Movie Review: Jane Eyre (2011)

Genre: Romantic Mystery Drama  

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga  

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, Judi Dench, Sally Hawkins, Imogen Poots  

Running Time: 120 minutes  

Synopsis: In 1800s England, a distressed Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) leaves the Thornfield Hall estate of Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbender) and finds shelter with clergyman St. John (Jamie Bell). In flashbacks, Jane's story is revealed. She was an orphan when her evil aunt Mrs. Reed (Sally Hawkins) dispatched her to a grim residential school. Upon graduation, she became the governess at Thornfield, where she met kindly housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax (Judi Dench) and gradually fell in love with the passionate, brooding, and wealthy Rochester. But he not only harbours a dark secret, but may also be interested in marrying Blanche Ingram (Imogen Poots).

What Works Well: Writer Moira Buffini adapts Charlotte Brontë's classic novel with elegance, and packs Jane Eyre's many adventures into a brisk two hours. Drama, romance, mystery, danger, and passion mingle as Jane navigates each hurdle on her own terms, never losing sight of her worth and the basics of right and wrong. The central romance may lack sizzle but is held together by shadows of tragic pasts, and director Cary Joji Fukunaga relies on candlelight to emphasize mystery-filled interiors loaded with the presence of the unseen. Adriano Goldman's cinematography makes excellent use of the rugged and windswept English countryside. 

What Does Not Work As Well: Jane and Edward progress from verbal sparring to thorny romance in a hurry, and as Rochester's notional counterpart, Jamie Bell struggles to find the right tone as St. John.

Conclusion: This quest for happiness goes through foreboding chambers.

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Movie Review: Never Let Me Go (2010)

Genre: Alternative Reality Romantic Drama

Director: Mark Romanek

Starring: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins

Running Time: 103 minutes

Synopsis: In England, a medical breakthrough in 1952 extends life expectancy to 100 years. In 1978, pre-teens Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy attend the Hailsham boarding school run by principal Emily (Charlotte Rampling). Teacher Lucy (Sally Hawkins) reveals that the children are destined to be repeat organ donors and will die early. Kathy is attracted to Tommy, but the more assertive Ruth claims his attention. In 1985, 18-year-old Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) transition to rustic residences at The Cottages, joining other donors in preparing for their fate.

What Works Well: The adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's book (with a script by Alex Garland) reveals its secrets with elegance and understated emotions. The societal and scientific contexts are confined to the deep background of a grey England, allowing Kathy and her friends to animate the centre. Their natural presence generates unsettling narrative power by challenging at the individual level what it means to be human and the ethics of organ harvesting. Carey Mulligan leads a stellar cast, mastering quiet emotion within downcast acceptance.

What Does Not Work As Well: The romantic triangle elements threaten to pull the drama towards routine, and the absence of broader perspectives and debate beyond the three protagonists borders on topical neglect. Side references attempting to inject meaning into art creation and gallery displays are largely fumbled.

Conclusion: Thought-provoking, but also frustratingly narrow in its ambition to seek solitary normalcy.

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Movie Review: Spencer (2021)

A study of loneliness and looming depression, Spencer delves into the mind of the planet's most famous woman trapped in an inhospitable world.

December 1991. The British royals assemble at Sandringham Estate to celebrate Christmas. Her Royal Highness Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) arrives alone, feeling detached from the rest of the family. She now knows her husband Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) is having an affair, and she is stifled and repelled by the cold and meticulously orchestrated traditions.

Over three days, Diana battles bulimia and only finds joy in the company of her young boys William and Harry. She interacts with head chef Darren (Sean Harris) and equerry Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall), but the only servant she trusts is her dresser Maggie (Sally Hawkins). As she reads a book about the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, Diana's erratic behaviour intensifies and she becomes ever more desperate to break free. Her late father's next-door estate offers a tantalizingly close emotional escape to happier memories.

Spencer imagines Lady Diana's gradual but necessary royal deconstruction as a process towards discovering a new path. Writer Steven Knight is solely focused on the real woman beneath the public legend, and director Pablo Larrain unceremoniously shreds away all pomp and ceremony: the rest of the royal family members and all their choreographed movements are pushed into the deep background, now just a ridiculous sideshow amplifying Diana's agony.

What remains is a searing journey into a distressed soul, with the cold walls closing in. Lost in her own country (literally, at the start of the movie), betrayed by her husband, close to being labelled an outcast, and sensing nothing but disdain from family members unfamiliar with the concept of affection, Diana seeks refuge with her sons, the servants, and vestiges of the past. 

