Stake Land

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 23, 2011.

Jim Mickle's low-budget horror road movie begins on familiar ground. The world has been overrun by vampires, the grubby, non-articulate kind (they might as well be zombies, except for their fangs). Awaiting the end of days, gangs of demented religious believers have aligned themselves with the undead.

One of the saner survivors is Martin (Connor Paolo), an orphaned teenager adopted by a middle-aged slayer known only as Mister (Nick Damici, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Mickle). In their armored car, the pair make their way across a despoiled America, heading up north to a possibly mythical haven known as “New Eden.” In the course of their journey they add more members to their surrogate family, including a pregnant young woman (Danielle Harris) and a peaceful nun (Kelly McGillis).

Mickle provides enough excitement and gore to satisfy fans, but also finds time for some suggestive, contemplative moments. The camera lingers on what seem like documentary images of industrial decay: abandoned factories overgrown by weeds, piles of wrecked cars. “Where did all the evil come from?” Martin asks dreamily in voiceover, sounding like someone in a film by Terrence Malick. There are echoes, too, of Zombieland (2009) and The Road (2009) – but Stake Land seems most closely related to the films of George Romero, especially the recent ones such as Diary of the Dead (2007).

Like Romero, Mickle has a pragmatic attitude to genre convention: even the corniest stereotypes can be turned to new purposes. Mister, for example, looks and behaves like a standard weather-beaten action hero, delivering his quota of gruff, tough wisecracks: asked how many “vamps” he's killed, he growls “Not enough.” Yet he remains an ambiguous figure – and for Martin, not necessarily an ideal role model. In the teeth of the apocalypse there's little room for scruple, but Mickle makes sure we grasp that learning how to kill always comes at a price.

Cars 2

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 23, 2011.

Based on an idea with limited mileage (sorry), the original Cars (2006) has always struck me as one of the least interesting products from the Pixar Animation workshop. Maybe I'm just not prepared to embrace a universe where talking cars go on dates, wrestle with inner conflicts, and learn to overcome their cultural prejudices.

Directed (like this 3D sequel) by Pixar guru John Lasseter, Cars was a Western-flavoured buddy comedy, in which the polished racing champ Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) found himself stranded in the small town of Radiator Springs and gradually learned to appreciate life in the slow lane. Cars 2 is a globetrotting action caper, an overused template in recent children's entertainment; presumably as a result of extensive market research, the focus has shifted from Lightning to his tow-truck sidekick Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), a bungling trier with the buck teeth and wide eyes of SpongeBob SquarePants.

When Lightning is challenged to compete in a World Grand Prix, Mater tags along for the ride; predictably, he winds up embarrassing his friend by behaving like an antsy toddler, at one point leaking petrol in over-excitement. But just in time to save his self-esteem, Mater encounters a pair of British spies (Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer); soon he's helping them solve a mystery that takes them from Tokyo to Paris to the Italian Riviera, involving a newly discovered oilfield and a possibly dodgy brand of environmentally friendly fuel.

In the past, the politics of Pixar have veered from libertarianism (The Incredibles) to hand-wringing over the fate of the planet (Wall-E). Cars 2 has a foot in both camps: Fillmore the hippie Volkswagen (Lloyd Sherr) gets the final word on the ecological subplot, even as Mater triumphs over a vengeful cabal of “lemon” cars while demonstrating that his crude American manners ought to be good enough for anyone.

“Is the Popemobile Catholic?” Mater demands rhetorically at one point, implying the existence of car religion as well as, presumably, a car Jesus. Any fantasy can be dismantled with enough quibbling – but while a great deal of knowhow has been poured into Cars 2, there's no way this cutesy scenario can work on multiple levels, as the Toy Story series does at its best. To say the least, it sure is strange that cars should fret about protecting a natural world devoid of animals, where a non-industrial society would be a contradiction in terms.

All Tomorrow's Parties

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 23, 2011.

Jonathan Caouette had the luck to make a splash with his lo-fi self-portrait Tarnation back in 2003, just before YouTube flooded the market with sensitive young things pouring their souls into their web-cams. He resurfaces, after a fashion, with this authorised account of a British alternative music festival, staged regularly since 2000 in various off-season holiday camps. Each time round, an admired band or artist is invited to select the line-up: past curators have included Portishead, Sleater-Kinney and The Dirty Three.

