Movie Review: The Dressmaker (2015)

A comedy-drama-romance, The Dressmaker enjoys sly western-noir moments, but chooses to sprawl and never settles on an even tone.

In the 1950s, Paris-trained dressmaker Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) returns to the tiny Australian outback town of Dungatar seeking revenge. Years earlier, when Tilly was a little girl, she was falsely accused of causing the death of a young boy and driven out of town. She is now treated with suspicion as an outcast, although Tilly's memories of her childhood are blurry and she believes she may be cursed. Her crusty - and fiesty - mother Molly (Judy Davis) is well on the way to losing her mind and is of little help.

After reconnecting with local crossdressing police officer Sergeant Horatio Farrat (Hugo Weaving), Tilly causes a stir with her couture dresses and finds an ally in hunky Teddy McSwiney (Liam Hemsworth), who cleans the local sewers. She wins over the town's women by designing ravishing gowns for them, but her real objective is to reveal the truth about the men who wronged her, and to seek justice, frontier style.

An Australian production directed and co-written by Jocelyn Moorhouse, The Dressmaker has subversive fun with a familiar revenge theme. Vaguely riffing on High Plains Drifter, the style is an unapologetic mix of noir imagery assembled onto Sergio Leone-inspired framing. But this is a search of justice without guns and threats: Tilly's secret weapon is dressmaking, and she deploys frocks to disrupt and unhinge her enemies. Along the way secrets are revealed, hypocrisies shredded, lies laid bare, with still room for romance, humour, one unexpected shock, and plenty of idiosyncratic behaviour.

Unfortunately, the plot is also cluttered with distractions riding on poorly defined secondary characters. Tilly uses a rivalry between Dungatar and the adjacent town of Winyerp to her advantage, starting with a football match and ending with a particularly confusing amateur theatre wardrobe contest. The antagonists are short-changed into cartoon characters, including the town chemist and his wife, a local councillor, and a visiting eligible bachelor and his mother. The town's women are sketched-in and largely interchangeable.

All the padding extends the running time towards two hours and dulls the impact of Tilly's quest to understand her past. Unperturbed, Kate Winslet rides the unruliness with knowing determination, her central performance a nod to classic avengers three chess moves ahead of their victims. Judy Davis is delightful as the mom not quite sure what is going on but anyway intent on disrupting it. 

This dress is attractive, but also a bit too frilly.



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Movie Review: Winter Of Our Dreams (1981)

An ardent drama, Winter Of Our Dreams chases flickers of hope fading into the dark corners of the soul. The grim tones are amplified by unsentimental realism.

Suffering from depression, 30 year-old aspiring folk singer-songwriter Lisa Blain commits suicide. In her final hours she tries but fails to reconnect with bookshop owner Rob (Bryan Brown), a friend from her happier college days, and gifts her guitar to her only friend, prostitute Lou (Judy Davis).

Rob is living in an open marriage with his wife Gretel (Cathy Downes). He hears about Lisa's suicide and starts to explore her life with the intention of writing an article. He connects with Lou and they establish a friendship of sorts. Lou is reading Lisa's diary and knows how much Rob meant to her during their days of idealistic activism, although Ron downplays the relationship. Lou is drawn to Rob, tracing Lisa's infatuation.

Set in Sidney, Winter Of Our Dreams explores the slow decay of dreams towards death. Australian writer and director John Duigan commits to an uncompromising tone, humour and happiness all but banished from the life of his characters. The film is uneven, sometimes slow even within the 89 minutes of running time, and starts to re-plough the same terrain in its second half. But the sense of despair coupled with authenticity carries undeniable impact.

With Lisa's suicide underpinning the narrative, Winter Of Our Dreams starts with Rob seeking to understand how his former friend plummeted from the heady days of college and political protests to taking her own life. But midway, Duigan transitions to Lou's perspective as the glare of her increasingly dead-end life grows stronger. The hand-off between the two characters shortchanges the investment in Rob, as he spends the second half of the film stranded in inert emotional space.

