Film Carew: Magic In The Moonlight, Predestination + More

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

If familiarity breeds contempt, where does that leave Woody Allen? Magic In The Moonlight marks the indefatigable "'funnyman'"'s 44th film in 48 years; showing that there's no more devoted Woody Allen acolyte than Woody Allen. Though some may argue his few dalliances into genre —or, even, gasp, drama— constitute a varied career, Allen has, in depressing reality, spent five decades making minor variations on the same vainglorious theme. Every Woody Allen film is unmistakable, yet unremarkable; his clockwork working-schedule and stock of comic clichés making his motion-picutre output one of monomaniacal mediocrity.

Of course, given monomania implies obsession, that’s probably the wrong motift to employ. A film as featherweight as Magic In The Moonlight betrays no hints of obsessiveness, from anyone involved. When it opens with a twee jazz-ditty playing over white credits on a black background, you can feel familiarity’s long-simmering contempt boil up; ditto as depicts a man romancing a woman 30 years his junior in a romantically-painted, remarkably-hatted jazz age that just won't shut up with the fucking twee jazz ditties. Seriously, Sweet Georgia Brown is on the soundtrack.

Colin Firth plays a magician and career sceptic —a sort of vaudevillian Amazing Randi— brought to a wealthy widower's estate in the South of France to debunk Emma Stone’s visiting psychic. Inevitability, a tepid farce ensues, as the young woman charms the old egotist to both her feminine wiles and psychic skills. Allen's done the aging-misanthrope-beguiled-by-simple-young-American-dame thing innumerable times, and, as ever, the self-portraiture is obvious. When Jeremy Shamos's physician, herein, details Firth's character as a "perfect depressive, with everything subsumed into his art", we know who he's really talking about; and a conversation about the 'irrational' impulse of love should elicit either discomfort or outrage in any viewers not entirely down with the whole marrying-your-step-daughter scenario.

But a few minor riffs on the filmmaker's well-known persona hardly a movie make. Magic In The Moonlight verily aches for a raison d'être, anything to justify its existence. It’s here, on screens, not because it needed to be made, but due solely to cinema's most remorseless, disheartening schedule. Actual artistic inspiration be damned: every year there'll be a new Woody Allen movie, whether you like it or not. The greatest question being, in 2014, who the fuck actually likes it?

PREDESTINATION

Spoiler alert! There are pleasures to be gleaned from Predestination, the Spierig twins' latest adventure in small-budget, big-idea genre-riffing. But those pleasures come entirely from the mysteries of its time-hopping thriller, where every 'revelation' is more next-layer-in-the-onion, the story growing richer in time-travel paradoxes with every reveal. They're minor pleasures, but they're also ever-so tenuous in this information-age; even the most cursory internet-clicking on its source, Robert A. Heinlein's short story "'—All You Zombies—'", obliterating the element of surprise in the space of a one-line premise.

This means that writing about Predestination involves carefully tiptoeing around the movie's plot, which finds Ethan Hawke as a 'temporal agent' who recruits a transgender man (Sarah Snook) to be his blackmailed accomplice. Through recounted anecdotes and time-travelling both, the pair cavort through a claustrophobically-woven alternate-history, a shadowy version of mid-20th-century America that looks as shot-on-a-Docklands-sound-stage as it actually was.

The narrative is full of stories-within-stories, a nesting-doll approach that suits its self-contained loop; a nifty thought-exercise in time-travel paradoxes. That you can't really critically unpack the idea without unravelling the entire movie may actually be a saving grace for Predestination. The game-playing gambit of its sole pleasure is probably best left as device for mild surprise, its logic as flimsy as the sanctity of spoilers.

FELONY

Felony has aspirations of thematic complexity, dramatic density, and genre artistry: the film a tale of crooked cops that dodges the genre's easy clichés for plentiful scenes of morally-conflicted dicks grappling with complex emotions in brow-furrowing silence.

Matthew Saville's most striking shot is so thematically-resonant and fabulously photographed he repeats it thrice: a cop, framed to the right, drives away from the scene of the crime (literal or figurative), but he can't keep from looking in the driver's-side mirror, into the receding background framed left, at all he's trying —and failing— to leave behind.

Felony was written by its star, Joel Edgerton, who plays a bogan cop —a star of the local precinct's footy-club fraternity, forever nursing a stubby, fond of some casual police brutality— whose life comes unravelling when he drives drunk, and collects a paper-boy on a bike. Tom Wilkinson is the long-corrupt older cop presiding over a protect-our-own culture of institutional sweeping-under-the-rug, pressuring Edgerton into keeping quiet. And Jai Courtney is the fresh-faced, by-the-book idealist, unable to stay silent when a boy lays in a coma, especially when that boy has a Hot Single Mum.

Saville's previous feature, Noise, dealt in a similar dramatic premise; and his work on The Slap is echoed, with Melissa George as Edgerton's wife, and two young children dragged into the lead character's dramatic handwringing. Edgerton, as writer, is out to revel in moral greys; wondering what makes police officers —or human beings— 'good' or 'bad', and whether anyone (save for the caricatures of a lower-class-scrubber and her repeat-offender-paedophile boyfriend, apparently) can be so simply reduced. But he doesn't have the discipline to pull it off, Felony's script turning —time-and-again— to dramatically-convenient contrivances to opportunistically 'solve' its moral problems.

LOCKE

Locke is like a cinematic stage-play; a one-man-show that's landed on screens due to the fact it's one-man happens to be a famous filmstar. Tom Hardy plays the titular character, a construction manager who leaves the site one night, and spontaneously sets out on the commute from Birmingham to London. Its 85 minutes plays out in real time, with Hardy —in a stagey Welsh accent so sonorous if oft sounds like he's singing— making a series of handsfree phonecalls along the way. Everyone else —wife, sons, co-worker, woman-giving-birth— is heard only via their voice, and writer/director Steven Knight knows that being connected only via a sketchy digital phoneline doesn't detract from the drama, but amplify it.

It's a human drama set on a relatable, almost mundane scale, but Locke carries a thematic resonance that goes far beyond the usual pictures that Hardly plays in. Though Hardy's not in an action-movie, Locke is, in his own way, an implacable hero, a figure of masculine virtue —determination, responsibility, endless rational calm— trying to make sure his life isn't falling apart as he drives. Every phonecall is a new fire to be put out, and the character navigates every crisis with managerial aplomb.

Though Hardy's not in an action-movie, Knight shoots him as if he is. There's none of the simple formalism of, say, Abbas Kiarostami's recurring scenes —and entire movies— taking place over car rides (a visual gambit echoed by Jonathan Glazer in his film-of-the-year, Under The Skin). Instead, Knight busily moves about various perspectives of the cabin of Hardy's 4WD, and routinely cuts away from the vehicle, showing it motoring along the M40. It feels as if the filmmaker is conscious of catering to the appetites of more casual viewers, and this gives an unfortunate effect; as if he’s dividing the drama into DVD chapters, leaving room for ad-breaks. If Locke was to have the power of a one-man-show, then it needed to sustain the singularity of Hardy's impressive performance; but all the fidgety looking-around and looking-away only serves to dilute its impact.