George Harrison: Living In The Material World

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 15, 2011.

Eric Clapton says that hanging out with his Beatle mate George Harrison at the height of the 1960s was like being with King Arthur at Camelot – which is hardly an exaggerated comparison. Long ago, the Beatles passed into myth: the story of their rise to fame and eventual break-up will continue to be told and retold, from every possible point of view.

Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour documentary centres on the enigmatic Harrison and his many adventures – from his adolescence in Liverpool to his search for truth in India to his significant later career as a film producer, starting with Monty Python's Life Of Brian (1979). Scorsese doesn't bother for long with second-hand testimony from critics or historians; the emphasis is on Harrison's personality as recalled by those who knew him best, including his surviving bandmates and both his wives.

The film fits easily into Scorsese's body of work, as a study of a complex, sometimes angry figure struggling with his contradictions. Harrison was as hedonistic as the next pop star, but nobody seems to doubt the depth of his spiritual commitment, nor the capacity for humility and tenderness which is expressed in his best-known songs (“Here Comes the Sun,” for example, or “My Sweet Lord”). Overall, it's an admiring portrait, but one that acknowledges the less appealing side of Harrison's determination to do things his own way: it's intriguing that the man who organised the first rock benefit concert – for Bangladesh in 1971 – kept plotting to avoid the taxman right up till his death.

Take Shelter

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 15, 2011.

Michael Shannon is the model of a professionally peculiar actor – an intense, looming presence who's not liable to be cast in a romantic comedy any time soon. Like any natural resource, he can be used for good or ill: he's mesmerising as a preacher of paranoia in William Friedkin's Bug (2006), a tad monotonous in the TV gangster drama Boardwalk Empire, where his performance seems to consist of one long, crazed stare.

That stare is set in a more satisfying context in the psychological thriller Take Shelter, the second feature from the American writer-director Jeff Nichols, who previously worked with Shannon on Shotgun Stories (2007). The setting is the American heartland – specifically rural Ohio, where construction worker Curtis LaForche lives with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain from The Tree of Life) and their young daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart).

Despite some troubles arising from Hannah's deafness, Curtis at first seems an enviable man, liked and respected by all. But each night, he wakes in terror from dreams that suggest impending doom: his dog goes mad and attacks him, drops of motor-oil mysteriously fall from the sky. Gradually he becomes convinced that there's a world-shaking storm on the way – one that will destroy him and his loved ones if he's not prepared. Soon he's making plans to upgrade the underground tornado shelter at the back of his home: he secretly borrows earth-moving equipment from work, and takes out a new mortgage without consulting his wife.

Even as he puts these arrangements in place, Curtis is aware that his behaviour could be seen as less than rational, especially as schizophrenia runs in his family. But like most tales of the fantastic, Take Shelter keeps us guessing. Is the apocalyptic storm envisaged by Curtis merely a symbol for the darkness inside his mind? Or is he a true prophet, a second Noah?

Part of Nichols' achievement is that he and his collaborators manage to find visual drama in a basically internal struggle. Light floods through the wide windows of the LaForche home, revealing the material reality of the family's existence – the thrift-shop crockery, the knick-knacks and magazines – with a kind of pitiless clarity. Out of doors, surrounded by plains that stretch to the horizon, Curtis and his co-workers seem utterly exposed to the eye of God.

We're made to feel that a storm could indeed blow everything away in an instant – that is, everything except for Shannon's lumbering body, which seems bound to the earth by invisible chains. Chastain, by contrast, makes Samantha ethereal even in her distress; it's no wonder these two rarely see eye to eye.

This is a narrowly conceived but powerful film, and more than just a straightforward character study. Curtis' fears correlate with wider anxieties around terrorism, the financial crisis and the decay of the environment; there's nothing delusional about his sense of the fragility of the American dream. “You take your eye off the ball in this economy, you're screwed,” says Curtis' brother (Ray McKinnon). It's stressed that without his job, Curtis would have no health insurance, and hence no access to crucial surgery for Hannah. Other motifs likewise seem designed as reflections of the divided condition of modern America – not least the clash between Curtis' mystical visions and Samantha's more conventional religious faith.

In many respects, Take Shelter is an independent cousin to the Hollywood films of the much-maligned M. Night Shyamalan, whose troubled protagonists similarly have to fight their way to a true understanding of the world's story and their own. Shyamalan is notorious for his trick endings – and likewise, not all the questions raised by Take Shelter are provided with satisfying answers. But by the time we reach the suspenseful climax, it hardly matters: the feeling of dread is authentic whether the threat comes from beyond or from within.

Red State

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 13, 2011.

This grim horror-thriller marks an intriguing comeback for slacker auteur Kevin Smith, whose films since Clerks (1994) have been of decreasing interest for anyone aside from his most committed fans. The opening scenes are in Smith's familiar, scabrous vein: teenage Jared (Kyle Gallner) arranges to hook up with an older woman he's met online, and invites his friends (Michael Angareno and Nicholas Braun) to get a piece of the action. On the evening of the rendezvous, they cross paths with the viciously homophobic Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), evidently modelled on the notorious Fred Phelps. For ten minutes of screen time they sit tight while Cooper preaches a seductive, well-modulated, utterly poisonous sermon to his flock; it's a mesmerising sequence, probably the best of Smith's career.