It looks like a great event, but this collage of video fragments shot over the years is largely shapeless and often dull. As a concert documentary, it's a write-off: few performances are shown in full, and far too much space is given over to generic crowd footage and dopey banter. Some small visual interest arises from the incongruity of the setting, with its neatly kept lawns between rows of chalets; Caouette makes extensive use of footage of the camps in their heyday, but it's never clear if he's implying some form of cultural continuity or simply marking the gap between present-day hipsters and past squares.

In its use of split-screen techniques, vaguely utopian vibe and emphasis on audience response, the film might be taken as a 21st-century answer to Woodstock (1970). But this is a very different kind of festival: relaxed and clubby, more focused on yesterday than tomorrow. While Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore dutifully urges punters to “smash the record companies”, most seem happy just enjoying the music.

Flinders Street

A piece on John Dunkley-Smith's Flinders Street (1980) appears in Senses of Cinema 59 as part of a "Melbourne on Film" dossier timed to coincide with the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival.

Bridesmaids

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 18, 2011.

Can women be as funny as men? It's an idiotic question, in the era of Tina Fey, Tea Leoni, Anna Faris, Isla Fisher, Parker Posey and Sarah Silverman – just to take the first half-dozen brilliant Hollywood comediennes who spring to mind. Still, only a few of these talents have been given the big-screen opportunities they deserve. With luck, that will change in the wake of Bridesmaids, a mildly daring, smartly assembled comedy co-written by and starring Kirsten Wiig, who has excelled in the past in supporting roles and on Saturday Night Live.

Bridesmaids was directed by the long-time Judd Apatow associate Paul Feig, and in many ways the film is a less blokey version of a typical Apatow production like Knocked Up (2007): a blend of knowingly crass humour and awkwardly-expressed feeling, with space left for ad-libs that shoot off in all directions. Wiig plays Annie, a broke, single thirtysomething whose self-esteem is not improved by bouts of no-strings-attached sex with a handsome cretin (Jon Hamm) who refuses to be seen with her in public.

The most bankable “funny women” in today's Hollywood – think Jennifer Aniston – are those who adopt a pose of neurotic “normality," steadily ignoring or ironising anything strange or threatening. Wiig pushes this style to a subversive extreme: there's no clear identity beneath her perky facade, just a chaos of warring impulses. Annie is constantly modifying her self-presentation, often trying on two or three attitudes in as many seconds; in bed with her lover, she oscillates between a desperate pretense of "letting go" and fretful efforts to find a satisfactory rhythm. Like much of the best 21st-century comedy, the scene teeters on the edge of the non-comic, inhabiting a zone of uncomfortable weirdness not far removed from the universe of David Lynch.

If Annie rarely seems in sync with anyone around her, the exception is her warm, sensible best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), who's about to marry her boyfriend Dougie (Tim Heidecker). Naturally, Annie is asked to act as maid of honour. But in her frazzled state, she's ill-equipped for the task, and soon scents a potential rival in Helen (Rose Byrne), the wife of Dougie's boss: wealthy, poised, brimming with sincerity and totally insufferable. Usually dreadful in "serious" roles, Byrne shows her true colours when she's allowed to be funny; here, she gets to exploit her naturally grating coyness to the utmost, with results so effective that the filmmakers are wise not to use her for more than a few minutes at once.

Bridesmaids is mainly a close-up comedy, all about faces and reactions, though the cinematographer Robert Yeoman certainly understands how to use framing to enhance a gag. Often the joke lies in Annie's pitiful inability to affect her environment; when she finally snaps and throws a tantrum at the bridal shower, her downfall is clinched in a wide shot of her doomed efforts to push over a fountain. Other memorable bits similarly involve Annie humiliating herself in front of a crowd: trying to upstage Helen at Lilian's engagement party, or getting noisily drunk on a plane. It's the kind of cringeworthy spectacle which can have you giggling wildly yet longing for the nightmare to end; by comparison, there's something rather lifeless about the designated "gross-out" scene, which involves the heroines puking and losing control of their bowels.

