Movie Review: Rocketman (2019)

A musical biographical drama with fantasy elements, Rocketman captures Elton John's artistry and the gap between massive public acclaim and dark personal demons.

Dressed in an outlandish devil/angel combo performance outfit, Elton John (Taron Egerton) enters a treatment centre therapy group and admits to being an alcoholic and addicted to drugs, sex and shopping. In flashback Reggie Dwight's life story is revealed, starting with a childhood in England where he felt unloved by his cold father Stanley (Steven Mackintosh) and disinterested mother Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), but supported by grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones).

Reggie's talent on the piano grants him entry to the Royal Academy of Music, and he eventually backs-up touring artists from the US. He adopts the name Elton John and gradually accepts he is gay. A record company executive connects Elton with lyricist Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), and their music writing partnership leads to unimagined global success. John starts a romance with business manager John Reid (Richard Madden), but as the singer desperately searches for true love and personal fulfillment, he falls into a miserable life of empty excess.

On-stage flamboyance is a cloak to hide deep-seated insecurity, and untold riches, fame, fortune and debauchery are no replacement for true love. Such is the story Sir Elton John wants to tell, and he gets to shape his legacy as the film's executive producer. Written by Lee Hall and directed by Dexter Fletcher, Rocketman is a vivid biography using John's music in no particular sequence to underline his emotional state of mind at key milestones, and adding effective fantasy elements to convey the insanity of the pop star life.

Taron Egerton takes on both acting and singing duties, and is sparkling in both contexts. Fletcher keeps the songs short and in service of the plot, and the editing is rational and coherent, with some excellent long and fluid takes to capture the dynamism of the accompanying dancers and crowds.

In adopting the eternal search for love and belonging as a central theme, Hall does not hold back in conveying John's parents as a nightmare of uncomfortable incompatibility with a child's need for affection. And so Elton goes looking for partners of either sex to fill the gap in his soul. Taupin emerges as his spiritual brother and creative partner, while Reid is the passionate but manipulative devil-lover in a business suit offering false fondness.

Meanwhile Elton's vulnerability goes hiding behind increasingly extravagant outfits, the performer wowing the crowd on the outside as he privately sinks deeper into despair.

Once John performs his first Los Angeles show Rocketman zooms quickly through the artist's upward trajectory, and then spends a hefty portion of its two hours wallowing in the unhappy and filthy rich life consumed by the decadence of sex, drugs, and booze. Fletcher almost trips towards self-pitying drama, but Taupin's timely interventions in John's life always help move things along towards more promising outcomes.

Rocketman chronicles the quest for love on and off the stage, a journey where misery accompanied artistic triumph on a most tempestuous journey.

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Movie Review: 50/50 (2011)

A dramedy about friendship, 50/50 deploys a deft touch to explore the disruptive impacts of a cancer diagnosis.

In Seattle, Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a laid-back twentysomething working for public radio. He is in a tepid relationship with Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), and best friends with the jovial Kyle (Seth Rogen). Seeking relief from unexplained back pain, Adam is diagnosed with a massive cancerous tumour, and given a 50/50 chance of surviving. His mother Diane (Anjelica Huston) is naturally frazzled.

Adam starts chemotherapy and befriends fellow cancer patients Mitch (Matt Frewer) and Alan (Philip Baker Hall), as well as young and inexperienced therapist Katherine (Anna Kendrick). Rachael tries to be supportive but struggles to cope, while Kyle does his best to keep his best friend's spirits up. Adam maintains his steady emotional state, but his life nevertheless fundamentally changes.

Finding flashes of genuine humour in a film about the devastating effects of cancer is never easy, but 50/50 pulls off the neat trick almost effortlessly. Thanks to pitch perfect performances from Gordon-Levitt and Rogen, the film seeks the warm foundations of friendship, and as Adam's condition worsens, Kyle's presence and determination to be there for his friend emerges as a smiling rock on which an admirable film is built. The Vancouver and Seattle locations add a fresh, rain-cleansed aesthetic.

Director Jonathan Levine, working from Will Reiser's sparkling script, goes looking for the playfulness that helps maintain sanity on the margins of the disease. Adam shaves his hair using Kyle's never-washed body trimmer. Kyle never misses an opportunity to chase women, and encourages Adam to play his ailment as a pick up line when the relationship with Rachael flounders. Katherine knows all the therapy lingo but has no experience in how to use it, and the charming Anna Kendrick perfectly tries too hard and says the wrong thing at almost every opportunity.

And even the secondary characters in Adam's orbit contribute to both the drama and the humour. Mom Diane is already dealing with a husband in docile dementia, and now has to gather up the courage to confront her son's sickness. The effort from both mother and son to meaningfully connect resonates as a worthy sub-plot. Similarly, Adam's unexpected friendship with the elderly Mitch and Alan exposes him to father figures confronting cancer with dignity and no shortage of impishness.

Despite the wit and talent on display some scenes do land in mundane network television hospital drama land, and 50/50 works its way to a too-tidy ending. But this is a laudable and mostly grounded look at coping with a sudden crisis where there are no certain outcomes nor right or wrong answers, just imperfect people doing their best.

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Movie Review: Gold (2016)

A tattered rags to prospective riches story inspired by real events, Gold is a reasonably satisfying escapade through the rollercoaster world of gold stock promotions. The film draws some energy from a scrappy and desperate central character, but then idles instead of soaring.

In Nevada, Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey) is a down-on-his-luck mining stock promoter, down to his last penny and barely able to support his long-time girlfriend Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard). Desperate to reverse his fortune, Kenny travels to Indonesia and connects with geologist Michael Acosta (Édgar Ramírez), who harbours unproven theories about rich gold deposits deep in the Indonesian jungle.