As the fundamentalists come under siege, the narrative keeps changing focus – partly because Smith has never had a particular gift for plot construction, and partly because he seems bent on inducing a maximum of moral discomfort. Nobody is especially admirable (including the sole significant gay character) and much of the bleakest satire is aimed at the US government. In the end Red State is less of a departure than it first appears for a director whose films have always centred on language and debate, and whose relish in the obscene has rarely masked his native puritanism. Philosophically, the film is a muddle – which is no surprise given the range of Big Issues that come into play. But too much ambition is better than too little, and a terrific cast including Melissa Leo and John Goodman helps bring all the rhetoric to life.

The Thing (2011)

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 13, 2011.

In a snowy wilderness, a group of scientists uncover evidence of a flying saucer crash, and soon find themselves battling a ravenous alien monster: originating in a pulp magazine story first published in 1938, this durable premise has inspired two earlier films, both classics of their kind. Made near the start of the Cold War, Howard Hawks' 1951 production The Thing From Another World stressed the camaraderie and bravery of the human characters, aside from an effete intellectual (Robert O. Cornthwaite) whose pacifism put everyone at risk. In John Carpenter's far bleaker The Thing (1982) the creature had shape-shifting powers, forcing those left alive to retreat into isolation and paranoia.

Matthijs van Heijningen's capable and respectful remake borrows from both its predecessors. As in the Hawks film, there's an arrogant scientist (Ulrich Thomsen) and a feisty heroine (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who proves to be smarter than her boss. And as in the Carpenter film – to which this is nominally a prequel – there are widescreen "Antarctic" vistas, gruesome special effects, and long suspenseful sequences which depend on our knowledge that anyone at all could be the monster in disguise. The screenplay by Eric Heisserer and Ronald D. Moore adds a few less familiar elements – such as the uneasy relationship between the American characters and the Norwegians – but by and large this is the same old Thing. If you like your horror with an undertone of reassuring familiarity, you can be sure of getting your money's worth.

What's Your Number?

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 13, 2011.

Judging by the current wave of Hollywood romantic comedies, there's still plenty of anxiety around the question of how much sex women should be having, and who with. Latest in line to have her morals assessed is Ally, played by the great Anna Faris, who realises in her thirties that she's had many more lovers than the national average. Rather than add new names to the list, she resolves to track down each of her exes to see if one of them might after all be her soulmate; aiding her is her neighbor Colin (Chris Evans) a “struggling musician” with a background in surveillance and a colourful sexual history of his own.

Any child could guess where this story is headed, but Ally sticks to her idiotic plan, chasing after a series of unavailable guys: one is about to get married, another turns out to be gay, and so forth. There's an uncomfortable subtext to these humiliations: Ally views herself as damaged goods, and the film never seems entirely sure this belief is misplaced. Nor is it clear whether she's meant to be a total airhead, or just a cheerful, normal girl who happens to fall over a lot. Still, it's hard to dislike any vehicle for Faris – the slob's Marilyn Monroe, with her gift for dejection and her pliable face like a hastily-drawn cartoon. Hearing her recite the lyrics to “Wouldn't It Be Loverly” in the world's worst Cockney accent is a joy in its own right.

Alice Addison (The Hunter)

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 8, 2011.

The anti-hero of Julia Leigh's novel The Hunter, who calls himself Martin David, is as intriguing as he is hard to like. Played by Willem Dafoe in the newly-released film of the book, Martin arrives in western Tasmania on a secret mission: to track down and kill the last surviving Tasmanian tiger on behalf of a European biotech company hoping to harvest the creature's genetic material. Once he's out in the field, nothing can distract him from his grim task – not even the possibility he might be able to aid a few other lost souls.

Not surprisingly, producers raced to snap up the film rights for this unusual, dramatic story. But though Leigh would go on to make her debut as a film director with the erotic drama Sleeping Beauty – released here last June – she declined to take a hands-on role in bringing The Hunter to the screen. Instead, the screenplay was written by Alice Addison, whose other credits include the telemovie The Silence (2006) and episodes of RAN: Remote Area Nurse.

Addison's work on The Hunter recently won her a Queensland Premier's Literary Award, but when producer Vincent Sheehan first approached her six or seven years ago, she had her doubts. “I had read the book when I was in film school in 1999 when it came out,” she says. “Even though I loved the writing, I didn't really feel a connection to the character.”

Yet over the course of many drafts, she gradually realised what she and Martin had in common. “Although I don't shoot things, I spend a lot of time as a writer searching for something that's elusive.” Writing, like hunting, is a solitary occupation, one that involves slogging through unknown territory with no guaranteed reward.