Judy Davis is in scintillating form and animates Lou as the woman spiralling into drug-addiction and prostitution, Lisa's fate now a warning sign along a dangerous path. Rob's appearance offers an unexpected avenue for potential escape, and the final third focuses on the contrast between her filthy almost-living-on-the-street reality and his suburban bliss. Rob's nonchalant openness places vague salvation tantalizingly within Lou's reach, but while she embraces the nose-against-the-window opportunity to escape her wannabe boyfriend and drug supplier, Lisa's diary is also a warning about mismatched expectations.

Winter Of Our Dreams is a bleak experience, primitive urban survival gasping for breath against the crushing weight of dimming expectations.



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The Movies Of Judy Davis

All movies starring Judy Davis and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Winter Of Our Dreams (1981)

A Passage To India (1984)

Barton Fink (1991)

Husbands And Wives (1992)

Blood And Wine (1996)

Absolute Power (1997)

Marie Antoinette (2006)

The Break-Up (2006)

To Rome With Love (2012)

The Dressmaker (2015)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: To Rome With Love (2012)

An episodic comedy romance with some fantasy elements, Woody Allen's To Rome With Love offers mild amusement but minimal substance through four unrelated vignettes.

American tourist Hayley (Alison Pill) meets and falls in love with Italian lawyer Michelangelo. When Hayley's parents Jerry and Phyllis (Allen and Judy Davis) arrive in Rome for a visit, Jerry, a recently retired opera producer, discovers that Michelangelo's father Giancarlo, a funeral home director, has a magnificent singing voice, but only when he is in the shower.

Young student architect Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) lives with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig). When Sally's alluring friend Monica (Ellen Page) comes for a visit, Jack can't help but fall in love with Monica's seemingly sophisticated charms. John Foy (Alec Baldwin), a successful architect revisiting Rome where he once lived, provides spectral advise to Jack. John and Jack may be the same person, 30 years apart.

Antonio and Milly are newlyweds from a rural town who have just relocated to Rome to start a new life and seek better jobs. Inadvertently separated, Antonio finds himself in the compromising company of vivacious prostitute Anna (Penelope Cruz); he has to pretend that Anna is Milly in front of his stuffy relatives. Meanwhile Milly stumbles onto a film set and allows herself to be seduced by famous Italian movie star actor Luca Salta.

Leopoldo (Robert Benigni) is an average office clerk with a mundane life. One day he wakes up and inexplicably finds himself an unlikely celebrity, with media and paparazzi hordes chasing after him with microphones and cameras and documenting his every move.

A flighty exercise in saluting the ethereal beauty of a city, To Rome With Love is almost astonishing in its lack of depth. While all four stories offer a benign level of enjoyment, the film is the equivalent of flipping through a glossy travel magazine; the articles are at best quick glance-through fluff, the pictures professional but also exceptionally familiar. The entire exercise is wholly forgettable moments after it ends.

While none of the stories carry any impact, a couple offer some marginal entertainment. Allen sporadically infuses a common theme of unexpected but non-threatening interventions altering the planned course of life, with the diversions from a charted course coming with both a smile and no explanation needed. The imaginative elements of the film work well, John Foy as a ghostly presence drifting in and out of Jack's life and Leopoldo's sudden detour into an alternate celebrity reality carrying some intrigue.

Antonio and Milly experiencing a chaotic start to their life in Rome appears to be a parable for the temptations of the big city, and is less successful. Least interesting of all is Allen inserting his typical neurotic New Yorker persona into the Roman context. The tiresome opera-singer-in-the-shower story starts out as not funny and is then stretched well past its breaking point.

To Rome With Love is Allen at his flimsiest, offering some old-world eye candy with a side of empty calories.

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Movie Review: Barton Fink (1991)

A dramatic comedy about writer's block, Barton Fink successfully gets into the head of a fledgling writer but stretches the concept to incredulous extremes.

In New York City of 1941, writer Barton Fink (John Turturro) achieves success with a new Broadway play and is celebrated as a rising star of the literary world. Despite espousing idealistic views of writing for the masses, Fink accepts a high-paying assignment to write screenplays in Hollywood and relocates to Los Angeles. His new employer is Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), boss of Capitol Pictures, who pretends to adore writers before assigning Fink to write a script for a lowbrow wrestling drama starring Wallace Beery.