Kenny and his coterie of similarly luckless penny stock promoters work the phones and raise enough cash to get Acosta's drilling operations up and running. No gold is found in the early samples and Kenny contracts malaria in the Indonesian jungle. With the money about to run out, the analysis lab starts to report rich gold content from the latest core samples. Kenny and Michael find themselves sitting on the biggest gold find in decades. Kenny's life is turned upside down, but profiteers in the form of bankers, large mining companies and the Indonesian government soon move in.

Inspired by the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction Bre-X scandal, Gold has a humdinger of a story to work with. And in Kenny Wells, the film finds a unique perspective, a prematurely aging, overweight, sweaty sad man with failure labelled on his receding hairline but still hoping for that life changing gold discovery. The front end of the film hums on the fuel of Wells edging ever nearer to the cliff of abject failure, having lost his father's business, reduced to making phone calls out of a bar and gambling everything on a final Hail Mary play to reverse his fortune.

But as directed by Stephen Gaghan, Gold becomes strangely subdued and loses momentum in its second half. As the drama shifts from the last-roll-of-the-dice rigours of prospecting to dealing with the aftermath of a massive gold find, the film suffers by sticking too closely with Wells. Rightfully or not, the global ripple effects of a multi-billion dollar gold strike become much bigger than one man, and the film sidelines itself by narrowly focusing on a small hustler who is now a misfit in a much larger game. Kenny does matter, but he matters a lot less when the big players move in and the entire mining sector is shaken to its foundations.

This does not stop McConaughey from delivering a committed performance, nailing the bug-eyed desperation of a small-time operator whose very survival depends on fake confidence. The supporting cast includes small roles for Bruce Greenwood, Craig T. Nelson and Stacy Keach.

Gold has decent sprinklings of stuff that glitters, but misses the motherlode.

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Movie Review: The Help (2011)

An emotion-packed journey to a world just beginning the painful transition from racial segregation to integration, The Help is heart-felt drama from the perspective of society's often silent servant victims.

It's the early 1960s, and racial segregation is alive and well in the deep south of Jackson, Mississippi. Young, progressive, idealistic and single Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) lives with her parents and dreams of a career as a writer. With the civil rights movement beginning to bubble across the country, New York editor Elaine Stein (Mary Steenburgen) hesitantly encourages Skeeter to pursue a book based on the experiences of "the help", the common term used to refer to the black maids in charge of all the housework and child-rearing for the white women of Jackson's high society.

Aibileen (Viola Davis) has raised generations of white children, but has carried a broken heart ever since her own son died. Her best friend is Minny (Octavia Spencer), an outspoken maid who speaks her mind and gets repeatedly fired as a result. Jackson's elite households are headed by the likes of Hilly Hollbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is cruel even towards her own mother (Sissy Spacek), and is happy to dump all the housework onto the maids while actively seeking to prevent them, by law, from using internal bathrooms. More enlightened but also more frazzled is Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), a wealthy outcast. Aibileen and Minny start to tell their stories to Skeeter, and eventually they are joined by the other maids in town. Meanwhile, Hilly's attitudes catch up with her, while Minny starts working for Celia, with both tentatively discovering the virtue of positive influence.

Based on the best selling book by Kathryn Stockett, with a screenplay by director Tate Taylor, The Help does suffer from the common book adaptation affliction of not enough trimming. There are a few too may scenes thrown in, such as Aibileen being kicked off a bus after a racial shooting and Skeeter's frantic preparations and transportation to her first date with romantic interest Stuart (Chris Lowell). These and others (the entire Skeeter / Stuart sub-story is served up in an under-cooked rush) only distract from the film's focus, and amateurishly add padding to the running length (an unnecessarily hefty 146 minutes).

But the strength of the narrative shines through, The Help depicting a profoundly disturbing environment in which rich white women depend on poor black maids to run their lives, and yet treat them as third rate human beings "who carry different diseases to white people". Yet the irreversible winds of change are blowing, and the power of The Help is in the silent realization that descends on part of the community, but not all of it, that dramatic societal upheaval is around the corner, and those left behind are in for a shock.

Skeeter is openly conscious of the ground shift and acts to encourage the ushering in of a new respect between mistress and maid. Her mother (Allison Janney) is coming to terms with the new world, while Celia, unwillingly insulated from societal norms, embraces the new reality without stopping to think. Meanwhile, Hilly and her ilk continue to promote segregation and therefore hurtle towards moral extinction, unaware that the two are linked.

Spencer won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, but Davis (nominated as Best Actress), Stone, Howard, and Chastain (nominated as Best Supporting Actress) all deserve recognition for terrific performances. In support, Janney and Spacek provide short but sharp contributions. The Help is very much women-only territory, all the male characters (mostly faceless husbands and boyfriends) reduced to almost invisible standing.

Taylor directs with as much emphasis on reaction than action, The Help drawing tension from what and how the maids overhear in terms of demeaning conversations. Aibileen draws on remarkable strength to maintain her dignity in the face of repeated insults, while Minny speaks out more often and predictably pays for it.  Both demonstrate remarkable passion and courage reacting to Skeeter's request for interviews.

Taylor's script does include brief but welcome reminders that not all the maids are honourable (one maid steals a ring), and not all the white women are cruel (Skeeter hears stories about maids being treated with compassion).

Seemingly civilized societies can nurture and tolerate an environment of insidious abuse and targeted indignity. The Help reveals the ugly fault lines, and celebrates the certainty of their expiry.

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