For much of the novel Martin is alone with his own thoughts, travelling into mountainous, densely forested country which Leigh describes in minute detail. Entering imaginatively into that space was a challenge for Addison – who was familiar with the landscape of western Tasmania, but not intimately so. “I'd been there several times on holidays. I'd never done anything like bushwalking.”

With Sheehan and the film's director Daniel Nettheim, she embarked on a research trip to explore the region at first hand. “I was able to hire a car and drive around and soak it up a little more,” she says. “It's just such a beautiful place and I'm so thrilled that they were able to shoot it down there, because it's not an easy thing to do.”

Addison says that the screenplay was designed so that Martin would move across different types of wilderness, reflecting his shifting state of mind. “I'd write sequences that were set in areas of mutton-grass flats, or horizontal forest. That could only be a guide, because when they came to shoot it was all dependent on where they could get trucks to. So it didn't replicate exactly what I had pictured, but I think we got a sense of the breadth of the landscape.”

During their stay in Tasmania, Addison and the others also took the opportunity to talk to real-life counterparts of the characters. “We spent a lot of time with locals, people who were hunting wallabies for meat, and also some environmentalists and people who were in the forestry industry.”

While the battle between loggers and greenies figures significantly in the background of the story, Addison says there was no intention of making a political statement. The key thing was to represent everyone fairly: “We wanted the central character to come down and walk between them, without taking a side.”

There's a surface realism to Leigh's novel, but also more than a hint of allegory; the tiger becomes a symbol, like the whale in Moby Dick. “As a writer you always want to go for the poetry of it,” Addison says. “But you have to ground a film in some kind of reality in order to get an audience.”

Addison says that she tried to respect “the grace and the quiet” of Leigh's prose while giving Martin more scope to reveal himself in action. “The book is incredibly internal, and film can't be so internal,” she says. “We can't spend hours up a mountain with a man hunting without knowing what's going on in his head. And you have access to the voices in his head in literature, but you don't in a screenplay – unless you use a clunky voiceover, which we didn't want to do.”

Part of the solution she arrived at was to focus more on Martin's relationships with the folk he meets in Tasmania – particularly single mother Lucy Armstrong (Frances O'Connor), a bright but woozy hippie who's having trouble taking care of her kids (Morgana Davies and Finn Woodlock). “In the book he's often thinking about the family, while he's striding through the wilderness,” Addison says. “What we did in the film is we armed him with a photograph of the family that had been given to him by the little girl as a way to find her father, who's missing up on the plateau.”

“One night, sitting eating his dinner in front of the fire, he gets out the image and looks at it. You get a sense that he's thinking about more than just an image in front of him – he's thinking about the promise of something else that could be in his life.”

Still, The Hunter is no simple tale of redemption. Despite doubts expressed by funding bodies, Addison says that she and Nettheim were determined that Martin would remain the morally ambiguous figure originally conceived by Leigh. On the other hand, it was important to ensure that viewers understood his reasons for making certain choices.

Consequently, novel and film end in ways that are similar but not identical. “The central character in the film goes through a transformation, in a way that he never really does in the book,” Addison says. “I found the book an entirely satisfying experience, but I think if it had been transferred directly to the screen it would have struggled to find an audience.”

Only recently did she and Nettheim face the ultimate challenge of showing their film to Leigh herself. “She hadn't seen it, or read any drafts, before it screened at the Toronto Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. So that was a very nerve-wracking experience for me, sitting a seat away from her as she watched it for the first time.”

“But I think she liked it – she certainly hasn't said otherwise to me! She turned to us afterwards and gave us the thumbs up. So I thought, you know, we must have got away with it.”

Footloose

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 6, 2011.

Fans of the original Footloose (1984) will be happy to know that Craig Brewer's remake has a similar high-energy credit sequence. You'll remember all those dancing feet in different types of shoes; what you won't remember is the subsequent twist where five teenagers die in a horrific car smash on their way home. At the urging of Reverend Shaw (Dennis Quaid) – father to one of the victims – the civic leaders of Bomont, Georgia enact a series of laws to keep their young people in line: no playing loud music, no staying out late, and no dancing except under close supervision. It's up to Ren (Kenny Wormald), newly arrived from Boston, to stand up for the rights of his generation while bringing the values of red and blue states together.

Converting a minor 1980s teen flick into an allegory about September 11 and the Patriot Act was a counter-intuitive move, one that only intermittently pays off. Brewer is committed to finding emotional truth in the hokey plot, but it's often a struggle, particularly when it comes to the romance between upstanding Ren and the reverend's hell-raising daughter Ariel (Juliette Hough). When this pair finally kiss, with the setting sun blazing between them, is it self-conscious pop art or just plain kitsch? In any case, the toothy Wormald has clearly been cast for reasons other than his acting ability, while Quaid, often an oppressive presence these days, seems more creepy than broken-hearted. The most promising of the younger performers is Miles Teller, recently seen in Rabbit Hole, as Ren's goofy best friend; his learning-to-dance montage is a comic highlight.