Somehow The New Morrissey Biopic Is The Year's Most Boring Film

england is mine

Ten minutes before the end of England Is Mine, Johnny Marr shows up. We’ve spent 80 uninspiring mins hanging around in the miserable Manchester of the late-’70s with mopey, misunderstood, maladjusted Morrissey —almost entirely in his sexless bedroom— but, here, finally, is the dramatic epoch: the Lennon-meets-McCartney moment for jangle-pop legends The Smiths. Unfortunately, Mark Gill’s portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man ends before Morrissey/Marr play a note together, with only the implication of future glories. The whole film is, in such, cinematic tease. Or, more charitably, perhaps England Is Mine —screening nationally at the British Film Festival— plays like the kind-of-dull first episode in a BBC mini-series, in which all the good stuff is left ’til subsequent instalments. 

It also makes England Is Mine akin to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s similarly-pitched Brit-musician biopic Nowhere Boy. There, there’s a literal Lennon-meets-McCartney moment, the tortured John finally, near close, meeting a boy named Paul. Whilst also not particularly good, Nowhere Boy was, at least, a strange psychosexual portrait of a kid who wanted to fuck his mum —shot through with the life-imitates-art fact its teen lead was falling for its old-as-his-mother director— which is, you’ll have to admit, a particularly ripe dramatic premise. The dramatic premise of England Is Mine? That Morrissey spent pent-up years in his bedroom, a frustrated genius in quotidian pre-fame; too bookish to branch out, too crippled with anxiety to seize the day. If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that shyness is nice, but shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to. 

If it feels cheap to quote Morrissey lyrics in reviewing England Is Mine, Gill pulls the same trick, dramatically. His film is filled with nods to Smiths songs, his script a scrapbook patchwork in which influences and events are stitched together to artfully allude to future jams. There’s posters of James Dean and Oscar Wilde on his walls, a disapproving father and a jerk of a boss (“why can’t you be more like everybody else?” the latter literally says), a book about the Moors Murders held in his hands, a friend who dies. 

There’s all these leaden references to known heroes and sung-about subjects because there’s no actual Smiths songs. Hell, there’s only one scene where the man playing Moz, Jack Lowden (seen recently golfing up a storm in Tommy’s Honour and piloting a plane in Dunkirk), actually sings aloud. 48 minutes in, an on-stage cover of the Shangri-Las’ Give Him A Great Big Kiss means that, for a brief, pleasing moment, we get to revel in some great Moz karaoke, the preserved pronouns and tragic teen-jukebox-jam angst ably suggesting the queer icon its singer is to become. The rest of the time we just see this young Morrissey scribbling in a notebook, sitting down at a typewriter, scrunching up pieces of paper and throwing them on the floor (yes, that old cliché!), and doing lots of frowning. 

This is because England Is Mine is an unofficial biopic; meaning, no Smiths songs. It evidently has only a modest budget behind it, too, if we’re to go by the moments a young Moz goes to shows by the Sex Pistols and Patti Smith, and cheaper-to-license oldies are played over the top. When he’s at the former gig, taking notes at the back, the effect is to make the infamous Lesser Trades Hall show —the most influential gig in post-punk history— utterly banal, which takes some doing. 

The fact that this is an unofficial portrait of Morrissey shouldn’t have been a death sentence. In 2014’s great showdown of duelling YSL biopics, Jalil Lespert’s official film, Yves Saint Laurent, felt like airbrushed Oscarbait, a work of corporate brand-management out to reassert peddled mythos; whereas Bertrand Bonello’s bootleg handbag, Saint Laurent, used its unofficial status as a creative spur, mounting something more audacious and obnoxious. Instead of dashing madly through time or dreaming wild interpretations from Morrissey’s music, Gill metes out a miserly, heavens-knows-it’s-miserable tale, a straight-line story in both narrative and construction, delivered at a chronological plod. Its lack of drama, verve, and storytelling isn’t due to the lack of authorised Smiths songs on the soundtrack, just a lack of ambition. 

