"Evita" (PG) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
It won't he easy, you'll think it strange some warned when, to paraphrase that song, all you have to do is look at it to know that every word is sung. Well, not every word about two per cent of the words in Alan Parker's radically operatic screen musical of Evita emerge as spoken dialogue - but such is the seductive power of the movie from its opening scene onwards that its being sung through becomes more of an asset than an obstacle.
That opening sequence is set in a Buenos Aires cinema in 1952, when the manager interrupts a screening to tell the audience that Eva Peron is dead. The weeping response of that cinema audience cues the chain reaction of national grief that sweeps the country as Argentina does cry, and copiously - for her. Parker cuts to 1926 and the small Pampas town of Junin as the illegitimate child who is the seven-year-old Eva Duarte, and her family, are refused access to the funeral of her biological father - before the film returns to Buenos Aires and the enormous funeral for Eva herself, who died of uterine cancer at the age of 33.
Structured in a series of flashbacks, the movie chronicles the rise of Eva - played, as you may have heard in passing, by Madonna - from her teens when she moves to the big city with an oily tango singer (a well-cast Jimmy Nail). Her ascent is observed cynically by the caustic commentator, Che, an ubiquitous Everyman character played by Antonio Banderas who turns up in a range of guises.
In the original 1976 concept album by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber and in the stage musical it spawned two years later, the character of Che was supposed, to be the Sixties revolutionary pin-up, Che Guevara, and he wore a beard, beret and fatigues in the theatrical productions of the show. Given the sheer improbability of Guevara and Eva ever meeting - he was just 24 when he graduated in medicine from Buenos Aires University in 1953, a year after Eva's death - Alan Parker's screenplay for Evita dismisses that conceit and the Che character becomes a Brechtian commentator rather like the sardonic master of ceremonies played by Joel Grey in Bob Fosse's 1972 film of Cabaret, the last great musical to grace a cinema screen.
Che's cynicism echoes Tim Rice's most wittily acerbic lyrics as, in the Goodnight And Thank You number, Eva sleeps her way to the top, discarding men as they become less useful to her before reaching her zenith in the bed of the shrewd right-wing military man, Juan Peron (the redoubtable Jonathan Pryce), whose political star ascends in parallel.
There are echoes within echoes - of Eva's rejection at her father's funeral - in the subsequent sequence, an elaborate show-stopper, as she appals but ultimately triumphs over the sneering aristocracy who chorus: "Things have reached a pretty pass/When someone pretty lower class/Graceless and vulgar, uninspired/Can be accepted and admired."
The superbly staged Rainbow Tour sequence in which Eva, media-savvy before her time, embarks on a Peron-supporting trip through Europe - emphasises the musical's warts-and-all view of Eva Peron, as does the Money Keeps Rolling In montage which follows, showing what the Eva Peron Foundation achieved while drawing attention to the strikes, unemployment and oppression of the press during the Peron regime.
However, by the end even the cynical Che mourns the early passing of the woman described in the libretto as "a cross between a bedroom fantasy and a saint". These contradictions in Eva's personality are expressed persuasively by Madonna in an intense, driven performance which exudes "a luminous screen presence and the kind of star quality which Eva herself projected. Belting out his songs with panache, Antonio Banderas is more dynamic than ever before on screen as the observer, Che.
This vibrant, spectacular and often spine-tingling movie is in itself a tremendous testimony to the collaborative nature of cinema when it gels so effectively under the unique vision of its director - in this case Alan Parker, a filmmaker who clearly understands the complementary nature of music and movies like very, very few others.
Parker revolutionises, revitalises and reinvents the screen musical daringly and triumphantly in his meticulous and astute transposition of Evita from stage to screen. (Oliver Stone receives a joint screenplay credit with Parker for his work on earlier drafts of the picture in its extended gestation as a movie). The stars of the movie are not just Madonna, Banderas and Parker, but also its truly gifted French lighting cameraman, Darius Khondji; its dexterous production designer, Brian Morris; its expert costume designer, Penny Rose; and crucially, its brilliant editor, Gerry Hambling whose precise, unshowy work perfectly orchestrates the rhythms of the film.
Alan Parker's consistently adroit staging of the magnificent crowd scenes equals David Lean at his most ambitious and have an epic sweep to them that the digital multiplication employed by movies such as Braveheart never could hope to achieve. And Parker has richly embellished and transformed what was a moderately entertaining stage musical when I saw it in London's West End in the original production, into something thrilling, special and truly cinematic.
"Shine" (IS) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Music again plays a key-role in this week's other stylised dramatisation of the career highs and medical lows in the life of another remarkable individual. Scott Hicks's touching Australian movie, Shine, inevitably recalls another accomplished Antipodean biopic, Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, in its factually-based portrait of a tormented artist who, like the writer Janet Frame in Campion's picture, is played at different ages by three different actors.
The subject of Shine is David Helfgott, an exceptional concert pianist who is still alive and performs in the concert pieces on the soundtrack. The film documents his troubled life, beginning in Perth in the 1950s when Helfgott (played by Alex Rafalowicz) is a child prodigy driven relentlessly by his domineering father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an impoverished but stubbornly self-sufficient Polish-Jewish refugee who escaped the Holocaust.
For all the father's obsession with success for his son, he displays a fundamental jealousy when he prevents David from accepting a US scholarship offered by Isaac Stern. When the teenage David (Noah Taylor) finally stands up to his possessive father and goes to study at the London College of Music, he is banished from the family home. The traumas of David's life finally cave in on him and after a virtuoso performance of Rachmaninov's notoriously difficult Piano Concerto No 3, he has a complete breakdown.
