Tag: Book-adaptation

Posted on

Sleeping Dogs (2024)

Sleeping Dogs (2024) feels more like an exercise in maintaining screenplay logic than a dynamic piece of storytelling.

Former detective Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe) has Alzheimer’s. The routines of his life are catalogued as lengths of tape, notes stuck to every surfaces of his apartment, each a reminder he can no longer trust himself.

Alzheimer’s played a major part in season three of True Detective (2014- ). There it felt integral to the story. Here it feels deployed, introduced so other parts of the plot can make sense. The most obvious example is the experimental treatment for Roy’s Alzheimer’s. Doctors have inserted electrodes into his brain, to both halt his decline and help him regain his memories. Without this contrivance the plot doesn’t work. Roy wouldn’t agree to meet the death row inmate, a man he helped convict for the murder of Dr. Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas). He certainly wouldn’t consider the man’s protestations of innocence, or agree to reexamine his case, but because of the treatment he does and he can.

As Roy goes back over his files, and starts to question anyone connected to the case, another clumsy plot device gets deployed. He is given a manuscript written by Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood), one-time assistant to the murder victim. As events in the manuscript are recounted, it not only explains the complicated relationship between Finn, Wieder, and Finn’s girlfriend Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), their personal and professional jealousies, it also offers up and points the finger at Baines as a possible killer. Without this map Roy wouldn’t go looking for Baines, realise she changed her name and published part Wieder’s work as her own, nor would he reconnect with Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan), his partner when he was a detective.

The relationships and connections that unfold strain the shreds of credibility, especially when we get to the closing few minutes of the film. I was left wondering why any of them cared enough to take the actions they did? Jimmy’s loyalty to Roy is understandable, but how they both connect to Baines lacks the motivation for what follows. It’s as if the film confuses plot with story, leaving information where emotion should land.

On the plus side Crowe is watchable enough, as are most of the cast, but nothing can make up for the fancies of the screenplay.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8542964/

Posted on

Lies We Tell (2023)

Watching Lies We Tell (2023) feels like discovering treasure buried in your back garden, nothing grand, a few vintage pennies, but treasure all the same.

Based on the obscure 1864 novel Uncle Silas by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, the film opens with a voiceover. Watch anything based on a book and you’ll hear it. It’s the filmmakers way of getting the book’s voice into the film. Here the eighteen-year-old Maud (Agnes O’Casey) offers a short treatise on human nature, on becoming either a monster or an angel.

Following the death of her beloved father, Maud has inherited a vast fortune and Knowl, the family mansion somewhere in the green of Ireland. Still legally a minor, and of the fairer sex, a clutch of executors have control of the estate until she reaches the age of her majority, three years hence.

Against advice, determined to honour the terms of her father’s will, she welcomes to Knowl, as her guardian, her disgraced uncle Silas (David Wilmot). He brings with him a son, a daughter, her governess, and his many debts.

An air of civilised contempt quickly establishes between Maud and her uncle, as Silas tries to bring Maud and her money under his control. First he suggests a marriage to his son. When that doesn’t work he turns her servants against her and confines her. Knowl becomes a haunted house, its vast barracks of rooms a prison bathed in candlelight. When that fails he threatens to have her committed, for her nerves, and subjected to cold water therapy, waterboarding by another name.

There’s a real joy in watching Maud resist the ever more desperate attempts by Silas to have her submit to him. It’s in the way they talk to each other, sparring with nineteenth-century diction, hostility vailed by politeness. The thing of it is, no matter what he does to her, no mater how foul his actions, or the actions of those under his control, Maud will not be broken. She never allows Silas to remover her agency.

In many ways Maud feels like a very modern woman, but I have a sneaking suspicion that despite so much of the world changing, nothing much has changed. In a similar scenario played out in a contemporary setting, the same impulses would take over.

The writing is great, well paced, with each new horror turning into the next. Equally the direction is subtle, and brave enough to let the performances shine.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10406410/

Posted on

Into the Labyrinth (2019)

Into the Labyrinth (2019) is, dare I say it, a labyrinthine film, written and directed by Donato Carrisi, from his novel of the same name. Its Russian doll plot is combined with some interesting visuals to hold your attention, but it demands work to realise which plot is nested within which.

A thirteen year old girl is kidnapped off the street. Fifteen years later a confused and frightened Samantha (Valentina Belle) wakes up in a hospital bed. Hoping to help the authorities catch her kidnapper, psychologist Doctor Green (Dustin Hoffman) wants Samantha to recount her time in the labyrinth.

Inexplicably, only these scenes with Hoffman are in English, the rest of the film is in Italian.

