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.

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.

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.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake

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

Tony Ching – the director of the original Chinese Ghost Story (1987) – is in fine form with this spectacular fantasy-adventure about two “snake demons” who change into beautiful women and set out to explore the human world. If this premise sounds familiar, it's because it's taken from an ancient legend that has been filmed many times before – perhaps most famously in the Maggie Cheung vehicle Green Snake (1993), directed by Ching's sometime collaborator Tsui Hark.

Here the focus is on White Snake (Eva Huang) and her love for Xu Xian (Raymond Lam), a mortal man she saves from drowning. When she kisses him underwater, they exchange “vital essences,” binding them together forever – a plot point explained to us later by a talking rabbit voiced by Miriam Yeung.

Yes, it's that kind of movie. There are fox demons who slip out of bamboo stems, malevolent flying spirit roots, and an outlandish meet-the-family sequence that easily betters the one in Twilight (2008). The story seems ready-made for the era of advanced digital effects, which allow landscapes as well as characters to transform from moment to moment; it's no wonder that Jet Li gets little chance to show off his reality-based martial arts skills as the villain of the piece, a narrow-minded monk.

White Snake and her equally imperious sister (Charlene Choi) are much more fun to be around. Though the film is not short on disturbing Freudian imagery, its view of demons is refreshingly free of moral judgement.

The Triangle Wars

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

People power seems to be flavour of the month for Melbourne documentary makers. Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote chronicled the fight to save a beloved Collingwood music venue; Rosie Jones' The Triangle Wars introduces us to a more genteel protest group on the other side of the Yarra, who pit themselves against the plan to build a mega-sized bayside shopping complex – complete with multiple nightclubs, cinemas, and carparks – next to the Palais Theatre in St Kilda, as if to erase the last traces of the suburb's mythically seedy allure.

Combining talking-head interviews with fly-on-the-wall footage, The Triangle Wars thrives on distinctive ''characters'' willing to ham it up on camera. Though there are no pure villains, it's evident where Jones' sympathies lie; the property developer Steve McMillan comes across as a good-natured cowboy – in a dramatised version, he might be played by Steve Bisley – while photographer-turned-activist Serge Thomann is a romantic with dreams of glory that hark back to the French Resistance. Caught in the middle is Dick Gross, a councillor who backs the proposal: a vulnerable man-of-the-people with a tendency to shoot his mouth off and appalling taste in shirts. As the anti-development sentiment builds, media figures including Rachel Griffiths and Dave Hughes add their voices to the campaign, while bohemian grande dame Mirka Mora, resident in St Kilda since the 1960s, is predictably ready to flash the camera and soak up her share of the spotlight.

For those with no immediate stake in the outcome, it's a mildly farcical story with some strange detours (local readers may recall the bizarre saga of Caroline Shahbaz, the ''white witch'' of Port Phillip). But by and large Jones and her team manage to cut a clear path through a tangle of legal and political issues, aided by the chromatic textures of Dale Cornelius' mock-suspenseful score. There's a victory of sorts for one side, but the future of the site remains uncertain; in the words of the Paul Kelly song in the credits, ''everything goes on just the same''.

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.”

Project Nim

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 1, 2011.

What a long, strange trip it turned out to be for Nim Chimpsky, perhaps the most celebrated ape of his day, torn from his mother as an infant in 1973 and parachuted into a wealthy Manhattan family to test the possibility of “animal language acquisition”.

Nim has been the subject of several books – including one by Herbert J. Terrace, the Columbia psychology professor who instigated the study – and his life is chronicled once more in this fascinating, harrowing documentary by James Marsh, the follow-up to his Oscar-winning Man on Wire (2008). That earlier film told the story of Philippe Petit, who made headlines in 1974 by walking between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Returning to the same historical moment, Project Nim is likewise concerned with an effort to transcend the bounds of the possible – one that eventually falls back down to earth.

