Michael Fassbender

The Light Between Oceans

Director: Derek Cianfrance (2016) BBFC cert: 12A

Wade into a sea of grief, madness and death with this mournful melodrama. Solid performances and breathtaking locations bring the best selling book by M. L. Stedman to windswept life.

Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander star as Tom and Isabel Sherbourne. He is a black clad and brooding veteran of the First World War’s western front, she is a vivacious local girl in angelic white.

The happiness of Australia’s most photogenic lighthouse keepers hits the rocks due to a repeated failure to have a child.  Demented by grief, Isabel persuades Tom to abandon the ship of common sense when a baby girl is washed ashore. They pass the child off as their own, with the only clue to her identity an expensive silver rattle.

As a period romance this is more gothic tragedy than uplifting celebration of love. Imagine Emily Bronte’s Cathy and Heathcliff escaping Wuthering Heights to spend a day out at the seaside.

There are tales of suicide, ghostly images, wild walks on stormy nights, wailing widows and mourning mothers. There are letters from beyond the grave. In flashback we see the dead, living. Beneath breathy voice overs, the script shovels on unlikely occurrences and coincidences.

The lighthouse island is named after Janus, two headed god who looks to the future and the past. Tom looks one way, Isabel the other. When Isabel shaves off Tom’s moustache, she is defenestrating his stiff upper lip and removing his emotional barrier to the world. Not only does this indicate he prepared to reveal his emotions, but it places him in her power. It is redolent of Samson having his locks shorn and is the harbinger of their doom.

As the drama sinks under the weight of this heavy handed symbolism, eventually the over-wrought storytelling cops out and dissolves into sentimentality. A lack of social smoking undermines the carefully constructed period detail.

Filmed in Tasmania and off the New Zealand coast, the coastline is a character and the crashing waves are a soundtrack. Rachel Weisz offers strong support as Hannah, the daughter of local businessman. It’s always great to see Bryan Brown on screen, even when playing Septimus Potts, as unpleasant a man as his name suggests.

Fassbender and Vikander became a couple while on set and the early scenes have an earthy crackle of electricity. I hope they achieve more happiness than their characters do.

★★★☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

 

 

 

 

 

X-Men: Apocalypse

Director: Bryan Singer (2016)

Yawn your way to the end of the world in this inert episode of the increasingly under powered superhero franchise.

Bloated and boring, an exasperting multitude of characters are poorly served by laboured direction, haphazard editing and dialogue empty of any lyricism, humour or subtlety.

Lines of exposition are expanded to scene length and decorated with close ups of actors indifferent to the weightless CGI events occurring behind them. Presented with a lacklustre script, the top drawer cast offer up correspondent performances.

James McAvoy returns as Professor X, the wheelchair bound and telepathic leader of supergroup the X-Men who believes in peaceful co-existence with non-mutants. As his one time friend Magneto, Michael Fassbender wants the world to feel his pain.

Minor characters pose in heroic silence as the pair once again rehash their world views. In a film adverse to brevity, their relationship is underlined by the inclusion of footage of earlier films.

Oscar Isaac is barely recognisable and mostly immobile as the eponymous Apocalypse, a mutant from ancient Egypt who is resurrected by devout yet curiously security lax followers.

With the  ability to turn people to earth and metal, Apocalypse wants to build a better world from the ashes of the present one and starts recruiting mutants to serve him in his nefarious plan.

Jennifer Lawrence looks bored as the shapeshifting Mystique who seems to have mutated into a thin copy of her character Katnis Everdeen from The Hunger Games series (2012-15).

Now a reluctant global poster girl for mutants in hiding, Mystique needs convincing to take arms against Apocalypse.

Hugh Jackman cameos as Wolverine while Rose Byrne is beginning to rival Fassbender for being the best actor making the weakest career choices.

Evan Peters and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Quicksilver and Nightcrawler are the best of the B team. Olivia Munn, Ben Hardy, Alexandra Shipp and Sophie Turner are eager but forgettable.

The setting of 1983 allows for pop culture references to be scattered around but there’s a lack of the wit to exploit their comic potential.

Though the Cold War and the nuclear arms race are a major subplot, a nuclear launch occurs and is promptly forgotten about while our focus hurries away elsewhere.

Director Singer kickstarted with his career with the masterful The Usual Suspects (1995) and launched this series with the energetic X-Men (2000) but this is closer in muddled mediocrity to his Jack The Giant Slayer (2013).

The end of the world can’t come soon enough for this flatlining franchise.

★★☆☆☆

 

Steve Jobs

Director: Danny Boyle (2015)

A terrifically talented cast are in perfect sync in this biopic of Steve Jobs, the charismatic and complex founder of the technology giant Apple Inc.

It’s as smooth, sleek and as tightly engineered as one of their computers or iPhones, but has problems with it’s memory and crashes at the worst possible time.

