Political themes were a feature of the 52nd London Film Festival, with two new movies about American presidents inevitably grabbing the attention, writes Michael Dwyer
THE TIMING OF the 52nd London Film Festival, over the fortnight before polling day in the US tomorrow, ensured that, among the 200 movies on show, the two that generated the greatest anticipation dealt with American presidents. The subjects of both movies are Republicans, the present occupant of the Oval Office in Oliver Stone's W., and a former leader who resigned in disgrace in Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon.
Anyone expecting a demonisation of either president would be better advised to rent a DVD of Robert Altman's Secret Honor, featuring Philip Baker Hall in a one-man show as Richard Nixon, or Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, with all its scathing references to George W Bush.
Given its world premiere as the festival's opening presentation, Frost/Nixon originated on the London stage before transferring to Broadway. While the play has been opened out for the film version, it remains true to its source, having been adapted for the screen by its playwright, Peter Morgan, screenwriter on The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and The Deal, all of which explored the personalities of power figures, respectively Queen Elizabeth II, Idi Amin, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Michael Sheen, who played Blair in The Deal and The Queen, reaffirms his chameleonic talents with a persuasive portrayal of David Frost in the new film, which is set in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon (played by Frank Langella) resigned as president following the Watergate scandal. At the time Frost was a successful TV presenter in Britain and Australia but had failed to crack the US market, and the movie charts the complicated negotiations that secured him an exclusive TV interview with Nixon in 1977.
The wily former president regards the interview as "a duel", and so it proceeds as the two men prepare themselves with research, training and tactics. When they settle into their long recording sessions, Nixon proves slyly manipulative and adept at sidestepping questions and drifting into rambling anecdotes that eat up Frost's allocated time.
This battle of wits is wholly absorbing in a film made with alert attention to detail and featuring a strong supporting cast that includes Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones and (as Frost's producer, John Birt) Matthew Macfadyen. It is Langella's subtle, hypnotic portrayal of Nixon that exerts the greatest fascination, and he may well be rewarded with an Oscar next spring.
Oliver Stone's 1995 film, Nixon, depicted the president (played by Anthony Hopkins) as a tragic character, a brooding, hard-drinking man haunted by his past. In W., which goes on Irish cinema release from Friday, Stone views George W Bush (played by Josh Brolin) as an insecure man who feels overshadowed and unloved by his father (James Cromwell). Moving back and forwards in time, W. notes the surges and steep dips in the approval ratings Bush gets from his father and from the American public.
Stone's movie begins quite playfully in 2002 at a White House meeting where the president and his core team of advisers coin the term "axis of evil" as they become consumed with finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It then cuts to 1966 when Bush is a rowdy, boozy Yale student who gets arrested after a football game, and moves on to mark his failure in differing occupations, prompting his father to ask: "Who do you think you are? A Kennedy?"
Unusually for a Stone film, W. is spiked with broad humour, as if the director cannot take his subject too seriously, a feeling the audience seems encouraged to share despite the gravity of the key issues the film has to raise. It ultimately portrays Bush as an intellectually and emotionally immature man, and Brolin plays the part with energy and conviction. Stone surrounds him with an astutely chosen cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss as the unswervingly hawkish Dick Cheney, Thandie Newton as a dead ringer for Condoleezza Rice, and Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, with a permanent phoney smile as he mangles language in utterances such as "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
WITH BARACK OBAMA seemingly poised to replace Bush as president, another timely American movie, The Secret Life of Bees, is set in 1964 when the prospect of a black man leading the nation was unthinkable. The setting is small-town South Carolina when black people were allowed to vote for the first time. In a startling early scene, a young woman, Rosaleen, is on her way to register as a voter for the first time when she is attacked verbally and then physically by white bigots. (Rosaleen is played by Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother and nephew were murdered in Chicago last week.)