At least Annie isn't the only one made to play the fool; the baggy format of Bridesmaids leaves room for a range of comic turns. Chris O'Dowd from The IT Crowd plays Annie's implausibly nice traffic-cop love interest in a sheepish manner that just avoids being cloying; Melissa McCarthy shows total conviction as the aggro, uncouth sister of the groom, even if her personality seems to alter each time she appears. The other bridesmaids are strictly one-trait characters: Ellie Kemper as a starry-eyed newly-wed and Wendi McLendon-Covey as a disillusioned mother-of-three. At worst, a surplus of wackiness robs the situations of any reality: Annie looks quite sane in comparison to her grotesque flatmates (Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson) or her daffy mother (the late Jill Clayburgh) who paints watercolors of celebrities and spends her spare time at AA meetings despite never having had a drink.

Bridesmaids takes some satiric potshots at the American wedding industry, but scarcely qualifies as any kind of feminist statement, much less a manifesto on the Plight of the Modern Woman. Indeed, it's hard to say what the film is “about” beyond the need to accept change, a boring platitude. The class differences between the characters are acknowledged but finally glossed over; the same goes for the idea that securing a husband is no guarantee of fulfilment. (While none of the marriages we hear about sound particularly successful, it's left unclear whether Lillian is headed for happiness or disaster; by design, we find out almost nothing about Dougie, a fleeting, silent presence.) Like most Apatow protagonists, Annie ultimately learns a lesson about growing up and assuming responsibility; this notion of "maturity" feels as hollow as ever, but at least Bridesmaids refreshes its formula with plenty of good, painful jokes.

Little White Lies

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 16, 2011.

The most dramatic scene of Guillaume Canet's comedy-drama comes right at the start, as a flashy, extended tracking shot carries us through a nightclub and out onto the street, where the jovial, intoxicated Ludo (Jean Dujardin) jumps on his scooter and rides away; a minute or two later, he's hit by a truck. Gathering in the intensive care ward the next morning, Ludo's shocked friends decide that they might as well head off anyhow for their summer holiday at a beach house owned by the irascible Max (Francois Cluzet) – the oldest member of the group, which consists mainly of well-off couples in their thirties. Before they return to Paris, secrets will be revealed and destinies will change; meanwhile, there's ample time for meals, boat trips and flirtations, often accompanied by soothing English-language pop songs.

This is a meandering, glib, self-indulgent movie. Canet frankly sets out to seduce us with the trappings of a leisurely, upmarket lifestyle, and it feels like pure hypocrisy when Ludo's salt-of-the-earth father (Joël Dupuch) shows up to denounce the others for their selfish materialism. Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983) supplies an obvious model for all the navel-gazing, but Kasdan's characters were ex-radicals dealing with the fall-out from the 1960s; here no-one is especially politically-minded, with the possible exception of Max's environmentally-conscious wife Vero (Valérie Bonneton) who insists on buying organic chicken.

Still, it's clear from early on that everybody has something to hide. Vincent (Benoit Magimel) seems to be happily married, but nurses a crush on Max which he confesses to Max's great discomfort. The cocky, permanently unshaven Eric (Gilles Lellouche) is less successful as a ladies' man than he'd like others to believe; then there's the lovelorn Antoine (Laurent Lafitte), who spends his days pondering what to make of regular text messages from his ex-girlfriend. The women are noticeably less fleshed-out, with the exception of the saucer-eyed Marion Cotillard – Cantet's real-life partner – as a closed-off free spirit who views the action through a haze of pot smoke, juggling lovers but preferring to watch movies alone. Her magnetic presence is the one thing that might make Little White Lies worth seeing.

Meek's Cutoff

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 9, 2011.

Frankly, I've never been able to warm to Kelly Reichardt's brand of minimalist Americana – tales of journeys that go nowhere, filmed from an arty distance but usually with the hint of a right-on message. Still, Meek's Cutoff, her first period piece, surely ranks as her most interesting film yet. Set in 1854, it's a quasi-Western very loosely based on real events, which follows a small band of pioneers – three couples, one with a young son – as they move across the Oregon plains towards the West Coast.

Their guide is the long-haired blowhard Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who boasts of encounters with grizzly bears and needs little encouragement to expound his folksy philosophies: women are ruled by “chaos,” he claims, and men by “destruction." This kind of blather does little to win over Emily Tetherow, the most thoughtful member of the group, played by Michelle Williams with the same air of childlike self-containment she brought to Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008).

