Spielberg's 30th Film 'The BFG' Is A Sweet Spell

the bfg

Steven Spielberg doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice to direct a live-action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. After all, d’you need the director of Schindler’s List to render a story whose climax comes when the Queen of England lets loose a whopping ‘whizzpopper’? But there Señor Spielbergo is, directing his 30th film, bringing his trademark sense of scale and awe to a beloved kid’s-book tale big on wide-eyed imagination and whizzpoppers both.

It begins —as did last year’s magnificent Bridge Of Spies— in silence, with an auteurist tracking shot silently gliding along the Thames, then up the cobblestone streets of an imagined old-timey England where people say things like “you’re bladdered”. It’s here that its lonesome orphan, Ruby Barnhill, will be rescued from her Dickensian suffering by the pic’s titular Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance, mo-capped). The scenes in which the giant strides through town, girl hidden under a blanket, are filled with due detail, big and small: the billowing wheeze of the giant’s breath and the flutter of fabric thrumming in the wind.

He hauls her off to Giant Country, which at its most simplistic is a kind of schoolboy’s nightmare writ extra-large; where, amongst the giants, anti-intellectualist bullies terrorise our hero for his kindly status (and also delight in eating humans). The BFG, instead, gifts humans with dreams; blowing them from a, um, magic flute in through their windows at night. He captures dreams in an upside-down dreamworld located in the reflection of a stilled pool; where dreams drip like water and dance like fireflies; gaseous electric sprites that, once netted like butterflies, are kept in jars, ready to be gifted unto the world.

These sequences are the film’s most delightful, and most Spielbergian, using his favourite device of pure light. And, for the filmmaker, there’s likely some self-identification in the tale of a collector of dreams, disseminating his magic unto the grateful children of the world. In these moments, Spielberg locates the magic in fairy-tale and image, and weaves a sweet spell. He doesn’t fair quite as well in keeping to the metre of Dahl’s effervescent nonsense, nor in capturing the savage grotesqueries of the tale (and those Quentin Blake line-drawings, of course), nor in revelling in the childish delight of crashing Buckingham Palace and setting it alight with a storm of farts.

maggie's plan

In Maggie’s Plan, Ethan Hawke plays a writer whose draft-in-progress is described, by Greta Gerwig, as “screwball surrealism”. That phrase, isolated in black-and-white, feels more evocative of, say, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees than the fifth film for Rebecca Miller, whose work thus far has shown a tendency towards domestic melodrama and grandstanding revelation. But there is a charming sense of screwball at play in Maggie’s Plan, which is easily Miller’s most impressive film yet.

Here, Gerwig plays the titular character; who, though she may be single and neurotic, isn’t the usual Gerwigian flibbertigibbet. She’s, instead, a pragmatist, an organiser, a mediator; someone whom, from her childhood through to her career as a college arts-career advisor (where she’s, symbolically, a human liaison between art and commerce), has concerned herself with others.

At the usual what-I’m-doing-with-my-life epoch for any rom-com dame, she tackles the turn into her 30s with due pragmatism: deciding to have a child by herself, with math-savant turned hippy pickle-maker Travis Fimmel (showing a delightful comic touch after his dire Warcraft sword-swingin’) providing the sperm. This, initially, seems to be the plan of the title, but after Gerwig ends up in a romantic entanglement with rumpled academic Ethan Hawke, her plan ends up being something part Austen heroine, part sitcom farce: after breaking up their marriage, she soon schemes to get Hawke back together again with his ex-wife, Julianne Moore.

It sounds like the stuff of contrived comic shenanigans, but Miller makes all the scheming play with a kind of logic, and features characters reacting to such shameless manipulation with due disbelief, outrage, horror. Unlike so many romantic comedies, Maggie’s Plan endeavours to inhabit real emotional space; even as Moore’s character, a glowering Danish anthropologist, is touched with gestures of theatre and caricature. There’s a personal quality to the playful, satirical depictions of working writers, highbrow academia, and literary pretension. Miller’s father is the famous playwright Arthur Miller, and she, herself, is also a novelist; meaning that, when she depicts Hawke’s turn towards novel-writing as an exercise in self-centredness, there’s both warmth and snark.