Meanwhile, as the police continue their investigation, debt collector Bruno Genko (Toni Servillo), in a last chance at redemption before cancer kills him, sets out to honour a contract made with Samantha’s family, and find her kidnapper. As Genko gumshoes his way from one damaged soul to the next, the mysterious bunny-headed-man becomes his prime suspect. But who is he?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8594376/

Posted on

The End We Start From (2023)

The End We Start From (2023) is a quiet film, clever enough to let the story breathe, and engaging performances shine.

A heavily pregnant Jodie Comer, known only as “Woman”, is waiting to give birth when it starts to rain. This rain is unrelenting, and when a storm surge hits, London is flooded.

Weaved into this growing crisis, the woman goes into labour and gives birth to a son. These early scenes have an intimacy to them I think would’ve been lost if the film had been written and directed by a man. Writer Alice Birch, from a book by Megan Hunter, and director Mahalia Belo create something truthful, almost sad, that lingers throughout the film.

As the situation continues to worsen, father “R”, mother, and baby son “ZEB”, leave hospital and join the traffic jams trying to escape the rising flood waters. They’re heading for the countryside and the relative safety of the father’s mum and dad, “G” and “N”, where they hope to wait out the worst of the unfolding calamity.

For a short while the extended family have an almost idilic existence, but when supplies run low and they’re forced to go looking for food, tragedy strikes. The matriarch “G” is killed. Husband and son, “N” and “R”, are devastated, and without giving too much away, mother and child are forced to seek refuge in a rescue centre.

Here the woman bonds with “O” (Katherine Waterston), a mother with a child of a similar age. But when the camp is raided by men with guns, there to steal food, the two women take their babies and flee, heading for the relative safety an island commune.

There’s a tension throughout the film between building society anew and rebuilding what we had, no more so than on the island. Unable to accept the isolation demanded by the commune, the woman takes her child and returns to her London home, hoping to rebuild what she had.

It’s interesting to note that throughout the film, most of the men are either aggressive or weak, jacked up on testosterone or overwhelmed by what’s happening. The women are pragmatic, resilient, and strong, they’re survivors. The unsettling message for all of us, but particularly the men, is we’re not prepared for what’s coming. The sad truth is most of us just don’t have the emotional, physical, or practically strength we need to deal with what’s headed our way.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21810682/

Posted on

The Painted Bird (2019)

This might be the purest piece of cinema I’ve seen in a long while. Somewhere in Eastern Europe a jewish boy does what he must to survive the horrors of WWII, manifest as every form of sexual and social deviance possible. Startling in so many ways.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667354/

Posted on

Station Eleven (2021–2022)

Patrick Somerville’s adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s book is not your usual walk through the apocalypse. A deadly flu ripping through the population, killing almost everyone on the planet, is pretty standard. A story connecting multiple timelines, mapping the interconnected lives of an actor, his wife, their son, with an artist, mentor, actress, and healer, is not. Neither are the links each has with the enigmatic Station Eleven, a graphic novel that takes on an almost mystical significance in their post-pandemic world.

To describe it as complex undersells what unfolds.

Twenty years after the pandemic, the Travelling Symphony makes a living performing Shakespeare’s plays to communities of survivors. I have a feeling this troupe of “strolling players” trundling through the decaying remains of civilisation, atop horse-drawn RVs, is something Shakespeare would recognise. The Symphony’s wondrously staged productions, and gloriously inventive costumes, tease meaning from the harshness, a living “Museum of Civilisation” connecting with the past, keeping a dying culture alive.

Not everyone shares the Symphony’s reverence for the time before. The Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) has a more antagonistic relationship with life past. It’s in this tension, between all things pre and post pandemic, between those connected with civilisation, and the “post-pan” children, for whom the world before is a myth, that the drama unfolds. When the Symphony repeats the mantra “we don’t leave the wheel” they’re not only talking about the route they take, the communities the perform to, but the culture they cling to. If Shakespeare is culture, written down, Station Eleven is the return to, the re-emergence of, the oral traditions of storytelling, of keeping history.

It’s the culture gone full circle.

Narratively inventive, the story’s fluid relationship with time, jumping back and forth, weeks, month, years before and after the pandemic, leaves the feeling  of memories alive in your mind. For the infant and adult Kirsten (Matilda Lawler and Mackenzie Davis), the Symphony’s best actress, they’re more than just memories, they’re real and active, alive. There’s a sequence, you might call it a dream, where younger and older Kirsten are together, fully engage, talking to one other, communicating across time.

This dynamic approach to storytelling brings depth to apocalypse.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10574236/

Posted on

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) is a fairy tale, a kitchen-sink Cinderella story, in the tradition of those energetic comedies made at Ealing Studio throughout the nineteen-fifties.

Salt of the earth cleaning lady Mrs. Harris, irreplaceable in an unseen kind of way, falls in love with a couture Dior owned by one of her employers, and resolves to get one for herself.