Under the sensitive and inventive direction of Scott Hicks - an Australian director who has specialised in television documentary - Shine unfolds as a fascinating, thoughtful and touching picture of how a young life and talent can be virtually destroyed by a misguided parent's bizarre expression of love, and how that victim somehow manages to pull together some of the pieces of his life in later years.
Hicks employs an elliptical musical structure to explore the contradictions between the volatile and eccentric but essentially innocent character of David Helfgott, and the impeccable precision he brings to playing some of the most complex musical pieces. In the thrilling, brilliantly filmed sequence of David performing Rachmaninov, Hicks draws clear parallels between the pianist and the composer, both of whom were child prodigies who achieved international recognition while in their teens and went on to suffer from depression and to be subjected to exhaustive therapy - although the film devotes little time to depicting Helfgott's treatment.
Shine is charged by the vivid performances of its principal players, especially Noah Taylor, the talented young star of The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting, and Geoffrey Rush, an Australian stage actor who, in one of his earliest roles, co-starred with Mel Gibson in Waiting For Godot. The authoritative German actor, Arm in Mueller-Stahl, is firmly effective as the intimidating father, and the supporting cast notably includes the British actresses, Googie Withers, a veteran whose career spans over 60 years, and Lynn Redgrave.
"Sleepers" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
"This is a true story," declares the loquacious narrator at the outset of Barry Levinson's flashy film based on Lorenzo Carcaterra's allegedly autobiographical book, Sleepers, although the vigorous contesting of the story's purported facts by the American media last year suggests otherwise.
True or false, Sleepers begins promisingly enough in New York's tough Hell's Kitchen area in the summer of 1966. The focus is on four boys, close friends in their early teens and irrepressible pranksters until one of their escapades goes disastrously wrong and they are sentenced to over a year in a reform school. There they are brutally abused, tortured and raped by sadistic wardens led by Kevin Bacon in a reversal of his role as a cruelly maltreated prisoner in the harrowing Murder In The First.
After an hour, this over-extended film - which takes its title from a slang term for imprisoned juvenile offenders - moves forward in time to 1981 when two of the boys have grown up to be full-time criminals (played by Ron Eldard and Billy Crudup), while another is an assistant district attorney (Brad Pitt), and the fourth, the narrator based on Lorenzo Carcaterra, is a journalist (Jason Patric).
A revenge killing leads to a protracted courtroom drama where the boys enlist the help of their long-time priest buddy and mentor - played by a chain-smoking Robert De Niro on auto-pilot as a Method actor's spin on early Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy roles - and a stereotypical washed-up and boozy lawyer (Dustin Hoffman).
This entirely dubious exercise in exploitation grows gradually more convoluted and unconvincing in the preposterous second half, and it is undermined regularly by Levinson's pretentious and self-conscious direction which pointlessly employs monochrome and slow-motion footage and distorted sound. Not since Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence has a movie been saddled with such an excess of superfluous narration, and the recurring references to The Count Of Monte Cristo are arch and grating.
The only distinctive performances come not from the high-profile actors in the cast, but from the youngsters who play the four friends as boys - especially Brad Renfro and Joe Perrino. Their energetic work is in sharp contrast to the blankness of the characters' adult incarnations. The largely wasted cast also includes Vittorio Gassman and, awkwardly cast as the token woman, Minnie Driver from Circle Of friends.
"American Buffalo" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Dustin Hoffman has a much more substantial role in American Buffalo, another transposition from stage to screen; but Michael Corrente's film of David Mamet's stage play is utterly devoid of the visual imagination brought to Evita by Alan Parker and none of the compelling charge of James Foley's arresting film of Mamet's play, Glengarry Glen Ross, shown on television here twice in the past week.
Television would make a much more appropriate home for Corrente's resolutely stagebound film of American Buffalo, which was adapted for the screen by Mamet himself. This account of honour among thieves is set in a junk-shop, as a poker-playing hustler (Hoffman) intervenes when his friend (Dennis Franz from NYPD Blue), the owner of the junk-shop, enlists the help of a young protege (Sean Nelson from Fresh) to steal a valuable coin, a buffalo-head nickel he has undervalued.
Beyond recording Mamet's punchy dialogue on film, this effort's only value is Hoffman's all-consuming, expletive-spouting performance, a masterclass in close-up acting, and he is well supported in the three-hander by Franz and Nelson. But Corrente situates all three on what is achingly obviously a stage set, and his minimal attempts to open out the play are clumsy and even risible.
Hugh Linehan adds:
"Hearts and Minds" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
It has almost become a truism for the makers of films about Anglo-Irish political conflict to refer to the Vietnam movies made by Americans in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a template for their own work. Whatever the merits of that particular argument, it's not surprising to see the same model appropriated in a South African context, now that that country's long-running war is over. One of the problems with Ralph Ziman's Hearts And Minds is that it shows those influences too clearly, thereby inviting unflattering comparisons.
Danny Keogh plays a South African undercover police officer who helps implement the undercover "dirty war" of the apartheid government, abducting, torturing and murdering suspected activists.
Ziman's debt to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (and to that film's inspiration, Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness) is freely acknowledged, but Keogh's performance is also reminiscent of the James Woods character in Oliver Stone's Salvador. However, Ziman has neither the resources nor the cinematic flair of Coppola and Stone; as a result, Hearts And Minds seems one-dimensional and its attempts to terrify or shock us fall flat. The resulting film is an interesting experiment, but never really convinces and ends with an absurd non sequitur.