The novel he’s penning is —whether screwball surrealist or not— spoken of as a mirror on the story, but Miller never rams home her point. Art imitates life and life imitates art; experiences become stories, and people recount their experiences as if stories. And, sometimes, they try and change their own narratives; to come up with a shameless plan is its own act of audacious creation.

goldstone

The word ‘sequel’ should be out of place in describing Goldstone, Ivan Sen’s three-years-on successor to his profound policier Mystery Road. Sequels are products of crass commercialisation and monetisation, and that doesn’t fit the bill, here; this just another story in which the same character, Aaron Pedersen’s indigenous detective Jay Swan, is drawn into another investigation into the dark heart of a stolen continent.

Yet, Goldstone feels like a sequel: a film that tells essentially the same story to diminishing returns; where all its strongest elements —the socio-political parable in its investigation; the eye-of-god overheads; unseen wild dogs as symbolic motif; a long-range Western-shootout over the scorched outback— were established last time around. Where Pedersen was, in Mystery Road, a man caught between words —a turncoat to aboriginal locals, but never welcomed amongst the ranks of white cops— here, he’s wholly outsider. He’s more a figure from a Western: a man, tortured by a dark past, who blows into a one-horse-town, and upsets the status quo.

The titular township —where every building is a portable, nothing permanent— is a speck on the map in the middle of a stretch of blighted desert; where the only game in town is the local open-cut mine. “We keep this country in business,” says sneering David Wenham, an officious prick in stubbies and knee-socks. He’s in bed with the local mayor, Jacki Weaver, who hides her cold-hearted scheming behind a retro-housewife façade (“I’m just an old woman who likes to bake pies,” she blithely smiles, with near-Shakespearean villainy). Like all frontiersmen, they’ve arrived at the end of civilisation by following the trail of money. And, now in positions of power, they reason that billions of dollars weigh more than the lives of indigenous locals, or the Chinese sex-workers flown in to serve the local miners; capitalist logic duly taken to inhuman ends.

Sen once again attempts to use genre as mechanism to explore weighty socio-political themes; and the blank canvas of the middle-of-nowhere, Far-Western-Queensland setting offers him a chance to make the symbols more extreme. Amongst the straightforward critiques of corporate land-grabs and multinational human trafficking, there’s evocations of the stolen generation, the dark history of colonialism. But the film lacks the tautness of Mystery Road in both script and atmosphere; its procedural never gathering a sense of momentum, its thriller machinations never creating the appropriate sense of suffocating unease. Were it a film that could be seen in isolation, its virtues might shine brighter. But as it is, it’s ultimately just another sequel: a second movie not as good as the first one.

the measure of a man

The Measure Of A Man begins where so many social-realist films do: with a factory worker fired, a whole career of skilled toil evaporating in an instant. In Stéphane Brizé’s fantastic film, we’re lucky enough to have this worker played by Vincent Lindon, the oh-so-French leading man who can wear a lifetime of setbacks in the worn lines of his expressive face. Here, he plays a man who largely takes his downsizing —and the humiliating fall into unemployment’s mandatory job-application-classes— with a diffident shrug; Lindon doing distant sadness, wounded pride, and wearied sighs with aplomb.

Eventually, he finds a new job, as a security guard at a big-box department store. At first, he’s tasked only with looking out for shoplifters on the ground, but soon he ascends to the CCTV room, watching on everyone under the store’s roof like an omniscient God. There, he’s invited to police his co-workers; making sure they’re not slacking off, or scanning other people’s purchases onto their own rewards card. He’s like an informer in a surveillance state, a collaborator with the ruling class, ratting out his fellow workers. Instead of finding self-worth in his new position of employ, there’s only a constant, quotidian moral quandary; Brizé quietly observing the ideological compromises demanded by capitalism.