, such as his even more desperate friend, “The Man with the Lisp,” can extend their stays by one day for each renegade “loner” living in the surrounding forest they can bag with the resort provided tranquilizer guns.

Oh, but Lanthimos is just getting started. David will pursue a match with “The Heartless Woman,” hoping she will mistake his awkward aloofness for a similar misanthropy. When that strategy fails, he will go off the grid with the loners, but their rigid social conventions might be even trickier to navigate.

The Lobster is a deliriously bizarre film, but Lanthimos presents it all so matter-of-factly, we are compelled to suspend disbelief and just roll with it. There are vaguely identifiable precursors to some of Lobsters’ madness, like the ticking clock of the aforementioned Logan’s Run and the resort itself, which is not so very different from the Village in The Prisoner. Nonetheless, Lanthimos incorporates them in inventive and intriguing ways into a sly and subversive script (co-written with Efthymis Filippou) that keeps evolving in unexpected directions. This is not the sort of speculative film that starts with an intriguing premise, but continues to mine the same vein with diminishing returns. Lanthimos has plenty of stuff held in reserve for the third act.

Colin Farrell is wonderfully pathetic as David. It is truly an anti-star turn that is even more taciturn, fatalistic, and world-weary than his fine work in Ondine, Miss Julie, and London Boulevard. Yet, develops some truly unique romantic chemistry with Rachel Weisz, the “Short Sighted Woman” he meets amongst the band of Loners. Léa Seydoux is quietly ferocious as the fanatical Loner Leader, but nobody can approach the level of nuts attained by Olivia Colman as the resort manager.

Frankly, The Lobster is like a breath of fresh air, presenting a wholly unique dystopian vision at a time when multiplexes are drowning in neo-fascist-jumpsuit-donning YA near future romances. No sir, this is not like those. It is its own animal, if you will. There are sequences that will have you staring at the screen slack-jawed, which is a good thing. By far Lanthimos best work yet, The Lobster is highly recommended for adventurous genre and art house patrons, when it opens this Friday (5/13) in New York at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square.

Broadchurch: David Tennant Investigates

It is the drama that made Twitter explode in the UK.  Fox has plans for an Americanized version for the 2014-15 season, but intrigued viewers only have to wait eight weeks to find out who did it.  The ensuing investigation might just cost the investigating detective a sizable chunk of his soul.  Nevertheless, all will eventually be revealed when the eight week Broadchurch (promo here) airs on BBC America, beginning this Wednesday.

Young Danny Latimer has been murdered. His body was found dumped at the beach, but the Socos (CSI) quickly determine this is not the original crime scene.  Beth and Mark Latimer did not realize their son is missing until it was too late, merely assuming he was off on his morning paper route.  Dogged Detective Inspector Alec Hardy soon discovers other family secrets that kept certain Latimers preoccupied.

Hardy is either the best or the worst DI for this investigation.  In his last posting, the detective worked an eerily similar case.  Precise details will emerge over time, but it clearly ended badly.  Hardy had come to the small Jurassic Coastal town of Broadchurch to escape the media spotlight and recuperate his ailing body and psyche.  While fraught with career perils, the Latimer case represents possible redemption for the controversial copper.  However, he will have to work it with the distinctly resentful Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller, who came back from her vacation to find Hardy in place of her anticipated promotion.

There will be no shortage of suspects in Broadchurch, including Danny’s father; his friend and colleague Nigel Carter; Jack Marshall, the local newsagent; the insomniac vicar Rev. Paul Coates, and a nasty late middle-aged woman living in mobile home not far from the crime scene.  DS Miller’s own son Tom also acts rather oddly upon learning of his friend’s murder.  Series creator Chris Chibnall will focus suspicion on just about everyone before the big finale, but Broadchurch is just as much about the grief and guilt resulting from the Latimer murder as it is a mystery procedural.

Broadchurch will be of particular interest to Doctor Who fans, starring former Doctor David Tennant as DI Hardy, former companion Arthur Darville as Rev. Coates, and guest star Olivia Colman as DS Miller.  Frankly, Broadchurch might just eclipse the Doctor as Tennant’s career defining role.  Again, he makes a convincingly intelligence screen presence, but where the dashing figure he supposedly cut in Spies of Warsaw was a bit of a stretch, he is darkly compelling as the haggard, sullen, world-weary, angst-ridden Hardy.  Yet, Colman also holds her own in their scenes together quite well as the increasingly disillusioned DS Miller.

To their credit, both Darville the actor and Chibnall the writer make Rev. Coates a legitimate suspect, while still avoiding all the easy clergy clichés.  They even allow him some surprisingly powerful sermons that essentially function as the conscience of the series.  Yet, it is Jodie Whittaker who really personifies Broadchurch’s emotional devastation as the distraught Beth Latimer.

Broadchurch is grabby right from the start, but it is written with greater depth and psychological insight than conventional mystery series.  Doctor Who alumni James Strong and Euros Lyn helm their installments with admirable sensitivity and the music of hardcore drummer-turned contemporary classical composer Ólafur Arnalds sets an unusually elegiac tone.  Quality television in every way, Broadchurch is highly recommended for fans of ambitious mystery series, like The Killing, Twin Peaks, and Top of the Lake.  It commences its American premiere this Wednesday (8/7) on BBC America.