Clearly, Emily holds Meek in no high regard, but for the time being she keeps her own counsel. In the meantime, despite Meek's assurances, it's evident that the travellers have lost their bearings and may be headed for disaster. Roughly halfway through the film, they take a prisoner, a wandering Native American (Rod Rondeaux) who speaks no English. Could he be their key to survival, or is he leading them further astray?

The scene is set for a battle of wills, but Reichardt doesn't emphasise the figures in this landscape so much as the spaces that separate them. There's the space between the whites and the “Indian” (first glimpsed by Emily on the horizon atop a hill). There's the space between the two sexes: often the men are huddled in the background, muttering to one another about serious matters while the women await the upshot.

There are other kinds of spaces too: between the characters and the landscape, between the narrative and the viewer. Reichhart minimises exposition, lets numerous scenes play out in darkness, and avoids visual rhetoric that would give us what the characters lack: a sense of where their story is headed. Vignettes of gathering wood or washing dishes are viewed from a distance that lets us grasp the probable futility of these routines; all the same, the images are there to be contemplated for their own sake, not to mark progress towards any kind of destination.

Like Rolf de Heer in his more explicitly didactic The Tracker (2002), Reichardt paradoxically enforces an ideal of non-mastery: the idea that good faith begins with getting lost, or maybe acknowledging you always were. Yet there's something else in play in the shot of the three women roaming over cracked earth at varying distances from the camera – a dream image recalling the travelling kings of Albert Serra's Birdsong (2008), as well as the pastoral mythologies of Jane Campion or Terrence Malick. Jeff Grace's score suggests an orchestra tuning up for a never-played symphony, and the open ending amounts to a kind of challenge: truth may be unknowable, but how far can imagination bridge the gap?

Oranges and Sunshine

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 9, 2011.

It seems that Britain, too, had its Stolen Generation. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, thousands of children were forcibly taken from “troubled” homes and shipped off in secret to institutions run by the Christian Brothers and others in Australia, where they met with physical ill-treatment and worse. It's an obvious subject for a film, though dramatically speaking the problem is that we know right away how we're meant to respond. Weren't people benighted in those days, and isn't it sad?

Directed by Jim Loach (son of Ken) and written by Rona Munro, this British-Australian co-production tells the story through the eyes of Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson), a Nottingham social worker who took on the challenge of uncovering the truth. Her quest brings her to sunny Australia, where she becomes a virtual surrogate mother to several of the now-adult migrants, including the inarticulate Jack (overplayed by Hugo Weaving) and the defiant Len (David Wenham) who refuses to be treated as a case for pity.

We're told that Margaret's empathy allows her to feel the pain they've repressed; this stress on her suffering-by-proxy could seem dangerously close to condescension, or a kind of emotional imperialism. But thanks to the talents of Watson and Wenham, Margaret's bond with Len is the film's most charged element, an exchange where both sides have something to offer. There's the hint of a sexual challenge to his all-Aussie insolence, though Margaret (like the film) chooses to disregard this, looking past his swagger to the scared little boy beneath.

In one of the strongest scenes, he takes her on a trip to the site of his brutal bush childhood; here, they come face-to-face with a group of staid, unremarkable men, blankly unwilling to see themselves as the bad guys. It would have been interesting if Loach had delved further into the theme of how cruelty can mistake itself for virtue, but Oranges and Sunshine is mainly conceived as a tribute to the decency and endurance of its lead characters – with results that are sometimes moving but often deadly dull.

"Roseanne" (1989-1997)

A version of this piece appeared in The Age Green Guide, June 9, 2011, as a contribution to the "Back On The Box" column.

If any show could make me nostalgic for the 1990s, it’s this one. In retrospect, it ranks with American TV’s most improbable hits: a frankly progressive, feminist sitcom about a working-class family, starring an overweight stand-up comic with a screechy voice, no acting experience, and by all accounts – including her own – a world-class raging temper.