Fink takes up residence in a derelict room at the cavernous but sparsely populated Hotel Earle, and struggles mightily with writer's block. The distractions include noise from adjoining rooms, peeling wallpaper, a singular picture of a girl on the beach, and talkative insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), who occupies the room next door. Extremely lonely and desperate to converse with another writer, Fink connects with W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), a legendary author now reduced to a state of perpetual drunkenness. Mayhew's secretary Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis) proves to be a better companion. With a deadline for delivering the script looming, there is a new major shock ahead for the hopelessly blocked Fink.

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, Barton Fink is an odd exercise, apparently a diversionary exercise the Coens used as break from the intensity of Miller's Crossing. Filled with salutes to written and cinematic landmarks, the film contains plenty to admire both aesthetically and intellectually, and hits at dead centre the intended target topic of writer's block. But only so much can be built around a white empty page that stares back. Desperate for variety the film veers towards a madcap tone, and a final third that is more amusing than effective.

The best moments are by far set at the Hotel Earle, an eerily empty place forgotten by time and carrying echoes of that most famous writer's block hangout, The Overlook Hotel from The Shining. But Barton's journey is not one of madness, rather just a banana skin where his idealistic spoutings slip on an inability to listen to the common man and a quick soul sell. The peeling wall paper, the pesky mosquito, the noisy neighbours, the incessant heat, and that darned too perfect picture on the wall do nothing except conspire to prevent Barton from writing.

John Turturro does what is necessary in the grey title role, the screen portrayal of an introverted writer struggling to find words by definition a rather thankless task.

Less interesting are the surrounding characters. W.P. Mayhew is not so much the inspiration Barton hoped to find but rather the ultimate victim of writer's block, a man with a destiny to meet his fate at the bottom of the bottle every single day. John Goodman is excellent as Charlie Meadows, a salesman who starts out as an irritant, evolves into a friend and companion, and then transforms into something else entirely as the script slips out of control.

Judy Davis as Audrey Taylor does not get a chance to register as much of anything, her obvious role as writer's muse truncated to serve a needless detour towards mystical mystery territory. Steve Buscemi as the hotel clerk and Tony Shalhoub as a movie producer get small supporting roles.

Undoubtedly thought provoking, Barton Fink offers plenty of talking points but is an ultimately less than cohesive experience.

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Movie Review: Blood And Wine (1996)

An effective neo-noir, Blood And Wine assembles all the elements for a stirring ride through the wilderness of human greed and desperation.

In Florida, Alex Gates (Jack Nicholson) is a wine merchant, struggling to maintain his lifestyle as his business slowly fails and his wealth evaporates. His marriage to Suzanne (Judy Davis) is falling apart, her broken leg and excessive drinking a direct result of his long absences and unconvincing excuses. Alex's relationship with his son Jason (Stephen Dorff) is also heavily strained, Jason preferring the tranquility of fishing with his friend Henry (Harold Perrineau Jr.) to dealing with his dad. And Alex is now having an affair with the much younger Gabby (Jennifer Lopez), the Cuban nanny for the wealthy Reece family.

Attempting to solve all his problems, Alex teams up with ex-convict and safe cracker Vic Spansky (Michael Caine) to steal a precious necklace from the Reece household. But what Alex plans as a simple theft and getaway to a new life with Gabby turns sour when Suzanne intervenes, the necklace ends up in Jason's possession, Vic reveals extremely violent tendencies, and Jason and Gabby start a steamy relationship.

Another collaboration between director Bob Rafelson and star Jack Nicholson, Blood And Wine is an engaging modern film noir. Filmed with a vivid aesthetic that emphasizes the Florida heat and creates a nowhere-to-hide glare, Blood And Wine is set in a no middle ground context where men like Alex can either live up to the neighbourhood expectations and be rich, or fade into oblivion.

With his home life already a train wreck and his business failing, Alex will make a last grab for glory and attempt to steal his way to riches while trading-in the literally broken Suzanne for sexpot Gabby. Of course, although he believes otherwise, Alex cannot control for all the variables. Suzanne's fury, Vic's psychosis and Jason's principles all create a minefield in the path of the carefully conceived plot, and little will go according to the original plan. Meanwhile, the suddenly unemployed Gabby has to decide which path offers her the best opportunity for future security.

