Smartly Written & Perfectly Cast - 'Midnight Special' Is A Cinematic Wonder

midnight special

There’s a great moment in Midnight Special in which the film —an on-the-lam chase across the US south— comes to a grinding halt. A breathless car-chase is suddenly stilled by a banked-up row of cars at a police checkpoint, the tension mounting not because the cars are wildly careening through traffic, but because they’re stuck, inching towards their fate. It’s a scene indicative of Jeff Nichols’ fourth feature, in which the director plays with genre; putting his own spin on a sci-fi-ish road-movie that’s openly informed by Steven Spielberg’s classic early films. 

Working with genre elements isn’t new to Nichols: 2007’s Shotgun Stories and 2012’s Mud were both films that camouflaged their gun-clutching, shootout-staging tropes by dint of rural-realist mise-en-scène. Here, he evokes The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and E.T., mounting a thoughtful, emotional spectacle that gives space for otherworldly magic and cinematic wonder. It’s a clear crossover work that’s smartly-written, perfectly-cast, and fabulously-acted; an antidote to the identikit entertainments clogging multiplexes. 

Michael Shannon (the director’s career-long stand-by) plays a dad who, with the help of pal Joel Edgerton, kidnaps his estranged birth-son (Jaeden Lieberher, of St. Vincent and Masters Of Sex), and heads across country, out to rendezvous with the kid’s birth-mother (Kirsten Dunst). By day, they sleep, motel-rooms blacked out with gaffa tape, earmuffs on Lierberher’s ears. By night, they drive on backwoods highways, lights off, cutting silently through the black by aid of night-vision; Lieberher wearing a much more lo-tech pair of swimming goggles, always, over his eyes. 

The kid is both messianic figure and MacGuffin; a source of channelled spirits, government secrets, doomsday prophecies, and potential power that makes him a figure to be prized, pursued, feared. The visions that beam from Liberher’s eyes are like Pulp Fiction’s glowing briefcase, a mirror on whoever’s looking at them, a symbol to suit the person gazing into the light. 

“They think you’re a weapon, the ranch thinks you’re their saviour,” sagely notes Adam Driver’s philosophical CIA agent; the requisite pursuing-party who dares see the kid on his own terms. Others see the alien in our midst —with either fear or reverence— as they want to. At the ranch on which he was raised, a cult has grown around the idea that this boy is a chosen one, members itching to be on the receiving end of one of his spectral visions like a community of junkies. So, their leader (Sam Shepherd) sends a couple of violent goons (Bill Camp, Scott Haze) on his runaway trail, adding an air of genre menace. 

Where Nichols’ best film, 2011’s Take Shelter, staged a paranoia thriller that held its ineffable cards close to its chest, here there is no doubt as to the sci-fi elements that trickle in; you never wondering if Shannon’s driven-dad is perhaps just a little crazy. Instead, it’s a portrait of virtuous dissidence, in which parental sacrifice for their child’s good involves driving through police roadblocks, rounds of gunfire, and enough bulletproof vests to fit a whole family. Whilst it lacks the vérité that’s enlivened his films so far, Nichols succeeds in creating what feels like a whole cinematic world; spinning a weirdly-sweet sci-fi fable on the widescreen canvas of movie-makin’ dreams.

eddie the eagle

British ski-jumper Eddie Edwards was a feelgood novelty-act at the 1988 Olympics, so it’s all too apt that his tale has been turned into a ’80s-style feelgood sports comedy. Director Dexter ‘Spike from Press Gang’ Fletcher indulges in all manner of era stylisations, from a synthy score to a way-’80s typeface. But, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton’s script goes further, happily uncorking every cliché of the sports-movie genre: the rag-tag dreamer who won’t be defeated, the disapproving dad who wants him quit dreaming and take up a trade, the grizzled onetime-champion coach who now nurses a bottle, the good-looking country-clubber blonde villains who sneer at our hero with panto disdain, the starched-shirt officials who play by the book, a back-to-basics training montage set to an inspirational rocker (Hall & Oates!), and a final series of triumphs that serve as sustained climactic I-told-you-sos. 

