Movie Review: Quartet (2012)

Genre: Dramedy  

Director: Dustin Hoffman  

Starring: Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins  

Running Time: 98 minutes  

Synopsis: In England's financially struggling Beecham House for retired musicians, the residents include retired opera singers Reg (Tom Courtenay), Wilf (Billy Connolly), and Cissy (Pauline Collins), as well as musical director Cedric (Michael Gambon). Preparations for the upcoming annual pageant are disrupted by the arrival of Jean Horton (Maggie Smith), a retired diva and Reg's ex-wife. She has vowed to never sing again, but Reg, Wilf, and Cissy set out to convince her otherwise.

What Works Well: The picturesque rural setting provides postcard-quality backdrops to this adaptation of writer Ronald Harwood's play, and the soundtrack of classical music snippets enhances the sense of staid sophistication. The lead performances are predictably elegant, Billy Connelly enjoys delivering a stream of unfiltered innuendos, and the extras animating Beecham House include actual retired British musicians. 

What Does Not Work As Well: No amount of visual and aural beauty can hide the wafer-thin content. The characters reside at the skimpy sketch level, their late-in-life afflictions treated purely for laughs, and the resolutions of the big dilemmas (will Reg and Jean reconcile? will she sing again?) are oh-so-predictable. In reaching for a respectable running time, director Dustin Hoffman resorts to plenty of padding.

Conclusion: Glaring gaps within graceful grandeur.



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Movie Review: Summerland (2020)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Jessica Swale  

Starring: Gemma Arterton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Courtenay, Penelope Wilton  

Running Time: 99 minutes  

Synopsis: After a short prologue set in 1975, most of the movie takes place in the early 1940s, in a small village near Dover, England. Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton) is a local writer and researcher of folk legends involving women, and is mostly shunned by the community for being single and anti-social. Alice is forced to host Frank (Lucas Bond), a child evacuee from the London Blitz, and despite herself forges a connection with the boy. In flashbacks, Alice recalls her one great love with Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

What Works Well: The scenery is beautiful, and matches the lyrical evolution of Alice from angry and lonely to caring and connected. Gemma Arterton delivers a forceful central performance filled with unapologetic purpose, but also shines in moments requiring sensitivity. Director and writer Jessica Swale adds sprinkles of humour, and introduces the one narrative twist with a deft touch. The story takes place on the sidelines of World War Two, but the conflict casts a long shadow upon dynamics in an idyllic small community.

What Does Not Work As Well: The flashbacks to an interracial lesbian relationship, plus strong currents of anti-religious and pro-feminist sentiments, are wedged into the wartime context with heavy-handed clumsiness.

Conclusion: The post-bitterness journey is sweet, but also burdened.



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Movie Review: Doctor Zhivago (1965)

An epic love story set against the backdrop of the communist revolution in Russia, Doctor Zhivago pits the passionate individual against the oppressive system, but is also too long, and its main protagonist is more a spectator rather than an instigator.

The film is told in flashback, and starts in the Soviet era at a hydroelectric dam with Lieutenant General Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness) questioning innocent-looking worker Tanya Komarova (Rita Tushingham) to determine whether she is the daughter of his half-brother Dr. Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif). Yevgraf recounts Yuri's story, starting when he was orphaned at a young age and taken in by the well-to-do Moscow-based family of the kindly Alexander Gromeko (Ralph Richardson). Yuri grows up to be a doctor and a poet, and eventually marries Gromeko's daughter Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin).

In parallel and also in Moscow, the beautiful 17 year old Lara Antipova (Julie Christie) is from a working class family and the unwilling mistress of Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), a member of the elite classes with shadowy connections to both the Czarist government and the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Lara eventually marries her real love Pasha Antipov (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic young man advocating for workers' rights and actively supporting the revolution.

The Great War erupts, Pasha is lost on the battlefield and Yuri meets Lara at a front-line hospital where they work together for 6 months. The revolution interrupts the war and turns Russia upside down. Yuri returns to Tonya in Moscow, but they soon embark on an arduous train ride beyond the Ural mountains to try and start a new life. With the country gripped by civil war, Yuri will reconnect with Lara under unexpected but dangerous circumstances.

An adaptation of the celebrated Boris Pasternak novel directed by David Lean, Dr. Zhivago is epic in scale and scope. The film clocks in at close to 200 minutes and features a large cast of characters, stunning landscapes, scenes of battle, revolution, and lavish parties, and a gruelling train ride that seems to unfold in real time, complete with a surreal and irrelevant Klaus Kinski appearance. This is an impressive and engrossing experience, but it is also tiresome. It is difficult to justify the turgid running time and the slow pacing, with everything appearing to happen in slow motion.