It goes like this: Moz is a sad prick in sad industrial town full of dudes who want to headbutt him and girls who say things like “yer voice is sort of funny, like, posh!” His mum and dad fight, he’s forced to get a shitty office job (ironic use of Shostakovich ahoy!), and his only solace comes in writing bitter letters to the NME. He meets Linder Sterling, they become friends, then she leaves town. He plays one gig, it’s great, then that band ends. He gets depressed, takes Valium, and, befitting sad-times clichés in movies, the rain falls hard on a humdrum town, usually trickling down the window whilst Moz lays curled in bed. Then Johnny, finally, arrives. In and around these events, we mostly just hang out in his room; Gill lovingly shooting close-ups of styluses descending on spinning wax or cassettes being slid into slots, but not really knowing what else to do. It’s boring, and, worst of all, makes Morrissey himself seem boring; there’s not a laugh to be had, here, with none of the black humour of Smiths lyrics making it into the script. 

One wonders, then, who is this film for? Smiths fans will surely roll their eyes at something so entry-level. After the Mozipedia turned obsessive Morrissey trivia into a veritable phone-book, and Morrissey’s just-as-weighty Autobiography was so full of fastidious detail that readers know exactly what was on TV in Manchester in the ’60s, there’s precious little for fans to glean from England Is Mine; Gill having no fresh insights into his subject, no squirrely obsessions of his own. 

If, then, the film is for neophytes, what are they to take from a film about Morrissey that doesn’t feature his music? That shows him singing only one song, a cover? That never has one of history’s most outspoken, provocative vegetarians never even speak of animal slaughter? England Is Mine operates from the position that its subject is a known quantity, his genius undeniable. It never works to forward that idea, never seeks to show —aside from some moments of over-the-typewriter frustration or inspiration— how a legend was made. It’s a before-they-were-famous film that does little to justify its own existence. More Morrissey biopics will surely arrive, in the coming years, on cinema screens; in authoring the first one, Gill has set a very low bar for future flicks to clear.

the snowman

The Snowman is based on some dad-book private-dick franchise, which means you can pretty much write the story before you hit the cinema. In a snowy Scandi-noir locale, women are being killed, and the only one who can piece the sinister, web-of-breadcrumbs clues together is a drunken, divorced, down-on-his-luck detective; a self-destructive sleuth who becomes obsessed with the case. As the bodies pile up, the killer and the cop draw ever closer (“He was watching us the whole time!”), uncovering a conspiracy involving one of the town’s most powerful men. And, this time, it’s personal! 

In most cases, all this would be inoffensive end-of-the-multiplex dreck; essentially playing to fans of the genre —on both page and screen— who harbour the lowest of expectations. Except, those associated with making The Snowman mean that the film has to answer to expectations. It’s directed by Tomas Alfredsson, returning six years after his modern-day spy-movie classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; though Alfredsson’s real career highlight is his sad-teen-vampire masterwork Let The Right One In. The screenplay was written by Peter Straughan (who adapted Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and Hossein Amini (who wrote Drive). The cinematographer is lauded Australian lensman Dion Beebe. Hell, even the editor is longtime Scorsese collaborateur Thelma Schoonmaker. 

And then there’s the cast. The grizzled cop is Michael Fassbender, who, in pure cheque-cashing form, reminds you that his hunger in Hunger was almost a decade ago. His ex-lover is Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose new LP is incredible. His just-as-obsessive partner is Rebecca Ferguson. The powerful man is J.K. Simmons. Creepy-ass David Dencik, fresh off stealing every scene he’s in in Top Of The Lake: China Girl, shows up. So do Chloë Sevigny and Toby Jones, for some reason, in tiny and not-particularly-interesting roles. And then there’s Val Kilmer, who —as is his current way— goes off the deep-end in a ridiculous denture in his turn as an even-drunker, even-more-down-on-his-luck, even-more-obsessed detective. 