“I love jumping nearly as much as proving people wrong,” says Taron Egerton, in a titular role where he largely puts on a silly grimace and pushes his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. Who he has to prove wrong is, most of all, that disapproving dad (Keith Allen), the great emotional climax coming when dad, finally, after spending the whole film telling his son he’s hopeless and should give up, says that he’s proud of him. There’s even a duelling disapproving-dad storyline, with his drunken coach (Hugh Jackman) also having a father-figure (his mentor, Christopher fuckin’ Walken!) and another estranged relationship that needs to be patched up. The emotions to such are big, obvious, and over-the-top, but Fletcher delivers his dumptruckload of sentimentality —and all the genre clichés— with such energy and enthusiasm that it’s hard to hate the whole.

a month of sundays

The world of real estate is ripe for comedy: the parasitic nature of the biz, the theatre of the auction, the endless double-speak of property listings. But Matthew Saville —who previously made the local downbeat-crime dramas Noise and Felony— sees the tragedy in it, as well; the way a home is indivisible from a life, a repository of our personal history, and how often property-sales come with the selling of deceased estates. 

In turn, in A Month Of Sundays, Saville attempts to strike a tragicomic tone equal parts sarcastic and sentimental, serving up a tale of a real-estate agent (a hang-dog Anthony LaPaglia) who strikes up a serendipitous friendship with an elderly lady (Julia Blake) he wrong-number calls, and confuses for his recently-deceased mother. It’s essentially a portrait of the departing elderly generation shot through with middle-aged malaise; LaPaglia having an ex-wife (Justine Clarke), a moody teenage son (Indiana Crowther), and a shit-talkin’ boss (John Clarke) pulling him in various directions. At its worst, the film feels contrived and conventional, with borderline-corny coincidences, but the pleasure is in its details: in the characters in the fringes, its TV shows and school plays, the set-dressing of its various properties, even the people in the background.

spanish film festival

The Spanish Film Festival is currently screening nationally, and amidst all the commercial comedies and earnest soap-operas and FC Barcelona branding exercises that dot the program, there are some sure cinematic highlights. 

Surest of all is Pablo Agüero’s Eva Doesn’t Sleep, a pic so great it ended up on the almighty Film Carew Top 30 Films of 2015 countdown. The film is a picaresque starring the dead body of Eva Perón, on a wandering odyssey in the years after her death. Having died —like Christ before her— at 33, Evita is a quasi-religious figure resurrected, three times over, to suit the Argentine political mood. The spectre of Evita is at the centre of a triptych of shadowy, nocturnal moments —bookended by a framing narrative in which Gael García Bernal plays an ascendant, ever-smoking Admiral soliloquysing during the 1976 coup— in which a tender embalmer (Imanol Arias) lovingly tends to her beautiful corpse, Denis Lavant fights shirtless over possession of it, and Daniel Fanego is kidnapped by a crew of Perónista revolutionaries. Eva Doesn’t Sleep is genuinely dark and blackly absurd, and shot by Agüero in a series of long takes that display genuine directorial élan; and comes officially recommended. 

Other Spanish FF picks include another film about Argentine political turmoil, Pablo Trapero’s The Clan. Deep in debt to Scorsese, it’s a swaggering familial crime saga in which the family business is ‘disappearing’ political enemies of the Junta during the peak of the Dirty War. And then there’s My Big Night, another wild, hyper-stylised, chaotic black-comedy from Álex de la Iglesia. Where many of his films play with horror elements, the only horrifying thing here is the vanities and idiocies of show-business. The entire film is set behind the scenes at a shoot for a New Year’s Eve light-entertainment TV special: its wild backstage machinations spiralling into the wicked and absurd; its claustrophobic, artificial realm feeling like it’s teetering on the brink of apocalypse.