Think You Know How 'The Good Liar' Will Go? Then You Definitely Need To Think Again

THE GOOD LIAR

The Good Liar is about liars. And lies. But, like a long-ago Mike Leigh movie — which it resembles in no other way — it’s not just about lies, but secrets. It starts off as a breezy enough lark, but, then, after a third act filled with revelation upon revelation upon revelation, it turns, strangely, towards weightier terrain; straining credulity whilst it strains for prestige picture importance. It’s not just a film about grifting, double-crossing, 'Dick Whitman'-ing, and served cold revenge, but repressed truths and buried history. It’s not some stagey thriller, but out to be a form of cinematic cultural rehabilitation - in the guise of an senior-friendly Sunday afternoon arthouse trifle.

The set-up goes like this: Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, in the ye olden days of 2009, set up dating profiles and end up meeting at a restaurant. It’s soon revealed, to viewers, that McKellen is a career confidence scammer, a foppish dandy grooming his new potential paramour as potential mark. She’s old, widowed, wealthy, and seemingly ripe for the taking-down. “What I deplore most in life is dishonesty,” he says, when we first meet him, in what turns out to be an amusing misdirection. We watch him switching between hopeless-old-duffer, when around Mirren, and meticulous shark, when scamming potential investors out of their cash in an elaborate B-story sting.

The only one who seems put out by this new suitor is Mirren’s grandson, played by Brit-TV pin-up Russell Tovey, who immediately challenges McKellen on his intentions, how quickly he’s horning in. But it doesn’t take much — a few carefully-timed glances from Mirren; or, hell, her position on the poster or the fact that The Good Liar is billed as a “cat-and-mouse game”­ — to get the sense that Mirren knows more than she lets on; and, indeed, the game may be afoot.

It’s hard to go into too much detail was acknowledging Spoiler Culture. Especially given that one of the few minor pleasures of The Good Liar are just how grand — read: over-the-top — the revelations are when they come, delivered with final act showstopping speeches and got-ya flashbacks and very little sense of restraint or realism.

The major pleasure of the pic is, of course, the presence of two icons of British cinema, each delighting in the devilish details of their on-screen deceits. They’re playing characters who are playing characters, so of course there’s layers to what they’re doing; each legendary thesp doing a lot with simple expression. But that work stands in contrast with the final act, which, well, is really just a lot. Can’t say anymore, really. But if you want to talk about _______________, I’m here to chat.

★★1/2

THE TWO POPES

Early in The Two Popes — whose title is as functional and uninspired as The Young Pope or The New Pope — the old, grey-haired men of the Catholic Church hierarchy are sequestered deep in a “beautiful but empty” palace in the heart of the Vatican. A new pope must be elected, and for all the arcane ritual — Keno-esque ball drawing, needles and thread, wicker baskets, decisions conveyed by coloured smoke — this is really, just a glorified committee meeting. What’s crazy is that this scene is shot in some gonzo fashion, with jittery close-ups and impressionist imagery and hyperactive editing. Why, your old pal Film Carew wondered, is this being delivered like it’s a Scorsese montage of guns and coke?

The answer is that the director is Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian filmmaker who found fame impersonating Scorsese with 2002’s City Of God. Since then, Meirelles has made an earnest prestige picture (2005’s The Constant Gardener), a horribly-misjudged Saramago adaptation (2008’s Blindness), and a terrible interrelated-stories ensemble movie (2011’s 360). None of which suggests he’s the man for this job: making a film about a meeting between, um, two popes. It’s a conversation piece, based on a stage play; two facts that evidently leave Meirelles restless and fidgety.

What results is a weird, tonally-off flick that tries, sincerely, to be a lot of things. It’s a buddy comedy — they’re the Original Odd Couple! — about hardliner Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) and progressive future-Pope-Francis Cardinal Begoglio (Jonathan Pryce) discussing a transfer of power whilst eating pizza and watching soccer and listening to The Beatles. It’s an exploration of Catholicism in the 21st-century (Meirelles is a Catholic), what it means to uphold decadent tradition whilst grappling with the horrors perpetrated by the institution. It’s, in flashback’d stretches, a tense drama about Argentina’s Dirty War, and the Church’s culpability/collaboration with the dictatorial government. And it’s a kind of sports movie, not just in the on-stage ‘boxing match’ between two old men, sparring in conversation, but in how that echoes outwards: Meirelles redeploying real news footage and on-the-street vox-pops and shots of cheering, flag-waving crowds, all awaiting the appointment of a new pontiff.

It’s the people on the streets — many of whom seem like supporters, barracking for their favourite prize fighter — that bring this story back to reality; take its twee if-erratically-directed conversation piece into the contemporary conversation. When someone calls Pope Benedict a “Nazi”, they touch on something the film otherwise doesn’t dare. The horrors of institutional cover-ups and serial sexual predation are referred to in sweeping generalisations. As is much of the nitty gritty, the real politics of the thing. It’s a movie filled with platitudes, which suits its intent; which seems to be rehabilitating the image of the Catholic Church. To add to the weird tone, it’s genuinely strange to see — especially on the heels of François Ozon’s By The Grace Of God — a movie daring to depict Catholicism with an air of celebration, not critique.

★★

WILD GOOSE LAKE

After his 2014 breakout Black Coal, Thin Ice, Diao Yinan evidently figured he was onto a good thing. After directing one neon-streaked, neo-noir set against the nocturnal underbelly of modern China, here’s another one. And one that reunites him with the stars of his previous pic, Liao Fan and Gwei Lun-mei. Where Black Coal, Thin Ice was a surprising commercial success in China — Diao having hoped he could smuggle socio-political sentiments into an accessible format — The Wild Goose Lake feels goosed for even more accessibility.

Meaning, basically: sure, it’s a super-stylised neo-noir of wild colours and wry humour, but when it comes time for its action-movie-esque set pieces, they feel far more action movie-like: there’s endless men on motorcycles, chasing this way and that; gunfire; bloodied wounds; crosses and double-cross and police sting operations; footchases and escapes and hideouts; and, oh, yeah, a man impaled with an umbrella that ends up splattered in blood.

Its best set-piece comes when Lun-mei, playing the star-crossed lover of a criminal on-the-run (Hu Ge), has arranged a covert meeting at an outdoor marketplace. She wanders amongst the crowd, circling around a troupe of line dancers wearing glowing neon shoes (they’re dancing, notably, to Ra Ra Rasputin and Dschinghis Khan, twin disco tracks making violent empire building accessible). As Lun-mei glides through bright splashes of colour and plunging blackness — essentially the movie’s palette throughout — tension slowly gathers. Until suddenly a skirmish breaks out, and the line dancers reveal themselves to be undercover police, and people scatter this way and that.

Balanced against the action is a sense of genuine romance, which taps into Wong Kar-wai’s early cinematic adventures in crime (and colour, mood, cine-poetry). And Diao again proves himself as someone depicting contemporary China in visionary ways; his visual surrealism (there’s a sound design drenched scene hiding out in a zoo after dark, deliberate blurring of the lines between advertised high-rises and actual buildings, a scene in a distorted hall of mirrors) conveying just how strange modern life in the mega-nation is. “There’s a lot going on in China these days, some of it more absurd than anything you might find in a novel or film,” Diao said, upon the release of Black Coal, Thin Ice. With that film, his vision was striking. With The Wild Goose Lake, it’s familiar.

★★★1/2