While the plot and performances satisfy and the narrative convolutions ensure a high and consistent level of unpredictable enjoyment, the film suffers somewhat from being almost too traditionally faithful to most of the noir tenets. Rafelson lines up and marches out the usual components: infidelity, violence, sex as a tactic, sweet talk, obsessive lying, double-crosses, a woman playing against men, and a precious treasure at the middle of it all. Only the private detective in a trench coat and the hapless local police are missing.

But the key characters are all well developed and more than make up for the modest level of originality. Vic is struggling with a respiratory disease, and his sense of one last opportunity for happiness before the finality of death drives his nothing-to-lose attitude. Michael Caine has tremendous fun with the dichotomy of a surprisingly dangerous old safe cracker unable to control his violent urges to resolve messy situations. Lopez has rarely been better on the big screen, and Gabby is provided with a rich background as an illegal escapee from Cuba trading on her good looks while seeking the man who can help provide a more established life. Alex is easy pickings for Nicholson, while Stephen Dorff is perhaps the least convincing, the role of Jason falling between the cracks of pervasive acrimony.

Blood And Wine may not be a perfect mix, but it nevertheless oozes out of the bottle with an intoxicating smell of attractive menace.

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Movie Review: Husbands And Wives (1992)

Woody Allen delves into the soul of the institution of marriage through the lives of two couples. Husbands And Wives uncovers a complex web of dependence, resentment, longing and confusion.

A pair of middle-aged married couples are also best friends. At the start of a dinner outing, Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) suddenly and nonchalantly announce that they are splitting up, shocking Gabe and Judy (Allen and Mia Farrow). Judy, an arts magazine editor, is particularly disturbed, and begins to question the strength of her marriage to Gabe. They have been drifting apart, can't agree on whether or not they want to have a child, and Gabe's position as a university professor of literature exposes him to plenty of temptation in the form of fawning young female students.

And indeed, Gabe starts spending time with Rain (Juliette Lewis), one of his students. She is independent, beautiful and thinks the world of him. Meanwhile, Jack enters into a relationship with the much younger Sam (Lysette Anthony), a health-obsessed aerobics teacher. Sally pretends to be enjoying life as a single woman, but in reality she is miserable. Judy eventually introduces Sally to Michael (Liam Neeson), a co-worker at the magazine, and they seem to hit it off, although Michael wants to progress the relationship faster than Sally is ready for. Judy actually harbours strong feelings for Michael, a further strain on her unraveling relationship with Gabe.

Allen, who directed and also wrote the screenplay, picks up on several difficult but pervasive themes. Both Jack and Gabe start relationships with younger women, as they get an ego boost by interacting with appreciative women who could almost be their daughters. Allen pushes further, exploring the limits of these cross-generational relationships. Sam's obsession with astrology and health begins to aggravate Jack, while Gabe gets a rude awakening with Rain's scalpel-like honesty in criticizing his work from the perspective of a more liberated era.

Both Sally and Judy are exceedingly difficult to please. Sally is a perfectionist who can never be fully complimentary about anything, and insists on picking away at any little item that does not fully satisfy her. Judy is used to getting her way with an understated victim act, turning most issues in her favour by magnifying the impact to her happiness yet rarely acknowledging the feelings of others. When Jack and Sally announce their split Judy is more upset than either of them, and when Gabe agrees to her request that they can try and have a child, she abruptly changes her mind with no acknowledgement of his attempt to please her.

Husbands And Wives pokes into many of the awkward issues faced by married couples, including reduced sexual activity, boredom, lack of attentiveness and the aggravation caused by over-familiarity. And yet the film also starts to find the strands that bind, the core strengths that can hold a relationship together despite all the buffeting. Accommodation, forgiveness and tolerance emerge as themes late in the movie, as one couple discover that the frustrations also comes with plenty of comforts.

Stylistically Husbands And Wives is all about the hand-held camera hovering right around the living rooms and bedrooms of adults talking through their crises. Most of the film consists of exceedingly long takes, the camera moving along with the actors from room to room as conversations intensify, heat-up, then cool down, only to re-ignite. The viewer is effectively invited into the homes and intimate lives of Jack, Sally, Gabe and Judy, for better or for worse.