Hard work and good luck conspire to get Mrs. Harris (Lesley Manville) the money she needs. There’s a small reward for handing in a precious ring, added to a lump sum from her backdated widow’s pension, that’s put with the winnings from a sneaky bet. Quicker than you can say, I will go to the ball, she’s clutching a small fortune, as tightly as her dreams of a dress, arriving in Paris just in time to crash the latest Dior show.

If fortune favours the bold, naivety, persistence, and a kind heart favours Mrs. Harris, letting her win over the younger members of house Dior, and wrangling the second best dress of her dreams. Her first is nabbed by the snobby wife of a businessman, who’s petty frock grab is as pouty as her sullen daughter.

As the dress comes to life, so does Mrs. Harris, slowly discovering her joie de vivre for the first time. Part of me wishes it wasn’t a dress bringing her out of her shell, animating her. It feels patronising for her to be defined that way. Which is perhaps why it’s set in the nineteen-fifties? It’s less plausible outside of that frame.

Mrs. Harris is an unapologetically optimistic film, old inspiring young, breathing new life in the old, all spurred on by Mrs. Harris and her indomitable spirit. This optimism comes with a side order of nostalgia, appealing to ideas about our past that just aren’t real, but it is a Cinderella story about a beautiful princess, in a stunning frock, finding her prince.

Truth is, for all of its faults, I was charmed by a warm hearted film.

https://www.imdb.com/titleg/tt5151570/

Posted on

White Noise (2022)

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation, of Don DeLillo’s 1985 book of the same name, is an absurdist joyride through the American dream.

DeLillo‘s book, described as a cornerstone of postmodern literature, has been translated into a film that is both self-aware and ironic.

The most obvious example is in the stylised dialogue, an anxious stream of consciousness that brings on and exasperates feelings of distance and isolation. Everyone talks but no one listens. So when professor of Hitler studies Jack (Adam Driver), and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), are forced to take their children and flee an “airborne toxic event”, fears of death become physically and emotionally all consuming, especially for Babette. Watch with expectations and you’ll be disappointed. Watch without and you’ll be intrigued.

The end title are joy with an original track, New Body Rumba, by LCD Soundsystem, who apparently “reunited to record their first new music in over five years for the film”.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6160448/

Posted on

The Wonder (2022)

Faith and science clash in the rural midlands of Ireland in 1862. English nurse “Lib” Wright (Florence Pugh), steadfast veteran of the Crimean war, has been brought from London, hired to observe the eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who despite not eating remains fit and healthy. Is the girl faking, being surreptitiously fed, or is she as many claim, a miracle?

Pugh is commanding, tough, vulnerable, complicit in teasing a compelling performance from the young Cassidy. Director Sebastián Lelio leans into the stifled emotions, without offering judgment, letting the uncomfortable truths of the story live, emerge from events. His choice to bookend the story in the sets from the film, is unique and some might say superfluous? I read it as highlighting our own willingness to believe a fiction. That or a nod to the book the story is based on by Emma Donoghue. Neither would surprise me.

An interesting film that makes you believe in the story.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9288822/

Posted on

The Alienist 2018–2020

I was asked to write three hundred words on a scripted TV show. This is what I wrote.

The Alienist is a thriller set in New York at the close of the nineteenth century. A time when sexism, racism, and corruption are endemic. Where poverty chafes against wealth, and someone is preying on the boys that work the streets and brothels of midtown.

When the mutilated corpse of a boy is found on the scaffolds of the Williamsburg Bridge, psychologist Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl) enlists the help of friend and illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans) to make drawings of the murder. Convinced it’s linked to the murder of a former patient, Kreizler uses his connection with the newly appointed police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty), to involve himself in the investigation, where he is joined by the first woman to work for the NYPD, Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning).

Using Kreizler’s psychological insights, and the latest pathology techniques, employed by detectives Lucius and Marcus Isaacson (Matthew Shear and Douglas Smith), the group slowly builds a profile of the killer, and set out to stop him. 

The production does a good job of recreating the squalor of the time, but does nothing to contextualise that poverty. It’s hinted at. Marcus meets single-mother Ester (Daisy Bevan) handing out leaflets for a socialist rally. But their brief affair is dealt with on a personal level, missing the chance to explore the upheavals that are intrinsic to the social changes they’re part of.

The main characters are complicated, with traumatic histories, that unfortunately rub too gently against their environment. Howard is perhaps the best example. It’s as if she’s going through the motions of being independent, a trailblazer, without the sternness of a woman battling the expectations of her class and sex.

Overall it’s a familiar set-up, in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, and while it gently challenges the morays of the time, they’re merely the backdrop to the mystery, rather than an integral part of the story.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4604612/