Based on Sue Monk Kidd's bestselling novel, The Secret Life of Bees features Dakota Fanning as sensitive 14-year-old Lily Owens, who flees her volatile widower father (Paul Bettany) and goes on the run with Rosaleen, their housekeeper. They find refuge in the home of a black woman (Queen Latifah), who runs a successful honey-making business, and her sisters (played by Alicia Keys and Sophie Okenedo). The storyline is conventional and relies too heavily on coincidence, but the capable cast helps to hold the attention.
Beginning three years later, in 1967, The Baader Meinhof Complex spans 10 turbulent years during which Red Army Faction terrorists wreaked havoc in what was then West Germany. The group was founded when Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a left-wing journalist, left her comfortable home, her unfaithful husband and their two children to join hot-headed activist Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and his ruthless lover, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek).
The film follows their anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist gang's progression from street protests and the burning of department stores to the extremes of kidnapping, hijacking and cold-blooded killings. It also addresses how the group became even more powerful and dangerous when the leaders were jailed and succeeded by equally determined recruits.
German director Uli Edel takes a cold, dispassionate view of them in an ambitious film charged with performances of remarkable commitment and brilliantly staged action sequences shot with documentary-style urgency. The casting of Gedeck as Meinhof and Bruno Ganz as the German chief of police has led to the film being bracketed with The Lives of Others (the 1960s-set East Berlin surveillance drama that starred Gedeck) and Downfall (in which Ganz played Adolf Hitler) as a trilogy, however coincidental, that confronts the darkest eras of 20th-century Germany.
Costing in the region of €20 million, The Baader Meinhof Complex is said to be the most expensive German production to date. Achieved on a far smaller budget, the UK-Irish co-production, Helen, is the first feature from writer-directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor after Civic Life Series, the impressive cycle of socially concerned short films they made under the collective name Desperate Optimists.
Shot in a distinctive formal visual style, Helen is a compelling psychological thriller in which Annie Townsend plays an 18-year-old loner whose life is changed after she agrees to participate in a police reconstruction during the search for a missing student. What follows is an effectively low-key drama that is intriguing and thought-provoking. Although the film is set in England, it uses some familiar Dublin locations and the production was supported by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.
French writer-director Marc Fitoussi makes an engaging debut with La Vie d'Artiste, a contemporary serious comedy of creative talents and their thwarted ambitions. Sandrine Kiberlain plays an actress reduced to dubbing Japanese anime films while her friend gets leading roles in plays and movies. Emilie Duquenne dreams of being a popular singer, but has to make do with hosting duties at a karaoke club. And Denis Podalydès is cast as a teacher whose interest in his job is minimal because he is so absorbed with struggling to complete his second novel. Further humiliations await all three in Fitoussi's deviously structured screenplay that eschews soft options on its road to a neat resolution.
THE MIXED FORTUNES of Australian actors and filmmakers in the 1970s are charted in Mark Hartley's highly entertaining documentary, Not Quite Hollywood. Australia used to have the most draconian film censorship regime in the world, according to Hartley, clearly unaware of how much stricter it was in Ireland.
He traces the development of the Australian film industry to the relaxation of the censorship laws in the late 1960s, after which the industry took off on parallel tracks. There were such award-winning achievements as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and My Brilliant Career, which introduced directors Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Gillian Armstrong, respectively, to international audiences.
Then there were the crude, sexually explicit comedies such as Alvin Purple and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which collected no prizes but scored at the box office. Hartley's meticulously researched documentary is illustrated with copious clips and features contributions from a wide range of commentators, none of whom is more animated and excited than Quentin Tarantino.
Always a hot ticket, London's annual Surprise Film was none too surprising this year. A critical success at the Venice and Toronto festivals in September, The Wrestler was conspicuously absent from the London programme. Featuring Mickey Rourke in a comeback performance that should get him an Oscar nomination, it was an obvious but enthusiastically greeted choice as the surprise film.
The London festival closed on a high note with Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, set in Mumbai, in which a street-raised boy (Dev Patel) comes under suspicion when he is just one question away from winning the jackpot of 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. The film is hard-edged, vibrant and exhilarating.