The four central performances are good without being exceptional. There is a slight element of theatricality, and an absence of genuine deeply emotional tones, as Allen keeps the mood generally light and looks for hints of humour despite the serious topics. The characters speak directly to the camera at regular intervals, the fake interviews used as a mechanism to further elaborate on their thoughts and actions. It's a gimmicky technique that is not really needed in the context of the movie.

Husbands And Wives proved to be fiction echoing stranger fact for Allen, as around the time of its release his long-term real-life relationship with Farrow ended and he became romantically involved with the much younger Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter. Men and women may never fully understand the forces of attraction and repulsion between them, only that the chemistry can become exceedingly messy.

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Movie Review: A Passage To India (1984)

David Lean's first film after a 14 year hiatus is a luxurious adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Passage To India. An exploration of the British ruling a quietly seething India, Lean succeeds at producing a visually lush experience that moves slowly but with purpose towards condemning an elitist culture.

It's the early 1920s, and Adela Quested (Judy Davis) travels to India with her presumed future mother-in-law Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft). Adela is planning to marry Ronny Heaslop (Nigel Havers), a local magistrate doling out dismissive justice against the local Indian community. Both Adela and Mrs. Moore are horrified by the condescending attitude of the local English rulers towards the Indian population, and seek to reach out and experience the real India.

One Englishman who is doing just that is college teacher Richard Fielding (James Fox), who befriends the locals, including Professor Godbole (Alec Guinness), and treats them with respect. Through Fielding, Adela and Mrs. Moore meet the young Doctor Aziz (Victor Banerjee). Eager to please the English and finding Mrs. Moore particularly pleasant, Aziz plans a day trip for the ladies to the remote and mysterious Marabar Caves. The trip quickly descends from enthralling to catastrophic when something horrible happens to Adela inside one of the caves, and Aziz is accused of attempted rape. His arrest and subsequent trial galvanize the local population, and sets the rulers against the ruled in a test of the true powers of justice.

A Passage To India examines the English flexing their imperial muscles, and finds little to like. Lean himself adapted Forster's book, and the colonialists are portrayed as only superficially polite, and generally pompous, insufferable and openly racist. Other than servants, the Indians are kept out of  "the Club" where the English enjoy their social gatherings, and the locals are generally treated as inconvenient.

And yet. In a display of the local civic infrastructure that the English did construct despite their haughtiness, the otherwise arrogant Heaslop has an Indian magistrate as his deputy, and it is this local judge who is allowed by the English to preside over Dr. Aziz's trial. Fielding is immersed in Indian culture, respectful of the country's people and customs, friends with the eccentric Godbole and quick to warm up to Dr. Aziz. And the film is critical of the English rulers, not the English: both Adela and Mrs. Moore are as resentful of the local rulers as the Indians, and both demonstrate genuine willingness to discover the real India and socialize with the locals. In Adela's case, this comes at the risk of rupturing her relationship with Heaslop.

As with the contradictions among the English, A Passage To India delves into the conflicted Indian psyche. Dr. Aziz and his friends resent being ruled by the English, but at the same time can hide neither their admiration nor appreciation. Eager to please and just as eager to complain, the Indians crave respect and autonomy as much as they fear the unknowns and responsibilities that come with independence. Two cultures, dancing awkwardly towards an uncertain future, neither fully respecting the relationship nor willing to sever it.

Lean captures this complex dynamic with his trademark artistry, every frame a landscaped masterpiece of composition, colour and emotion. At more than 160 minutes, A Passage To India does not move quickly, but rarely does it dawdle. Most scenes have a purpose in moving the narrative forward and providing further depth to the characters, although some sharper editing (again, by Lean) would have been welcome.

Within the narrow confines of expected proper English behaviour, Davis, Ashcroft and Fox have to display emotions through the slightest of gestures. The barely noticeable narrowing of the eyes and tightening of the mouth are sufficient for all three to successfully portray feelings ranging from astonishment to anguish. Banerjee's character allows him to be more animated, his portrayal of Dr. Aziz representing India's subservience, disillusionment and emergence into a more confident identity.

A Passage To India is a fitting ending to Lean's career. A grand, assured and memorable canvass, signed by a master of elegant film-making.

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