That all this combined talent can’t even lift The Snowman within sniffing distance of ‘functional mediocrity’ is, surely, a sad indictment of the source text. Jo Nesbø’s ‘Harry Hole’ detective series, promotional materials tell me, has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. With inbuilt brand-recognition like that, you can see why a to-screen adaptation was inevitable. Given how deeply, deeply stupid the story here is —the title comes because the serial killer BUILDS A FUCKING SNOWMAN at the site of all his killings— you can guess that the source text was something that needed to be overcome more than respected. The problem, beyond shitty writing, seems to be a misallocation of talent, and a misreading of tone. The Snowman would’ve played better as trashy, silly, lurid, and knowing; all its haggard tropes strung together with a sense of self-parody. Instead, Alfredsson delivers a grim, sombre, snow-blanketed study in genre-movie-gone-wrong, this tone totally mismatched to the tale’s parade of clichés.

the meyerowitz stories (new & selected)

As someone who’s long considered Adam Sandler some regrettable, untreatable form of cinematic STD, this is a hard thing to say: Sandler is incredible in The Meyerowitz Stories (New & Selected). Sure, Sandler has plenty of plum roles in his past, but even films like Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People felt like meta-Sandler films, the roles he played knowing commentaries on the familiar caricature of Hollywood’s angry clown. Here, in the latest film for Noah Baumbach, he’s actually given a role that’s no work of, or commentary on, Sandlerism. Instead, he plays a long-time stay-at-home dad who, having done an amazing job raising a thoughtful, responsible, considerate daughter through high-school (Grace Van Patten), is now dealing not just with a sudden loss of his daily identity, but the time and space to recognise all his failures. No longer being able to focus his attentions on someone else —and to take pride and a secretly-egotistical sense of accomplishment from this— he’s forced to take a look at himself, take stock of his own life. 

This comes when a trio of scattered siblings —Sandler, Ben Stiller, Elizabeth Marvel— are drawn back into the orbit of their old man, who’s played by Dustin Hoffman. An abrasive, egomaniacal sculptor, he’s forever grinding axes, always slighted, always annoyed at a world that hasn’t laid down for him. His conversation is less dialogue, more monologue; the soliloquys he delivers for his children each reasserting his disappointments in them. It’s a film about growing up in the shadow of a patriarch, struggling with reconciling your emotions for someone who made your life hell (“if he isn’t a great artist,” Sandler says, “that means he was just a prick”). It’s a film about how the old wounds of family-dynamic never really heal, and, even as adults, siblings fall back into old roles. And, it features a bunch of characters talking over each other, yelling at each other, blaming each other. 

Baumbach’s script is sharp and tight; coming told in separate episodes that shift perspective, show a sense of humanity that contrasts with the bitter, oft-misanthropic people at is centre. After delivering lighter films —the nouvelle-vague-ish Frances Ha, the failed generational satire While We’re Young, the screwball lark Mistress America— here Baumbach returns to studying the savage emotions and cruel hostilities of the family, the tone reminiscent of The Squid & The Whale and Margot At The Wedding. The fact that he made the film for Netflix, and that it's bypassing cinemas, is no suggestion that this is one of his lesser works. The Meyerowitz Stories (New & Selected) is, instead, one of Baumbach’s best.

ingrid goes west

It's the Instagram black-comedy that's secretly a psychological thriller; Single White Female rewritten for the age of influencers. Ingrid Goes West finds Aubrey Plaza as a lonely, evidently-unhinged 20-something reeling from the death of her mother. Sitting on a pile of inheritance, she's waiting for a sign with what to do with her life. Troublingly, it arrives in a glossy-mag puff-piece called “meet your new girl crush”, which introduces Elizabeth Olsen’s Instagram starlet —bio: “Treasure Hunter. Castle Builder. Proud Angeleno”— and her obsessively-manicured, well-lit, online-performative life of sunkissed beaches, decadent brunches, and inane contemporary art. 

Like so many frontiersman searching for a new life, and a new identity, Plaza heads West, moving into Olsen's neighbourhood, stalking all her ’grammed haunts. Eventually, she dognaps her pooch then returns it to get an ‘in’; brought into the life of Olsen and her bearded, man-bunned pseudo-intellectual squeeze, Wyatt Russell, getting to see how the other half lives. Our anti-heroine spins a web of lies, eventually roping in her vaping, Batman-obsessed, Laker-bro landlord O’Shea Jackson, Jr to be her insta-boyfriend. This web-of-lies will eventually ensnare Plaza, in cringe-worthy comedy and excruciating public humiliation, but Ingrid Goes West is anything but a morality tale. 

