'T2: Trainspotting' Is Endlessly Meta, Technically-Impressive & Visually-Alive

T2: TRAINSPOTTING

Befitting a sequel that arrives — and is set — 20 years after the original, the awkwardly-titled T2: Trainspotting is a film about the passing of time; the way people, cities and culture change. For those still reliving Britpop’s boozy reign, T2 is less celebration of old glory days, more portrait of the many days since. Here, the band are brought back together, only they’re all sad middle-aged men. “It’s nostalgia,” Jonny Lee Miller warns, at one point; laments for the past making these sad middle-aged men “tourist[s] in [their] own youth”.

After striding off into the Trainspotting sunset, Ewan McGregor’s reformed junkie has spent two decades living in Amsterdam — so close, yet so far — in glorified hiding from the degenerate mates he double-crossed and did-over. You can never go home again, but you can go back to Leith, two decades on, and attempt to mend fences and bury hatchets; to find that Miller’s preening peacock is now a raging coke-fiend with dreams of opening a brothel, that Robert Carlyle’s ultra-violent sociopath has broken out of prison and is on the lam, and that Ewen Bremner’s wasted life has been ruined, again and again, by heroin.

The reunion is endlessly meta. There’s endless, elaborate references to the original Trainspotting. Bremner’s character dresses a tenement in snapshots from the first production, and, within the actual narrative, sets out to write the ‘stories’ that happened, last film, as a book; his scribbles wholesale lifted from Irvine Welsh’s original novel (“I’ve got a title,” Shirley Henderson says, late in the film, though thank God she doesn’t have to say it aloud). McGregor’s return from overseas feels like his return from Hollywood. And he and director Danny Boyle had to, themselves, put an old falling-out behind them.

When not referencing the original, the standalone plot of T2 is, itself, a re-do: again there’s four friends operating as enemies, a wad of cash, a pretty girl, a reversal, a betrayal, a straining for a happy ending. In unexpectedly artful moments, Boyle even has the past merge with the present: McGregor, in his gaunt, younger guise, running from the original into the streets of the sequel, digitally spliced like an actor back from the dead. It’s a technically-impressive, visually-alive, and utterly shameless approach to fan-service; the narrative of 2016 daring to suggest that it, too, is but a work of nostalgia tourism.

Boyle — cinema’s most restless digital-maximalist — again displays a hyperactive approach to direction: edits fidgety, montages many, screens within screens forever opening up. Anthony Dod Mantle’s camera is stuck on microphones, swung fists, and dashboards; sometimes floating like a ghost, other times hurtling in for visceral close-up. There’s visual invention aplenty, but there’s also moments of pure sequel convention: when the iconic images of the original are re-done with a fan-flattering wink.

And, sure enough, there’s another Choose Life rant, in which the film situates itself within the digital dystopia: lamenting the desperate neediness and incessant insecurities of social media; how the knowledge-is-power maxim has, in the information age, turned into existential disempowerment; how youth-culture will forever be quickly co-opted by corporate entities.

Anyone hoping that Trainspotting’s original socio-economic milieu would be updated for an era of Brexit and Scottish independence will feel slighted by how little class informs T2; the only changing-social-climate commentary being various comic cheap-shots taken at gentrification. Here, both old neighbourhoods and old men have spent the years-since trying to clean up; T2 hoping to show how people and places change, whilst deliberately delivering a sequel’s cinematic same.

THE GREAT WALL

The monster-movie monsters in The Great Wall, the tao tie, are mythical lizards that arise once every 60 years, out to both eat people and remind them “what happens when greed goes unchecked”. That spoken-aloud line marks a meta moment in this grand-scale, Chinese-American co-production, a tentpole spectacular whose own greed is on naked display. Importing Hollywood stars (Matt Damon, Willem Dafoe) for the most expensive Chinese production ever, Zhang Yimou’s openly out to court the globe’s two biggest cinematic markets.