If Man on Wire was modelled after a caper film, the accounts of Nim's childhood suggest a druggy screwball comedy. To care for his protégé and teach him sign language, Terrace drafted his former student (and lover) Stephanie LaFarge, along with her second husband and their combined brood of seven children. In every way, little Nim was treated as a member of the family: breast-fed, toilet trained, plied with beers and joints. (“It was the '70s,” is the catch-all explanation offered by LaFarge's daughter.) Log-books and daily routines were dismissed as overly bourgeois; no-one involved had more than the vaguest grasp of either signing or animal management.

Still, LaFarge's home movies give glimpses of a fanciful idyll: romps in the park, Nim cuddling a kitten. In other respects, the situation was a volatile one, particularly as the rapidly maturing Nim began to compete with LaFarge's husband for the position of dominant male. (There's testimony on all sides to Nim's ability to bring out the “animal” in humans – not least Terrace, who's repeatedly chided for his preening, high-handed behaviour and tendency to surround himself with young female researchers.) Eventually Terrace rejigged the terms of the experiment, shifting Nim to a mansion supplied by the university and bringing him on campus for regular schooling. But after several outbreaks of violence, it was time to call a halt. Nim was sent back to his birthplace at an primate research centre in Oklahoma – and despite his obvious brightness, the final scientific verdict cast doubt on how much he had truly learnt.

The second half of the film shows Nim passing from one group of caretakers to another, in a series of sequences that have the pathos of early Disney (like Pinocchio, he's almost but not quite a real boy). The self-accusations of a vet in a medical laboratory will force almost anyone to think twice about the morality of using animals as test subjects; Marsh also gives us a couple of clearly-identified heroes, notably the radiant Bob Ingersoll, a hippie grad student who befriended Nim in Oklahoma and did his best to help him later on.

Like Werner Herzog, Marsh is more a yarn-spinner than a journalist or historian; like Errol Morris, he makes documentaries that telegraph their “constructed” nature as blatantly as any fiction. Artifice is evident in every aspect of Project Nim, from the use of re-enactments to the lighting of the interviewees, set against a grey, ostensibly neutral studio backdrop. More than an assemblage of facts, the film aspires to the status of a parable, with many potential meanings, not all of them linked directly to animal rights. Arguably Nim's keepers were wrong to try to endow him with human attributes – but how far can we emphasise with his suffering without making the same mistake? Is it possible to communicate with others without viewing them as mirrors of the self? “If a lion could talk,” wrote Wittgenstein, “we could not understand him.”

Face to Face

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

Shot mainly in one location, Michael Rymer's functional adaptation of a dreadful David Williamson play offers a view of workplace conflict that seems unlikely to satisfy anyone outside of a high school English class. We witness a mediation session conducted by the all-wise Jack Manning (Matthew Newton) in an effort to resolve the problems of slow-witted young Wayne (Luke Ford), who has lashed out after being fired from a scaffolding company.

The boy complains of bullying, his blustering ex-boss (Vince Colosimo) has problems of his own, and soon a host of skeletons are tumbling out of the cupboard, enabling Williamson to give us his two cents worth on sexual harassment, industrial relations, and other burning issues of the day. Shifting creakily from one such talking point to another, the “plot” is impossibly neat, while the message (which boils down to “Why can't we all just get along?”) registers as the purest kind of wistful thinking or bad faith.

Most of the actors do a creditable job with the phony material, but the main novelty is the casting of the impish Newton as Williamson's idealised alter ego, a role that might originally have been written for an older, more conventional authority figure. Newton plays it "straight" yet often seems ready to break into the wolfish grin of a man who enjoys his job a little too much; dispensing tough love on all sides, Jack presides over the free and frank exchange of ideas with the aplomb of Tony Jones on a busy episode of Q&A. In short, he's the only character who doesn't wind up revealing all his secrets – and consequently the only one who seems like anything more than a stereotype.