Director Matt Spicer and co-writer David Branson Smith know that the key to any psychological thriller is a study of human psychology. And, so, once they get past the easy gags about online-branding and captioned banality (“hashtag” and “winking-face emoji” said aloud will always sound stupid, be funny), they use their characters to explore this strange, omnipresent modern-day phenomenon. Why do people get so much validation from posting things on line? Who is the kind of person who turns their entire life into a branding exercise? Who is drawn in by this performative lifestyle-porn, is an easy mark for a peddled representation of the good life? It’s a creepy picture of internet-age entitlement and monster-making, a terrifying take on modern-day stalkery, and, ultimately, a sad portrayal of the yawning chasm of desperate neediness that dwells at the heart of this entire quasi-industry.

brigsby bear

Brigsby Bear may be the most unexpectedly-beautiful film of the year. Armed with a sitcom premise and a fetish for archaic-’80s-technology/hokey-’80s-kids-shows, it will appear, to many, as if director Dave McCary and writer/star Kyle Mooney are delivering a ‘hipster’ film; something big on VHS-wobbles and attendant irony. Yet, what they have fashioned takes the idea of pop-cultural nostalgia and mines out the ache at its heart. It’s, essentially, a study of lost-innocence; people pining for the TV shows of their youth usually yearning for a more-innocent time, to return to somewhere safe and reassuring. 

This is the narrative impetus of Brigsby Bear. Mooney plays a grown-man safely ensconced in suspended-adolescence, but there’s a wrinkle: he’s been raised in a Dogtooth-esque enclave by his parents (Jane Adams and Mark fucking Hamill), where reality has been perverted and a self-fashioned mythology has been taught. In turns out, this pair abducted him when he was a baby, and have finally been found out; and, so, suddenly, our boy’s bubble is soon burst, and all the terrors of the real world are thrust upon him. Mooney takes the sitcom-ish set-up of the big-kid to extremes both comic and emotional; his boyish enthusiasm infectious, his sense of wonder and astonishment at new experiences unexpectedly effecting. 

But, in the face of all this new stimulus, he yearns to return to something familiar, a reminder of his old ‘home’, a non-threatening pop-cultural artefact. It’s Brigsby Bear, the TV-show-within-the-film. When we meet Mooney, he lives in a bedroom strewn with Brigsby posters, doona-covers, and paraphernalia, and obsesses over theories of what the galaxial adventures could really mean; theories that involve casual quantum physics as well as TV-show mythos. The show, it turns out, was made for him entirely by his father, a piece of ongoing propaganda used to impart totalitarian morals (“trust only the familial unit”; “curiosity is an unnatural emotion”; “only touch your penis twice a day”). 

With no new episodes to watch, Mooney sets out to finish the story himself, to make his own Brigsby Bear movie. This, too, sounds like it could be mined for cutesy making-a-shitty-movie gags, but Mooney and McCary find the deeper themes here, too. It’s a shrine to artmaking-as-therapy and outsider-art; creation a way for scarred, flawed, strange people to make sense of the world, find their place in it, and play out emotions and psychological states beyond their ken. It evokes classic outsider-art figures like Henry Darger and Daniel Johnston, but, also, their modern-day equivalents: the people using YouTube as desperate outlet. There’s real empathy, here, for these forms of expression, Brigsby Bear able to be read as valentine to the humans behind the memes.

the untamed

What the tastefully-suggestive trailer of The Untamed, below, only artfully alludes to is the thing that’s getting people to see it, and for which it’s already infamous: Squid Sex! In Amit Escalante’s sometimes-freaky fourth feature, tentacle-hentai is given a psychological art-movie spin, with shades of both body-horror and melodrama. An asteroid crash-lands in remote Mexico, bringing with it a creature that can deliver unimaginable pleasure, filling every human orifice with its glistening appendages, those on the receiving end the most willing of victims. There’s vague danger hinted at for those who go too often, or not with the requisite spirit of equanimity; or maybe just, like all wild creatures, ol’ Squidward is unpredictable, capable of savage violence as well as savage love. 