Zhang’s done this once before: 2011’s The Flowers Of War roped in Christian Bale for what was, at the time, also the most expensive Chinese production ever. But, where that film was a grand, soap-operatic portrait of white-saviour-fantasy set against the real-life tragedy of the Nanking massacre, this white-saviour-fantasy is a fantasy film filled with endless CGI monsters, occasional explosions, and enough visual invention that Zhang’s auteurist credentials don’t go entirely down the toilet.

Here, Damon plays a bearded medieval mercenary — with a vague, mercurial accent that sounds quasi-Irish, except for when it doesn’t — who, when fleeing from a marauding horde of tao tie, stumbles upon the Great Wall sometime circa the 11th century. Taken prisoner by a military cohort that lives within the wall, he soon charms them with his virtuous whiteness, which allows him to murder monsters with almighty aplomb; his dexterous, gymnastic archery exploits on the digital-backlot battlefield bringing back erotic Orlando Bloom memories. But, befitting the dreams of cross-market co-productions, the heroic white man also has to learn stuff from his Eastern, proto-communist hosts: trust, honour, the power of the collective, Chinese military might.

Zhang isn’t much interested in the hero’s journey, nor, for that matter, in any of the characters. Instead, he essentially treats The Great Wall as a choreographic sequel to his Beijing Olympics closing ceremony: martialing a vast cast of soldiers dressed in lurid colours, which seems less evocative of his work in Hero (or, indeed, with his Red Trilogy three decades ago), more of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. There’s a closing sequence shot in a psychedelic hall of stained glass, too, just to put Zhang’s colour obsession on full display.

The Great Wall’s other obsession is with inventive forms of battle: soldiers bungee off the wall, giant scissors chop monsters in half, and magnetised throwing axes are drawn towards each other, mid-air; Zhang often situating his ‘camera’ on flying arrows, or the breastplates of diving warriors. There’s no gravity to his lens, no sense of fixed perspective; instead, it moves through space like the POV in a video-game, a weightless spirit aswim through 3D-CGI spectacle.

But, for a monster movie, the main problem are the monsters themselves. Up close, they’re lovingly-designed, but all the overhead shots of them attacking en masse finds the creatures washed out into a glorified green blur. The tao tie are endless, rapacious, remorseless eatin’ machines, but they’re essentially a benign foe: providing wave after wave of fodder, the sitting ducks for a first-person shooter. They also make little logistical sense: they rush only at the wall (not, y’know, around it; or, for that matter, North towards wall-less Mongolia), and don’t retreat even when skewered with countless arrows or stabbed in the mouth with staffs.

One reading could be that this foreign menace symbolises encroaching capitalism — they are, after all, mindless consumers — but it’s hard to give too much weight to that notion given where it’s housed. The Great Wall is, itself, an exemplar of shameless capitalism; a popcorn-movie product whose production — American ideas, Chinese manpower — evokes multinational manufacturing.

HIDDEN FIGURES

Hidden Figures is the feelgood contender of Oscar season: a twee tale of historical you-go-girl-ism set to a snappy Pharrell beat. In the backrooms of NASA in the 1960s, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe play ambitious black women working at the new frontier of the space race; in advanced mathematics, computing and engineering. Yet, NASA’s cutting-edge facility dwells in Virginia, a Southern state wearing the scars of segregation. Technological progress and social progress don’t move at the same rate; the ladies deeming their employers “fast with rocketships, slow with advancement”.

Civil Rights may be in the air, but there’s still separate buses and libraries, water fountains and bathrooms; the long, cross-campus, half-mile dash for Henson, to go from the space-trajectory-calculatin’ coalface back to the toilets in the black building, played for comedy (and set to that snappy Pharrell beat). Well, at least until Kevin Costner, hard-ass-white-boss-whose-respect-is-won, knocks down the Colored sign on the ladies’, thereby symbolically ending segregation.

Director Theodore Melfi’s last film, St. Vincent, found the surprising heart in a little-kid-and-curmudgeon set-up, but Hidden Figures is far slicker, more shamelessly sentimental, and filled with soap-operatic convention. The score suggests the emotions, the emotions are forever simplified, and the air of light-comic frivolity ultimately gives way to an overwhelming earnestness. The film is about bringing to light the contributions of black women whitewashed from official US history, but the nobleness of its social crusade doesn’t immediately grant Hidden Figures artistic worth, nor cinematic meaning.