More troublesome is the rather passive central character. Yuri Zhivago is an ultimately peripheral character who witnesses great events happening around him. On several occasions he is swept up by history, his life trajectory altered by others. Even the central theme of love and infatuation is unfulfilling. Zhivago's dubious feat is trapping himself into a love triangle, Tonya wholly undeserving of his betrayal and Lara gaining his affection through mere presence. Yuri gets a few brief scenes as a doctor, and no meaningful demonstrations of his talents as a poet.

The film succeeds better in depicting the struggle between the individual and the collective. The post-revolution scenes in Moscow are a brilliantly grey portrayal of the all the failures of communism quickly rising to the surface, the rabble believing that their time has come, oblivious that the country's functionality is grinding to a halt and intellectual starvation and physical exhaustion await. Zhivago remains consistent in expressing his doubt about communism's logic before, during and after the revolution, opinions that will force him to leave Moscow when he clearly becomes a misfit.

Omar Sharif almost sleepwalks through the film but finds a few moments of genuine emotion. Christie matches him with a docile, low-key performance that does not convince as muse. Rod Steiger delivers the most energetic role, and on more than one occasion single-handedly pumps sweat, conviction and passion to jump-start the languid proceedings. Victor Komarovsky emerges as potentially the most interesting and complex character in the story, perhaps more deserving of his own book and movie.

The film's weaknesses do not diminish Doctor Zhivago as a grand technical marvel, an ambitious and unconstrained artistic achievement, with an iconic Maurice Jarre music score used in proper doses. But it is also a film with not quite enough happening at its core to justify all the impressive packaging.

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Movie Review: 45 Years (2015)

An in-depth look at a ripe marriage, 45 Years asks questions about secrets by omissions, and tests the resiliency of a long-term union. The film enjoys two exceptional performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, but has relatively thin material to play with.

Retiree couple Kate and Geoff Mercer (Rampling and Courtenay) live quietly in the English countryside and are approaching their 45th wedding anniversary. He is starting to mentally slow down, while she remains healthy and alert. Their life is rocked to its foundation when a letter arrives to inform Geoff that the body of his lover from 45 years ago, a woman named Katya, has been discovered beneath a melting glacier in Switzerland, where she died while on a hiking vacation with Geoff.

He is devastated by the reawakened memories, and now reveals to Kate the depth of his love and infatuation with Katya, how they considered themselves effectively married, and that he fully intended to spend the rest of his life with Katya had she stayed alive. Suddenly feeling very much second best, Kate is forced to reassess her marriage and the last 45 years of her life, as the anniversary party fast approaches.

Written and directed by Andrew Haigh, 45 Years is a two-person psychological study, with Kate engaged in most of the thinking and Geoff almost happily surrendering to memories. As the thick layer of accumulated years cracks and doubts creeps in, the film unfolds in silent intensity. Consistent with the English middle class propensity to be more reserved than animated, when Kate is abruptly forced to re-examine her marriage, the outcome is not measured in histrionics, but rather in questions pondered but not posed, and answers concluded without being spoken.

With Kate in full reflective mode, Haigh makes clever use of mirrors and screens to emphasize her forced re-examination of a life that once seemed straightforward. Kate cannot help but catch glimpses of herself in mirrors, and she starts to frequently see Geoff indirectly through his reflection. In one of the film's highlights, Kate delves into her husband's past through an old-fashioned slide show and an ad-hoc screen, the old images seen from behind while the camera stares at Kate absorbing, for the first time, a pivotal love in her husband's life.

Contemplation does win the battle with conversation, and 45 Years encounters a problem. The film only runs for the 95 minutes, and plenty of screen time is invested in observing Kate emotionally struggle in silence. Charlotte Rampling carries the weight and projects the internal conflict between a piercing sense of betrayal and the plain facts of a life well lived, but she alone cannot inject enough heart into the film. The pace slows to a crawl, as there is only so much drama that can be squeezed out of abstract events from 45 years prior. When on-screen happenings and on-screen interactions are both most prominent by their absence, forward momentum almost completely stalls.

Despite the narrative scarcity, 45 Years is a worthwhile introspective exploration of marital foundations unexpectedly shifting, late in the cycle of life.

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