This creature is kept locked in a darkened woodshed, that’s somewhere between the uncle’s bondage dungeon in The Handmaiden and Scar-Jo’s interstellar-flesh-harvesting psychedelic-sex-garage in Under The Skin. The mom-and-pop who tend to the creature no longer partake, so Simone Bucio serves as a kind of squid pimp, her ridiculously-good-looking looks their own form of sexual solicitation. She recruits the twink doctor (Eden Villavecencio) who treats her own gouged squid-wound. Doc is carrying out an affair with his brother-in-law (Jesús Meza), a macho prick deep in denial (and/or the closet), who’s off fucking with bro while wife Ruth Ramos tends to their kids, her sexual dissatisfaction mounting. 

When Escalante commits to his cock-eyed conceit, The Untamed has real teeth; this a film about the contemporary appetite for boundless pleasure, the human need for sex, and the self-destructive things people will do for satisfaction in either case. “What’s there in the cabin is our primitive side,” weightily intones the squid’s finders-keepers owner; this film about how primitive impulses still govern human actions, make us irrational. The scenes in which a new pure-pleasure-seeker tiptoes gently down the primrose path towards the shadowy cabin-in-the-woods are a delight. Yet, otherwise, things are less delightful. Evoking Under The Skin is an unflattering comparison, shining a light on how mediocre all the non-squid-fucking bits of The Untamed are. Every scene where Meza —mid-villainous-character-arc— explodes with masculine rage feel like they’ve been beamed in from some other, worse film. In keeping with the theme, though, his anger arises when his sexual satisfaction is suddenly cut off. Out of everyone herein, he’s the most in need of a good old-fashioned squid-fucking.

the midwife

Catherine Frot meets Catherine Deneuve in The Midwife, a bourgeois French arthouse drama that coasts on the back of its stars, even throwing the rough-hewn charm of Olivier Gourmet into the mix. Provost put himself on the cinematic map with a pair of period-piece portraits of artists, 2008's Séraphine and 2013's Violette; the tragic heroine, of each, women-before-their-time, whose work was maligned and sanity questioned. Each was also a stern, considered, careful picture, which makes it all the more disappointing that Provost has, now, turned to such a piece of non-threatening crowd-pleasery. 

Frot is an uptight midwife —so many great scenes of childbirth, herein, amidst the standard dramatics— beholden to a solitary life of routine. Into her life blows Deneuve, a woman she last saw in her childhood, a former girlfriend of her troubled, long-dead father, who's lived a life of boozy excess, and wouldn't roll out of bed if she weren't bedecked in full make-up, jewellery, and haute couture. The old glamour-puss has reappeared due to a nascent cancer diagnosis; a narrative spur that demands old wounds be reopened, and closure be found. And, so, these two icons of the French screen —who bring gravity and grace to roles that don’t demand such— face-off in the oldest comic conceit known to sitcom: they’re the original odd couple!

band aid

Band Aid’s title wears its comic premise in the double-meaning-blessed title. Writer/director Zoe Lister-Jones and Adam Pally play a husband-and-wife pair who, having devolved into a relationship of constant fighting, decide on an unexpected form of couples-therapy: start a garage-band. Arguments are made songs; their first set of jams culled from their Top 12 Fights Of All Time. This project provides an outlet for their frustrations, and a new focus on collaboration; and with their creepy neighour (Fred Armisen) on the drums, there’s hopes that their marriage can be saved. 

Band Aid —playing, locally, at the Jewish International Film Festival— feels like a rare motion-picture , in this day-and-age, because its milieu is now so associated with television. Its portrait of Los Angelenos in their 30s, working shitty jobs, old artistic dreams dead and buried, friends having kids, and everyone taking drugs is the kind of mise-en-scène seen in countless small-screen dramadies filled with toxic personalities. But, there’s a charm to seeing its single idea play out in a single setting; dramatic and comic potential mined in 90 swift minutes equal parts cutesy and stinging.