A binary figure who considered his employees to be with him or looking for a new errr, job, the Apple chief died in 2011.

Ashton Kutcher played him in the poorly recieved Jobs (2013) and he is rebooted here in a perfectly calibrated performance from Michael Fassbender.

Far from PC, he’s a bullying, vindictive and paranoid, a control freak with a messiah complex who inspires a noisy devotion in his disciples.

The university dropout was neither an engineer or a designer but was blessed with an intuitive understanding there are vast amounts of money to be earned through brand design and marketing.

Plus trapping his customers into an operating system incompatible with competing systems or products creates slaves of his customers.

This obsession with creating a closed operating system reflects Jobs emotional inner life. The prophet of the future surrounds himself with an  emotional firewall.

In contrast, sociable Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who wants to create a more flexible, adaptable open system, while urging Jobs to acknowledge the role others have played in the success of the company.

They produced a computer so intuitive to use a five year old could begin to use it without instruction, the five year old being his daughter Lisa, played by Makenzie Moss.

The script is intelligent, sharp and scorchingly funny in its early stages, there’s no romance, sex or violence, except for when Jobs downloads a torrent of abuse on his colleagues, friends and family.

It’s a typically well-researched work by scriptwriter of the Facebook movie The Social Network (2010) Aaron Sorkin. He’s smart enough to wittily flag up the limitations of the structure.

Framed as a three act play, each act focusses on the press launch of a new Apple product: the expensive first Macintosh computer in 1984, the disastrous NeXT in 1988 and the revolutionary classic iMac in 1998.

As Jobs is celebrated, sacked and rises again the drama stalls.

A lack of a martyr makes for a dull finale as the self-mythologising messiah is allowed his moment of destiny defining redemption.

Ridley Scott‘s astonishing Orwellian themed TV advert for Macintosh is seen and discussed.

But it’s never pointed out the Big Brother imagery invoked to attack his rivals products could easily be used to criticise Jobs and Apple itself.

He is creepily aware of the small details of his colleagues’ lives. They form a dysfunctional surrogate family.

Kate Winslet sports a Polish accent and some unfortunate fashions as Joanna, Jobs’ head of marketing and his ‘work wife’. It says something about a corporation when the marketing department represents its compassionate soul.

Jeff Daniels is father figure John Sculley, the ill-fated CEO of Apple against whom Jobs rebels. Seth Rogen plays his ‘bro’ Wozniak.

Few directors possess director Danny Boyle’s consummate command of music to accentuate the visual drama, or have his ability to cajole convincing performances out of young children.

Though Boyle’s attempts to add some visual dynamism through his restless camerawork, he can’t illuminate the dark confines of a dialogue heavy script.

An early girlfriend aside any reference to Jobs’ romantic life is absent. The huge job cuts he instigated on his triumphant return to the company are glossed over.

Coldly calculating in it’s refusal to condemn Jobs for his sins smacks of legal compromise. It’s not possible to libel the dead but one suspects Apple employ extraordinarily expensive lawyers to police it’s brand.

By the end we’re far from convinced of Jobs’ genius, as his only identifiable talent seems to be in rude manipulation, at which he is extraordinary.

★★★☆☆

MacBeth

Director: Justin Kurzel (2015)

This bold and bleak adaption of Shakespeare‘s Scottish play is violent and visually arresting but curiously unmoving.

A moody, macho and masochistic Michael Fassbender frets for a couple of hours upon the stage.

He drips with menace and blood and there is much sound and fury.

After serving his King by quelling an insurrection, Macbeth encounters three witches who prophesy a royal future.

Encouraged by his wife he murders his way to the throne, and becomes consumed by madness.

A macabre tone is struck from the start with the burial of an infant. Among the battles, murders, ghosts, and witches, the rural feudal society is chillingly and chillily realised.

The relentless rain-lashed realism captures the grim hardships of the era, but there is also beauty is the landscapes, a children’s chorus and the craftsmanship of cloaks and daggers.

Fiona Crombie’s strong production design offers fine detail and heavy weathering, anchoring the actors in the period.

It’s a consistent vision, utilising wild exteriors in what was a gruelling shoot for cast and crew.

Interiors were filmed in the magnificent and contemporaneous Ely Cathedral.

Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw frames some lovely images but fellow Australian, director Kurzel rarely use his camera to fully bring out the drama of the verse.

The pair are stronger on the hoof, creating some terrific moments in battle and in the hunt.

Kurzel’s brother Jed adds to the tone with an unsettling screeching soundtrack.

Three writer’s have acceptably trimmed Shakespeare’s verse. But it’s sadly compromised through frequently flat recital, caught within beards or lost thick fog of a Scots brogue.

There’s also tendency by most of the men to employ a throaty whisper as often as possible, so we have to strain for understanding.

Only Englishman Sean Harris as Macduff and the French actress Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth offer engaging readings. Both characters are motivated by grief for lost children.