Staring at a miserable present and a bleak future, and with the ghost of Anne Boleyn providing all the warning she needs, Diana mentally seeks refuge in her roots. Larrain uses the next-door but abandoned and dilapidating Spencer family estate, including her father's jacket-draped scarecrow, as a device of yearning for simpler times when a young girl experienced meaningful love and happiness.

Although Diana's arc does evolve, the pacing is slow, and Spencer occasionally stalls in the same emotional space. Several themes are underlined to pad the running time to two hours: the Princess as a trapped victim, Charles' thoughtless pearl necklace gift as a choke hold, Diana's every move scrutinized and her every dress for every hour of every day pre-selected, and all private conversations within Sandringham immediately transitioning from secret to gossip.

Larrain captures fluid, elegant, and sometime rustic beauty inside and outside the estate, while Jonny Greenwood's jazz-infused score adds a restless, on-edge representation of Diana's mind. And in an eloquent performance, Kristen Stewart defines heartache creeping into torment. She also blossoms in the few moving scenes of poignant happiness with young William and Harry, Diana expressing singular fulfillment in her role as a mother.

Finding elegance in the journey to revelation, Spencer prods the doubt-filled roots of courage.



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The Movies Of Sally Hawkins

All movies starring Sally Hawkins and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999, uncredited extra)

An Education (2009)

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Made In Dagenham (2010)

Jane Eyre (2011)

Blue Jasmine (2013)

The Double (2013)

Maudie (2016)

The Shape Of Water (2017)

Spencer (2021)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Made In Dagenham (2010)

A labour conflict drama, Made In Dagenham celebrates a small group of women who fought for gender pay equity. The film is well-intentioned but altogether too obvious.

It's 1968 in unfashionable Dagenham, England, where the Ford motor company employs tens of thousands of workers at a car manufacturing plant. Less than 200 of them are women, and they mostly operate sewing machines to stitch together seat fabrics. Encouraged by supervisor Albert (Bob Hoskins), the women organize labour action to demand better pay and recognition as skilled workers.

Feisty machinist Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins) supplants the more frazzled Connie (Geraldine James) as leader and spokesperson, and shocks Ford's management by demanding equal pay for equal work regardless of gender. The women go on a full strike, eventually shutting down the factory. As the community starts to struggle financially, Rita learns not everyone appreciates her hardline stance. Ford's Detroit leadership wades into the conflict, as does Britain's Employment Secretary Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson).

Based on a true story but featuring mostly made-up characters, Made In Dagenham is as British as its title, drawing inspiration from suburban working class housing estates and the spirit of unlikely activists standing up for an idealistic principle against a profit-driven heartless corporation. The story carries inherent power, but writer William Ivory and director Nigel Cole cannot do much with it except mechanically tick the expected boxes.

As it goes through the motions, the film is comfortably and annoyingly familiar. Rita is the local hero emerging as an inspirational leader; her family life suffers as she is preoccupied with the cause; the community turns against her when the men are forced out of work; and she has to persist and fight for what is right, staring down not just the company but also the broader male-dominated union movement, unimpressed with women making their voices heard.

When it's not reverberating with strong echoes of Norma Rae, Made In Dagenham not infrequently threatens to descend to television movie-of-the-week fare, complete with a trite call to ignite the British spirit of World War Two. Other than the empathetic Albert, the men are uniformly portrayed as dolts, and all the Ford management types may as well be labeled "evil corporate type" on their foreheads.

Cole introduces the character of Lisa Hopkins (Rosamund Pike) as the wife of a Ford executive. She crosses paths with Rita at the school attended by both their kids, and what promises to be an interesting across-the-divide relationship between the women becomes a missed opportunity, settled in the most bland way possible.

Ivory's script leaves out notions of depth and background, most of the characters quick-fried into cliches. Sally Hawkins single-handedly drags the film towards respectability as she fights gamely against the material, but she barely bridges the credibility gap in Rita's evolution from sewing machinist to articulate, passionate and fearless leader.

Some highlight moments are provided by Miranda Richardson as a Labour Party cabinet minister caught between crass political realities, genuine economic imperatives and sympathy to the cause of her fellow women. Made In Dagenham starts on the shop floor but ends at the policy table, where a better story may have resided all along.

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Movie Review: The Shape Of Water (2017)

An inter-species cold war romance, The Shape Of Water presents old ideas with the gloss of new packaging.

It's the early 1960s, the cold war is in full swing, and the space race is on. In Baltimore, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is mute, lives alone, and works as a night shift janitor at a secretive government research facility. Elisa's only friends are next door neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), a failed artist, and her crewmate Zelda (Octavia Spencer). The facility receives a mysterious aquatic creature (Doug Jones) referred to as "the asset", captured in the Amazonian jungle by the CIA's brutal Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon).