SILENCE

It’s sacrilege, in certain cineaste circles, to criticise Martin Scorsese, the Mafioso-poet whose stylistic tics have influenced generations of filmmakers setting montages of criminals to overplayed Baby Boomer rock-songs. Saint Scorsese dwells beyond the pale, especially for the fact that, along with his endless hyper-masculine portraits of charismatic rogues, he’s oft gone ‘spiritual’ with explicitly religious pictures, using his tool of divination — cinema — in source of the sublime.

Silence is one of these films: a ‘passion project’ decades in the making, which follows a pair of Jesuit priests proselytisin’ in 17th-century Japan, where Christianity is outlawed, its practitioners forced to renounce their faith. A film about religious persecution and the implementation of torture should, at the epoch of Trumpism, come loaded with trenchant thematic resonance. But Silence is a portrait of religion, and religious conviction, that feels cloistered, closed-in, stuffy. It’s an old-fashioned drama enlivened only by scattered scenes depicting gruesome torture. In some ways, it’s a cousin to Mel Gibson’s eroticised bondage movie The Passion Of The Christ, only far longer, drier, duller; not filled with Christ, only endless entry-level Christ symbols.

Silence’s central drama is waiting — patiently, endlessly — to see whether Andrew Garfield, unconvincing in both beard and crisis-of-faith, will, when let out of his cage and prodded by his captors, stand on a wood-block carved with the face of Jesus. Endless shots of hovering sandals await; the tension, for anyone who isn’t a devout Catholic, essentially non-existent. And, yes, the erstwhile Spider-man has been cast as a 17th-century Portuguese priest grappling with the limits — and extremes — of devotion. Garfield seems miscast at best, out-of-his-depth at worst. Adam Driver and Liam Neeson, two far-more-commanding screen presences, fare better; but Driver disappears after about half-an-hour, and Neeson only shows up for the final reel. Instead, we get long stretches of clunky conversation about religion between Garfield and Issey Ogata, waiting for a climax that never comes. Silence is ponderous, po-faced, punishing; an interminable, humourless, 160-minute sermon.

TRESPASS AGAINST US

In a field on the fringes of the Cotswolds, a family of lawless larrikins — the Cutlers — squats in a rag-tag home of caravans and rusted car-wrecks; living, essentially, a family-wide form of adolescent anti-authoritarian rebellion, all swear-words and raised middle-fingers and joyrides across paddocks. Brendan Gleeson is their cock-eyed patriarch, a man who rules not through the familiar dramatic trope of standover violence, but by dint of his seniority, which makes gospel out of his sublime idiocy. He teaches his clan — three generations of ’em, from impressionable kids to Sean Harris’s animalistic goon — that the world is flat, that school is useless, the police fools. In both character and performance, Gleeson shows how far charisma can take you; how it can be used as tool, weapon, whoopee-cushion.

Butting up against him is his first-born son and eventual heir, Michael Fassbender; one-time chip-off-the-old-block who’s, now, wanting to go his own way with wife-and-kids. Trespass Against Us brings up old crime-familia clichés, but doesn’t play to them: there’s no menace, no guns, no rats, no whacking. Nor, for that matter, is there much tension or drama. Director Adam Smith punches up things with various car-chases, Fass behind the wheel, either fleeing from the cops or running smirking rings around them. By existing outside of polite society, the Cutler clan live by a different set of laws; thus, they see the police as no real threat. Eventually, cinematic morality deems that someone must pay for all this lawlessness, but even then, the family emerges triumphant, in a swelling climax that involves both misplaced sentimentality and childish larks.

THE FAMILY

From the Manson Family to Scientology to the Alt-Right, crazed cults are often viewed as All-American phenomenon, the natural product of an Evangelical nation of seemingly boundless suggestibility. But one of the world’s more horrifying cults dwelled — and still continues to, in some form — close to home, in Lake Eildon, four hours outside Melbourne. It was there that Rose Hamilton-Byrne, social-climbing trophy-wife, fashioned herself as reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and recruited, adopted, and absconded-with children to worship her as goddess-mother of both benevolence and terror. For those kids handed over to The Family, their hair was dyed in matching peroxide, the outside world was elided from a cloistered community, the prevailing climate was of fear and paranoia, and, just for good measure, they were dosed with LSD.