Elizabeth Debicki has a moment on fire but David Thewlis, Jack Reynor and Paddy Considine seem oddly removed from events around them.

Shakespeare put humour in his tragedies to emphasise his antagonists’ fall and make their doom compelling.

As Fassbender’s Macbeth moves from military machine to murderer to madman, the actor fails to find the humanity.

Devoid of love, humour or a conscience to lose or regain, the tragedy is missing in action.

What remains is a blood-soaked slog through the fog of 10th century war.

★★★☆☆  

Slow West

Director: John Maclean (2015)

A lovestruck Scot hits the trail way out west in this confident and compelling western.

It rustles up great performances, pitiless action, majestic scenery, bone dry humour and a melancholy soundtrack.

Cast from the mould of Don Quixote, 16 year old Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a naive and romantic doe-eyed Bambi of an un-rough youth.

He dreams of building railway to the moon and is given to gnomic utterances such as ‘love is universal, like death’ – though he has no real understanding of either.

Riding a horse weighed down with the gentlemanly essentials of a teapot and guide book, he has abandoned his privileged Sottish home to find his love Rose (Caren Pistorius) in the wild west of Colorado.

She left Scotland after an accident and now lives in rural isolation. We see their romance in flashbacks.

Through shoot-outs, robberies and flash-floods he encounters Native Americans, musicians, writers, orphans, soldiers and outlaws.

Unprepared for the violent and treacherous road, he employs a taciturn, cigar chomping sharp-shooter called Silas (Michael Fassbender) as a guide. He has more knowledge of Rose than he lets on.

Even next to the experienced and charismatic Fassbender, Smit McPhee sits tall in his acting saddle and never in the shade.

The chemistry between these travellers reveal facets of their character, altering our perception of them.

Fassbender gives a thrillingly controlled performance, hinting at nerves and a conscience hiding behind the facade of an ice-cold killer.

The film is so well constructed his voice over seems redundant – perhaps it was a commercial decision made by the producers.

With it’s surrogate family-building subplot there are echoes of Eastwood’s directorial masterpiece The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).

Not content with riffing on one classic, Slow West also utilises the three pronged dynamic of Sergio Leone’s magnificent spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966).

While Silas has strong echoes of Clint Eastwood‘s The Man With No Name, a dog-collared bounty hunter called Angus The Clergyman (Tony Croft) draws on Lee Van Cleef’s introduction as The Bad where he is similarly attired.

Ben Mendelsohn completes a trio of competing mercenaries as an outlaw called Payne. He’s a swaggering presence in a bearskin coat, reminiscent Butler (Hugh Millais) in McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971).

Though the scale of Slow West is smaller than those films, it hits it’s ambitious targets with a Silas-like accuracy.

This a wonderfully composed movie; cinematographer Robbie Ryan only moves his camera if it serves his purpose. He previously shot Fassbender on Andrea Arnold’s gritty Brit drama Fish Tank (2009).

Musical supervisor Lucy Bright has the London Contemporary Orchestra provide a mournful string accompaniment to Ryan’s strong eye.

This is the second excellent western of the year after Kristian Levring’s The Salvation, suggesting the genre is a long way from Boot-hill. That was filmed in South Africa, Slow West was shot in New Zealand.

Despite disparate location work, both offer a fresh and defiantly European perspective on the ultimate American genre. They are intelligent, action-orientated and intense additions to the canon.

★★★★☆

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Director: Bryan Singer (2014)

Hugh Jackman sharpens his claws for the seventh time as superhero Wolverine in this action-packed adventure with added time-travel thrills.

The film has exciting set-pieces, a terrific cast, some good jokes and an entertaining new angle on the Kennedy assassination of November 1963.

Yet the script struggles to find time for a plot amid the cacophony of characters – so the special effects have to do the dramatic heavy lifting.

The story begins with mutants under attack by super-powered robots called the sentinels.

Mutant leaders Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) send the mind of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 to inhabit his younger self’s body.

He has to find the young Xavier (James McAvoy) and convince him to help recruit Magneto (Michael Fassbender).

Magneto is jailed inside the Pentagon so they recruit a lightning fast mutant called Quicksilver (Evan Peters) to break him out.

This leads to a brilliant action comedy sequence set to the wonderful music of the late singer-songwriter Jim Croce whose music was also used in Tarantino’s bloody opus Django Unchained (2012).

Next the mutants have to stop the shapeshifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from carrying out a revenge killing of the scientist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage).

She decides to take direct action not realising his death could lead to the annihilation of the mutants by giving the the US government the excuse they’re looking for.

Fassbender and McEvoy have great fun in costume but neither has to squeeze himself into an unforgiving blue leotard like Lawrence.

It’s not uncanny of the film-makers to put the world’s most popular actress centre story. But even she can’t steal the show from the prowling, growling Jackman.

★★★☆☆