Elisa is inquisitive about the new acquisition, and starts secretly spending time near its tank. She finds the creature to be curious, capable of communicating and expressing emotions. But Strickland understands only the language of violence and torture, sees no value in the asset and recommends its destruction. A species-loving Russian spy who works at the facility as Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) is horrified, but his superiors are not supportive of intervening. Elisa decides to take matters into her own hands to try and save her new companion, but she will need help.

Directed by Guillermo del Toro, The Shape Of Water is an amalgamation of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Free Willy, repackaged for adults with a thicker layer of eroticism and social commentary. The film's set designs, dark mood, and overwhelming green-blue palette are captivating. The predominantly nighttime setting in a cavernous nondescript government facility echoes with bureaucratic menace. And Sally Hawkins contributes a phenomenal performance as a lowly janitor determined to find love and carving her place in the world using sign language to express every complex emotion.

The familiar theme of humanity shining strong and true in individuals who are superficially different and disadvantaged permeates through The Shape Of Water, and indeed is applied with a subtlety of a sledgehammer. Elisa is mute, the creature is half man, half fish, Giles carries his own secret, Zelda is black, and Hoffstetler is Russian. The heroes of this story suffer through society's discriminatory attitudes as they risk everything to fearlessly fight the establishment.

And the status quo is not unexpectedly represented by the white Strickland, a member of the military industrial complex spouting Biblical fury and by far the most irrational and dangerous character on display. del Toro displays no control over his villain: Strickland foams at the mouth and acts irrationally for most of the movie, carrying a cattle prod to poke away at his enemies, and everyone is his enemy.

The film's other prevailing concept is acceptance of love's magical strength in all relationships, and here The Shape Of Water pushes into some unique territory. Elisa and the sinewy, muscular amphibian humanoid develop a deep and unconstrained bond. del Toro borrows from both King Kong and The Creature From The Black Lagoon as the monster combines danger with intriguing sexuality, and the film waltzes through its premise on a passionate edge where genuine affection, controversy, comic relief and undiscovered powers come together.

A fantasy romance agitating for debate, The Shape Of Water is nevertheless overly familiar at its essence.

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Movie Review: Maudie (2016)

A biography of Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, Maudie is a simple, heartfelt and slow-moving story about overcoming adversity with plenty of unlikely perseverance and limited talent.

It's the late 1930s in the small community of Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. Maud Dowley (Sally Hawkins) is a slightly eccentric dowdy spinster, abandoned by her brother and living with an aunt. Maud walks with a pronounced limp, suffers from arthritis and seems to have no prospects in life. But determined to make something of herself, she applies for a job as housekeeper for gruff fish salesman Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke).

Everett is a grumpy man of few words and fewer social skills, living on the edge of town in a tiny one-room house. Maud has to navigate around his moods just to keep her job as live-in cleaner and cook. Gradually they become close, and Maud starts to paint the walls of the house, demonstrating an artistic bent for simple images of nature. When her artwork is spotted by Sandra (Kari Matchett), a sophisticated tourist from New York, Maude's reputation as a folk artist starts to grow, but secrets from her past emerge to cause more pain.

The art of Maud Lewis is simple, innocent and childlike, inspired by the natural landscape of Canada's east coast. Maudie the film holds true to the same principles, maintaining an uncomplicated stance and relying on the central performance and the lost-in-time rural setting to capture the imagination.

There is nothing in the story deserving of shouts from rooftops. Lewis was an unassuming humble woman, and the film draws from her power of quiet determination to push back against personal and societal barriers to build momentum. Director Aisling Walsh keeps her cameras largely static, the passage of time slow and unassuming, allowing the sparse surroundings to seep onto the screen. The settings alternate from the idyllic small town with one general store and no secrets to the bumpy outskirts where Everett lives on the margins of society and Maud finds an unlikely home.

Maud and Everett become a couple without ever talking about becoming a couple, their affection conveyed through tolerance and accommodation rather than chemistry and sparks, an uncomfortable relationship between two misfits perfectly portrayed by Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke. Hawkins gets into Maud's skin and disappears within the character, a committed performance built on small increments of individual courage rather than large actions or words. Hawke pulls off the difficult task of turning a brooding, undomesticated man who initially favours his dogs and chickens over any other human into something resembling a sympathetic supportive character.

Maudie does test the patience with an over-reliance on mood, but despite the languid pacing the film is a worthwhile celebration of an unlikely cultural icon.

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