Rosie Jones’s documentary exposé is a thorough examination of the institutionalised abuse that occurred, within the notorious clan, from the 1960s to the 1980s; an indictment not just of Hamilton-Byrne and her network of sycophants, enablers, and disciples, but of the society that did little to disrupt the goings-on. Jones marshals the familiar tropes of the genre: talking-heads, dramatic recreations, archival footage; but the cinematic shortcomings ultimately matter little. Littered with the tragic testimonies of the cult survivors, it’s a hugely personal piece of cinema; raw with trauma, emotion, outrage.

CAMERAPERSON

Kristen Johnson has spent her career working camera for documentaries, from Fahrenheit 9/11 to 1971, travelling through war-torn countries (Bosnia, Liberia, Afghanistan) in service of both journalistic and artistic truths. Cameraperson marks a motion-picture memoir, an impressionist essay stitched together from the films that she’s worked on. There’s a few moments of profound first-person testimony — from survivors of war, abuse, and wartime abuse — and intimate scenes shooting her family: a mother with Alzheimer’s, toddler twins curious about the world they’re new to. But, mostly, it’s a scrapbook of off-cuts; a cine-poem built from B-roll culled from the cutting room floor.

Johnson is a cinematographer by trade, but, in making her first feature as sole director, she fashions a film in which the ‘cinematic’ images are few. Cameraperson is not about the shots, but what Johnson had to go through to get them. As we gaze on foreign vistas, we hear her — behind the camera — sneeze, fall over, talk to people, discuss logistics with directors, plot how to steal shots in perilous situations. These moments illuminate the collaborative nature of filmmaking, how documentary often functions as on-the-fly storytelling, and the adventures that come with any shoot. Cameraperson is not without its socio-political currency — the silent shots of places where atrocities occurred linger, eerily — but it’s mostly a work in which footage is indivisible from memory; a portrait of a life lived behind the lens.

AQUARIUS

The maxim ‘you can’t fight progress’ is usually uttered as cold consolation, but sometimes it can be used as a weapon, used to beat back those who dare to try. ‘Progress’, as uttered, is usually interchangeable with capitalism, but it can just as easily apply to colonialism: the victims of its fait accompli those who have cultural heritage on their side, but not cultural capital. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius is a cinematic response to the land-grabbing and development-mania that swept Brazil once it was awarded those twin pinnacles of sporting corporate-money-laundering: the World Cup and the Olympics. Here, Sônia Braga — in a command performance that’s been widely, duly praised — plays a retired music critic (once, apparently, music critics made enough to retire on...) who’s the last remaining tenant in a beachside apartment-block in a tony Recife neighbourhood. Where the others have taken the cash and run, she refuses to be paid off: rationalising that her house holds history, memories, and possessions that no price can be put on.

Though shot in sumptuous wide-screen and filled with scenes evoking 1980s memories, Filho conceived of Aquarius as a ‘siege’ movie. Braga begins the film as an elegant exemplar of the hippy-lioness in winter, her apartment soon turns from for Age-of-Aquarius apotheosis to something resembling a prison. There, she holes up, and readies for a fight, beating back the advances of ambitious Humberto Carrão, the landlord’s grandson, who’s returned from schooling in America with an education in ruthless capitalism. His moves — tradesman starting work in spite of her, porno-shoot orgy staged in the apartment upstairs — are the tropes of neighbour-from-hell comedy, and cast him as simple villain; his moves desperate, his demeanour increasingly exasperated.

Given Filho’s more-radical debut, the masterpiece Neighbouring Sounds, presented one of cinema’s most thoughtful explorations of the themes of private and public space, the simplified morality of this film is a shade disappointing. But, Aquarius isn’t mounted as a complex study of humans navigating the amoral mechanisms of capitalism; is, instead, a spirited work of defiance, a rousing riposte to those who place value only on maximising real-estate prices, not on cultural memory.