It helped, of course, that Roseanne Barr was surrounded by a superb ensemble. There was John Goodman as her husband Dan Connor, a sturdy second banana capable of an endless range of slyly timed reactions. There was Laurie Metcalf, who turned Roseanne’s neurotic sister Jackie into a complex, sympathetic woman who might well have sustained a show of her own. Then there were the kids, including Lecy Goranson as oldest daughter Becky and, most memorably, Sara Gilbert as middle child Darlene, the ultimate sarcastic, disaffected teenage girl (a ‘90s archetype – but unlike other similar figures, Gilbert never looked or sounded as if she was one makeover away from prom night).

The show had terrific writers, too, among them Joss Whedon and Amy Sherman-Palladino (the future creator of Gilmore Girls). But none of this would have mattered if not for the star-producer and her determination to ensure Roseanne maintained its thoughtful, compassionate approach however many people she had to scream at or fire in the process. There’s little doubt that tumult behind the scenes fed into the show’s view of family life as a battleground, with characters constantly needling one another in ways that felt half-affectionate, half-brutal. (“Let me screw up Darlene, and you can have Becky,” Roseanne says to Dan in a typical exchange.)

Shot conventionally in front of a studio audience, Roseanne occupied a different universe from the fast-paced “single-camera” sitcoms of today. Most episodes were based in the Connor home, with rhythms set by the actors rather than by snappy editing. Plots were simple, almost unimportant: Roseanne and her team tackled “issues” of all kinds, but rarely offered neat solutions. At best, the scripts and performances had a raw, exploratory edge, acknowledging how often love and pain exist side by side.

“Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in,” said Roseanne in a recent, characteristically forthright article. It was true then, and it’s truer now. In her day, she was smarter than anybody.

X-Men: First Class

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 4, 2011.

The fifth instalment in an apparently endless blockbuster series, X-Men: First Class is neither a strenuous would-be masterpiece like The Dark Knight (2008) nor a hip provocation like director Matthew Vaughn's previous Kick Ass (2010). For better or worse, this “prequel” to the original X-Men trilogy is a very ordinary superhero movie: deftly balancing the solemn and the ridiculous, dedicated to presenting familiar characters and situations from slightly new angles.

Among other things, First Class must be the most jaunty film ever to open in a death camp, where the young Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner), later to be known as Magneto, is tortured by a Nazi officer (Kevin Bacon) hoping to capitalise on his telekinetic skills. Two decades later Erik (now played by Michael Fassbender) is a malcontent whose quest for revenge brings him into contact with future mutant guru Charles Xavier (James McAvoy): a charming young genetics scientist from a privileged background, given to hanging round in Oxford pubs trying to impress girls with displays of advanced empathy.

In the meantime, Erik's old foe has resurfaced in the guise of mutant supervillain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) who's bent on starting World War Three, then founding a new civilisation on the wreckage of the old. Recruited by CIA officer Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne, making the most of her gift for looking flabbergasted), Erik and Charles go about assembling a mutant team that includes Charles' shape-shifting childhood pal Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) along with a bunch of American youths, some of them destined to turn to the dark side in the near future.

As recent years have demonstrated many times over, the concept of a group of misfits with special, hidden gifts has a emotional appeal not restricted to the obvious adolescent market. While Vaughn and his regular script collaborator Jane Goldman show little sign of personal investment in the material, First Class is shrewdly calculated to appeal to fanboys and fangirls of every sort.

Certainly, this is the most hormonal X-Men instalment yet, toying with the thrilling possibilities that arise whether mutants are romantically paired with regular folk or with each other. If Vaughn has few inhibitions about making his actresses strip down to their underwear, he's equally willing to build up the charged friendship between the two heroes, which is shadowed by our knowledge that they'll eventually part ways. The real fun of the film kicks in when the very manly Erik and the very boyish Charles start working as a double act, playing chess by the fireplace or touring the States on their mutant recruiting drive. Less successful is a scene where the newly assembled X-Kids bond by showing off their talents, like the budding Broadway stars of the ever-obnoxious Glee.

Though the dialogue is often anachronistic and the period décor suggests little more than a close study of the Bond films, there's something apt about setting an X-Men film at the start of the 1960s, with the civil rights movement well advanced and the Summer of Love just round the corner. Should these mutants be attempting to conceal their abilities, or is this the moment for them to let their freak flag fly?

