Film Carew: Jersey Boys, Yves Saint Laurent, Tim's Vermeer, Calvary

JERSEY BOYS

Any doubt that Clint Eastwood is up there with Woody Allen, duelling for the mantle of World's Most Overrated Filmmaker, is put to bed, once again, with Jersey Boys, a horrifying fever-dream of non-stop clichés erected in saccharine shrine to the AOK USA. It's a jukebox musical turned rote rock-biopic, recounting the career of Frank Valli and the Four Seasons, a collection of Joe Pesci caricatures from da wrong side of da tracks. When we meet Valli (played, in a procession of terrible wigs under a slathering of pancake make-up by the dead-eyed but high-voiced John Lloyd Young), his mama - the maker of the “best meatball sandwiches in all of America”! - is literally twirling a forkful of spaghetti whilst wearing an apron.

From there, the representations of the girls in Boys grow even more dire: dames depicted as either groupie sluts waited to be balled, or nagging bitches our rock heroes made the mistake of marrying. “Sweetheart, go powder your nose!” barks the goony Vincent Piazza, when the men need get down to business; later, he 'hilariously' says “try not to say anything for the rest of the day, alright, sweetheart?” when a blonde-joke-incarnate dares open her mouth for anything but the fellatin'.

It's not you, it's me. Actually, it's this film.

These interactions are throwaway, but significant: Jersey Boys less a pleasant parade of old-timey pop hits, more like 130 minutes of tedious machismo that looks like a cinematic doily, every soft-edged scene lit up with the luminous glow of gormless nostalgia. It's a picture pining for Atomic Age America, the mythical nation of that 'simpler' time when women knew their place, and segregation kept everything safe. Eastwood - who is, notably, 84 years old - lovingly fashions a postcard-perfect portrait of a pre-fab epoch that never was; a fairy-floss fantasia of sockhops and maltshops, county fairs in which white-teeth'd boys in letterman jackets toss back popcorn whilst making eyes at pigtailed girls twirling pennants.

They're the post-war tropes John Waters has been satirising for 40 years, but Eastwood is famously tin-eared when it comes to satire; this was, after all, the man who turned the joke premise at the centre of Robert Altman's Hollywood mockery The Player into a real race-against-the-clock thriller, True Crime. Similarly, you can hardly expect old Clint to have seen Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, whose parodic spectre lingers in every scene in which the ballbustin' first wife yells at Young for being a fuck-up and a failure, or over every moment where inspiration conveniently strikes just in time for the next musical-number.

Rather than being content to tenderly recreate the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show, a better film would've used this imaginary past as a mirror on the present; positioning, say, the group's criminal connections and casual misogyny - and their exploitation as pop-music product - to reflect on rap's role in the contemporary record biz. But Jersey Boys has no interest in this century, nor of being a better film. It is, after all, made by Clint Eastwood.

Cheers to biopic clichés!

YVES SAINT LAURENT

If Jersey Boys doesn't deliver enough biopic clichés, then there's JL's Yves Saint Laurent. Jalil Lespert's film is just as ready with the toothless forward of myth-making tropes, his portrait of the man behind the brand one of two competing YSL biopics to arrive in 2014, going up against Saint Laurent, which, as the work of provocateur/visionary Bertrand Bonello, instantly seems more interesting. Bonello's film is the bootleg take, but the filmmaker claims he never sought official permission; believing working under the watchful eye of legacy-protectors like operating in an artistic prison. Lespert makes that same prison his home, this officially-licensed portrait of Saint Laurent able to lean on the real garments, but unable to conjure something of sharp-edged idiosyncrasy out of the mists of myth. Dramatically, Yves Saint Laurent is soggy and wet, its broad, splashy stroke painting a portrait of - of course - a flawed genius, a fashion mystic whose many vices were the price he had to pay for being a visionary. It's tedious cliché trumpeted as if grand profundity, and by the time the brassiness of the Jazz Age gives way to the kaftans-in-Morocco acid-trips of the Age of Aquarius, your cynical eyeroll will likely be having involuntary spasms.

TIM'S VERMEER

This wildly-entertaining documentary goes out of its way to undermine that time-honoured trope of the mystical-artist, whose ultrahuman genius was the gift of God. Directed by professional debunkers Penn & Teller, it's a long-form experiment in which inventor Tim Jenison sets out to recreate Vermeer's The Music Lesson via only 16th-century technology. Jenison knows the Dutch master's proto-photorealism features luminous details familiar to us children of the photographic age, but unseeable by the naked eye of the renaissance. It's his theory that Vermeer's visions came not from divine providence, but looking at life through a lens. He's not out to cut the Old Master down to size, nor do the eye-opening results of his experiment diminish Vermeer's remarkable work. Instead, Penn, Teller, and Jenison are gear-geeks out to give credence to the tools of the trade, shaking up entrenched beliefs about canonised artists along the way.

CALVARY

Though billed as crackin' Irish comedy, Calvary is anything but. Beneath the dry wit and smirkin' quips, it's a pained howl, a cry-of-rage from an isle in flux, national identity rocked by the demise of Catholicism, the dominant religion they once fought internecine wars for. It begins with Brendan Gleeson as a priest in confession, listening to a parishioner warning that he's going to be shot Sunday week, as symbolic retribution for all those raped under the cloak of church secrecy. In Calvary's West Coast hamlet, the local citizens - tiny figures amidst a savage landscape - all wear scars and bruises, are victims of abuse, oppression, minority. Wherever Gleeson goes, he's met with indignance, hostility, and mockery; a national crisis-of-faith meaning that a priest's free-pass has been irrevocably revoked. These days, even the local mechanic (Isaach de Bankolé) knows missionaries in Africa used to cut off black hands as punishment; even the local barkeep (Pat Shortt) can crack wise about how the Catholic church collaborated with Nazis to make off with Jewish gold. When the village church is burned-down in front of the whole cast-of-characters, someone asked who might hold a grudge against the church; “that could be half the country,” retorts one wag.

Writer/director John Michael McDonagh - maker of The Guard, brother of Martin McDonagh - is out to take the pulse of a people, but he's also aware of the haughtiness of such a dream. So, McDonagh undermines Calvary's suspension-of-disbelief, as characters engage in meta-commentary on the form: Dylan Moran's ultra-wealthy stock-trader commenting on the symbolism of a rich man pissing on a priceless painting whilst he does it; Aiden Gillan's 'Atheist Doctor' lamenting the limits of his role; Gleeson and Kelly Reilly wondering what the “third act revelation” is going to be; father/daughter McDonagh dismissed as “corny” cliché; the quoting of biblical poetry “hackneyed”. It's a device that McDonagh uses for laughs, but then abandons at the finale; in which a shock ending and a Paul Haggis ensemble-cast-montage make an unironic run at Awards Show profundity. This grandiose climax is at odds of much of what preceded it, Calvary remaining uneven to the end. But it's filled with a fascinating mix of ferocity, foolishness, and naked ambition that's, ultimately, admirable.