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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Movie Review: Chicken Run (2000)

A stop-motion animated comedy thriller, Chicken Run delivers warm laughs and self-effacing action.

In rural England, Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha) is a smarter-than-most hen always hatching plans for a group escape from the chicken farm of the ruthless Melisha Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) and her hapless husband Willard (Tony Haygarth), where chickens are summarily killed as soon as they stop laying eggs. All of Ginger's escape plots fail and she spends plenty of time in solitary confinement dumped into a bin.

The other chickens on the farm include the dim-witted and constantly knitting Babs (Jane Horrocks), the elderly Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), who cannot stop talking about his days in military service, and champion egg-layer Bunty (Imelda Staunton). Nick and Fetcher (Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels) are two scavenger rats who steal supplies to support Ginger's escape plans.

The fate of the chickens appears sealed when the Tweedys decide to convert their egg farm into a mass production chicken pie factory. But one day the cocky and laid-back American chicken Rocky Rhodes (Mel Gibson), a circus act escapee, lands at the farm, giving Ginger hope that he can teach all the chickens to fly in preparation for a mass escape.

Directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, the duo behind Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run is 80 minutes in the life of enterprising chickens on the farm, drawing inspiration from The Great Escape to deliver cheeky humour and unlikely thrills. With a good balance of smart, stodgy, charming, doltish and evil characters, the film carries plenty of appeal for younger audiences, peppered with enough wit to satisfy adults.

The film offers simplified lessons in leadership, honesty, teamwork and perseverance, with side-orders of friendship, loyalty and rising to the challenge. Even a pecking romance eventually blossoms amidst the desperate attempts to find an escape plan that actually works.

The stop-animation artwork is conceived with painstaking care, the seamless camerawork creating a fluid and enjoyable cinematic experience. The chickens are provided with hands, teeth and sympathetic eyes to make them accessible. Most of the action takes place within the chicken coops, with one memorable excursion into the fiendishly productive pie-making machine.

The voice acting is full-bodied, Julia Sawalha a stand-out in providing Ginger with an iron will to escape and a yearning to experience freedom outside the farm fence. Jane Horrocks contributes plenty of laughs as the clueless Babs, and Benjamin Whitrow nails the insufferable old fart Fowler. Mel Gibson is less engaged as Rocky.

Full of madcap energy, Chicken Run is an unwavering commitment to fly the coop.

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Movie review: The Love Punch (2013)

A wacky heist comedy romance, The Love Punch is a lightweight travelogue with just a modicum of quality.

In England, divorced couple Kate and Richard Jones (Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan) are approaching retirement age, living separate lives but still on speaking terms. Richard's retirement plans are thrown into disarray when the company he works for is foreclosed by a hedge fund and the pension plan gutted. Vincent Kruger (Laurent Lafitte) is the Paris-based heartless corporate raider, and he is about to get married to the glamorous Manon Fontane (Louise Bourgoin).

Kate and Richard concoct a plan to gate-crash the wedding and steal the $10 million diamond necklace that Vincent is gifting Manon. They call upon their friends Jerry and Penelope (Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie) for help, and the foursome plot a raid on the wedding reception being held at a lavish south of France estate. Meanwhile, Richard is doing all he can to win back Kate's heart.

Written and directed by Joel Hopkins, The Love Punch is utterly inconsequential but also occasionally harmlessly entertaining. Clearly conceived as a pretext to invest some French production dollars into promoting tourism on the big screen, the plot is a sorry excuse for some lush French scenery. On the slightly positive side, Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson inject just enough class to avoid a total loss, and the script throws up a few good quips, many courtesy of a pleasantly gruff Timothy Spall.

And within the absurd proposition of four retirees turning to high stakes crime, Hopkins manages to take a few shots at Brosnan's Bond history and offers some smart commentary about love as advancing age replaces giddiness with pragmatism. In pursuit of keeping it real, Kate and Richard find an unlikely ally in Manon, a modern woman who quickly snaps out of her white knight fantasy.

But despite the decent moments, The Love Punch is frivolous and ultimately just too silly, a scenic coffee table book converted to moving pictures with actors going through the motions but mostly getting in the way of the glossy imagery.

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Movie Review: Denial (2016)

A courtroom drama centred on the Holocaust, Denial explores the difficulty of debunking ridiculous conspiracy theorists.

It's 1994, and in Atlanta, Georgia, American professor of Holocaust studies Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) writes a book condemning the lies of Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall), a British historian specializing in Nazi Germany, and a fan of Adolf Hitler. In London, Irving files a libel lawsuit against Lipstadt. To mount a defence she turns to celebrated lawyer Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), who represented Princess Diana, and his partner Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson).

As part of their case preparations Deborah and Richard visit the remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp and meet with Holocaust researchers. Julius and Rampton clash with Deborah on whether she should testify or not, and on whether Holocaust survivors should be called as witnesses. In 2000 the libel case finally makes its way to court, creating a media circus, with Irving representing himself.

Based on a true story as published in Lipstadt's book and directed by Mick Jackson, Denial is a relatively low-key affair, despite tackling one of history's worst atrocities. Due to England's rather eccentric libel laws, the onus is on the defendant to prove their statements as factual, resulting in the bizarre necessity for Lipstadt and her team to justify calling Irving a liar because, well, the Holocaust indeed did happen. Towards this quest the film achieves and sustains a modest level of engagement, but never rises to any heights.

A couple of problems hold Denial back. The first is the mismatch in resources and talent invested in each side of the legal battle. Jackson is only interested in Lipstadt and her well-resourced team containing some of the top legal minds in Britain. On the opposite side of the aisle Irving is a frumpy, lonely presence with no support, and the film never delves into his thinking or preparations, essentially defanging the antagonist. Resources do not necessarily equate to success, but a heavyweight with a full entourage will rarely lose to an untrained lightweight.

Another obstacle for the film is the central character silenced in her own story. Most of the tension is derived from Lipstadt disagreeing with her legal team's lean and scholarly strategy to keep the focus on Irving's lies. The lawyers prevent her from testifying and resist her advocacy for Holocaust survivors to appear as witnesses. Begrudgingly Lipstadt has the good sense to recognize that she is a professor and her lawyers are the courtroom experts, but this also means that for most of the second half of the film Denial is about grey lawyers doing their thing. Wilkinson as the barrister Rampton shines in these scenes, but he is always a secondary character in the story.

Nevertheless, there is still plenty to admire. Jackson delivers a taut 110 minutes of drama, keeping the focus on the case across seven years from 1994 to 2000. The scenes at Auschwitz are suitably affecting. Weisz and Spall join Wilkinson in delivering sturdy performances, and the film manages to throw in a minor source of uncertainty near the climax, raising the question of whether a man who believes his own lies is actually lying or not.

Denial is a worthwhile story told with genuine heart, but a case of proving a buffoon is a buffoon can only carry so much weight.

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