From the first X-Men film onward, the mutants have been implicitly equated with a range of persecuted minority groups; here more than ever, the literal and the metaphoric are interwoven, in a sometimes puzzling manner. There are a couple of African-Americans in the mutant ranks, and Erik, of course, is Jewish in origin; like its predecessors in the series, First Class is devoid of gay characters, but cheerfully winks at viewers on the lookout for homoerotic subtext.

Yet the allegory only works up to a certain point. The films can't easily be taken as straightforward pleas for tolerance and understanding; in no sense "ordinary," the mutants are irrevocably set apart from the rest of the human race. While Erik champions his own “people” above all others, Charles clings to the hope that, somehow, we might all be able to get along. The dilemma is stated anew in each instalment of the saga, but there's no hope of a definite solution – at least while more sequels mean money in the bank.

Cane Toads: The Conquest

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 2, 2011.

Chronicling the most successful invasion of Australia since the First Fleet, the documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History was a surprise hit for director Mark Lewis in 1988. This sequel is more or less the same film all over again, except bigger, funnier and more alarming. The basic facts are well-known: originating in Central America, the toads were brought to Australia in the 1930s as a pest control measure, and proceeded to breed like rabbits (or faster) spreading across Queensland and beyond.

Useless, poisonous and (by most standards) hideous, the toads constitute a plague of Biblical proportions, but you'll have to look elsewhere for a considered analysis of their impact on the environment. Lewis' approach is crowd-pleasing to the point of glibness (this is a film where a mention of Hawaii, say, automatically triggers a burst of hula music). Still, the decision to shoot The Conquest in 3D was a stroke of brilliance: the toads loom in the foreground of many shots, staring down the camera with a blankly truculent look.

In the manner of an early Errol Morris film like Gates of Heaven (1978), much of the film is devoted to a parade of human eccentrics – from bleeding-heart environmentalist Peter Ravenscroft, who runs his own private “toad sanctuary,” to down-to-earth taxidermist Kevin Ladynski, who once hoped to make his fortune as the owner-operator of Kev's Travelling Toad Show. Most memorably, there's a return visit to the now-adult Monica Krause, the little girl from Unnatural History who adopted a cane toad as a pet, tickling its white belly and singing it nursery rhymes in German.

While the vignettes never quite add up to a consistent thesis, at best The Conquest manages to be both discomforting and uproarious: a catalogue of toad-killing techniques incorporates some moments of gross-out comedy worthy of Gremlins (1984). As in any good horror film, a range of possible interpretations are in play. When we meet a band of vigilantes fighting a desert war to prevent the toad from crossing into Western Australia, there are echoes of other kinds of paranoia over foreign hordes. Yet it's hinted, too, that non-indigenous Australians might do well to admit some kinship with the toad, a stranger in a strange land.

From Time to Time

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 2, 2011.

The Green Knowe novels by Lucy M. Boston are among the strangest and most poetic of British children's books. If anyone could do them justice on film, it might well be Julian Fellowes, the heritage specialist (and Conservative peer) behind Gosford Park (2001) and the new TV series Downton Abbey.

Based on The Chimneys of Green Knowe – the second in the series – From Time to Time sticks fairly closely to the letter of its source, though Fellowes has made a few adjustments in line with modern feelings about class. The plot begins in 1944, as young Tolly (Alex Etel) is sent from Manchester to stay with his very proper grandmother Mrs Oldknow (Maggie Smith) at the storied manor house where she lives “alone” with a couple of servants.

When Tolly starts to see ghosts, they seem natural emanations of Mrs Oldknow's deep sense of the continuing presence of the past. With her aid, he pieces together a mystery from two centuries earlier, involving a blind girl (Eliza Bennett), a runaway African slave boy (Kwayedza Kureya), and a lost treasure. For the most part he is merely a spectator of this secondary drama; but while history cannot be altered, there's still time for some wrongs to be set right.

Fellowes' brand of stiff-upper-lip nostalgia is in some ways very attractive, though he's not what you'd call a natural-born filmmaker. He can't always prevent his actors from turning into waxworks, and his schematic visual choices indicate a little too blatantly where his heart really lies: the twentieth-century portions of the story are veiled in darkness, while the Regency flashbacks have a digitally enhanced glow.