The Muppets

A version of this review appeared in The Age, January 12, 2012.

What's wrong with The Muppets is plain from the opening song-and-dance number – specifically, the simper worn by co-writer and star Jason Segal as he cavorts alongside his puppet pal Walter. His uneasy expression seems to say “I'm just a big kid at heart,” but also “Look at me acting like such a geek.”  Such self-consciousness feels remote from Jim Henson's famous creations, with their winning simplicity and lack of embarrassment.

In fact this supposed comeback vehicle, directed by James Bobin, isn't really a Muppet movie; rather, it's a film about how much Segal loves the Muppets, a much less appealing proposition.  The story posits that the old Muppet theatre in Hollywood has fallen into decay and is about to be sold off to grasping oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper). It takes the insipid newcomer Walter to reunite the original troupe, with the aid of his human pals – an opportunity for Segal to pat himself on the back for restoring the Muppet “brand”.

Pathos was always part of the Muppet formula, but usually for only a couple of minutes at a time. Bobin and Segal aim so squarely for the hearts of Generation X cultists they seem to have forgotten about their main audience of children: there's a surplus of sickly nostalgia, nowhere near enough explosions and off-the-wall jokes.  Even the stronger ideas – Kermit as a millionaire recluse in the mold of Howard Hughes, Fozzie Bear fronting a Muppet tribute band in Reno – are rarely developed to their full comic potential. Miss Piggy's new role as the Paris editor of Vogue doesn't seem half demented enough for her notions of glory: shouldn't she be running her own Oprah-style empire by now, flogging aerobics videos and pancake mixture?

Still, there are enough good moments to suggest the film that might have been.  Amy Adams is a self-evidently perfect choice as leading lady; unlike Segal, she seems capable of accepting the Muppet universe on its own terms.  And you can hardly go wrong with Animal, the crazed Muppet drummer, particularly when he's teamed with Jack Black.

The Descendants

A version of this review appeared in The Age, January 12, 2012.

Alexander Payne made his name as a writer-director of social satires with a cruel, mocking edge, most memorably Election (1999), with the young Reese Witherspoon as the ultimate teacher's pet. But like many filmmakers, Payne has evidently mellowed with age. Based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, this comedy-drama features his most glamorous and sympathetic protagonist yet: Hawaiian moneybags lawyer Matt King, played by silver fox George Clooney looking characteristically sleek yet well-fed.

Matt is that staple Hollywood figure, a grieving single dad.  Or virtually single: with his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) in a coma after an accident on the water, he's forced to take sole responsibility for his two girls (Amara Miller and Shailene Woodley). He's also charged to negotiate the sale of an untouched plot of land which has been in his extended family for generations – leading him to ponder what legacy he himself will leave behind.

Setting aside his broadly comic turns for the Coen brothers, Clooney is not generally a demonstrative actor. But this is his showcase role or, if you're feeling cynical, his Oscar bid – he gets to cry (twice), seethe with repressed emotion, wax pseudo-poetic in voiceover and explode with rage. Being George Clooney, he does all these things with style and restraint.  Likewise, Payne is a technically excellent filmmaker: he has a good sense of rhythm, knows where to put the camera and chooses his cast well.

Though hardly a realist, he has retained an interest in how difficult emotions – grief, anger, shame – get tangled up in awkward, sometimes comic ways.  Perhaps his boldest move here is taking the ultra-reliable supporting player Judy Greer, best known for daffy “best friend” roles, and handing her the scene most likely to break your heart.

Still, on the whole The Descendants covers little new dramatic ground; this is not the first Clooney vehicle that chides the hero for his narcissism while barely challenging his perspective. Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor strive to ensure that every obnoxious supporting character has some hidden redeeming traits.  But their self-congratulatory humanism finally feels a little mechanical – especially as the helpless Elizabeth remains a cipher.

Hugo

A version of this review appeared in The Age, January 7, 2012.

At the beginning of Hugo, Martin Scorsese's camera descends out of the sky above Paris and hurtles, like the pendulum of a great clock, through a Metro station lit up bright as a Christmas tree, miraculously failing to collide with scurrying commuters. It's a show-off digital stunt that evokes the tradition (if not the technique) of Georges Méliès, the stage magician and early cinema pioneer whose spirit pervades this 3D extravaganza, based on Brian Selznick's 2007 illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

The film could be written off as an over-decorated, sentimental contraption, like a Dickens story retold in the manner of Amelie (2001). But despite its quaint exterior, this is one of Scorsese's most ambitious enterprises: nothing less than an effort to create a new myth of cinema, at a time when the artform is changing beyond recognition. Bridging the gap between Méliès and the Harry Potter saga, Hugo is a frankly esoteric crowd-pleaser, a children's film made from a decidedly adult perspective, and a fairy tale that contains no magic, except for the technological marvel that is the medium itself.

The time is 1930 or so, and Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a mechanically gifted orphan lad who lives behind a giant clock inside this station – pilfering tidbits from stalls, keeping one step ahead of the bumbling Inspector Gustav (a spectacular turn by Sacha Baron Cohen), and monitoring daily routines from his vantage point above the crowds. A moviegoer since early childhood, he's the ultimate spectator but lacks a narrative of his own, until he meets Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), the bookish god-daughter of a grouchy toy-seller known to her as Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley). As the children find out, Georges' secret has something to do with a clockwork “automaton” passed on to Hugo by his beloved father (Jude Law, seen in flashback). Luckily, Isabelle has the key that will unlock the past – and as soon as she puts it to use, all of the film's hints and allusions begin to fall into place.

It's apt enough to describe Hugo as an ode to the “magic” of the movies, but it would be truer still to see the film as an exploration of the power of the imagination, one that very pointedly places cinema and literature on equal terms. In a way, it's Scorsese's version of The Tempest, a highly formalised romance centred on an enchanter in exile whose messengers set the whole plot in motion. But this is just one of many echoes in a complexly patterned work of art which – despite John Logan's sometimes over-explicit script – remains on unusually friendly terms with its own subconscious.

As much as cinema is celebrated here, it's also linked with danger and trauma: there are tributes to the Harold Lloyd “thrill comedy” Safety Last and to the Lumiere Brothers 1896 short Train Pulling Into A Station, which supposedly prompted its original viewers to flee in terror of being run down. One breathtaking nightmare sequence spells out the idea that the invention of the movies can be understood as a wound or breach in the world – rather as dreams reveal repressed wishes, or 3D allows phantom objects to break through to the other side of the screen. As a tool for making the impossible real, cinema unavoidably bears some relation to other technologies which signalled the start of the modern age, and which enabled the horrors of the First World War.

At the same time, like much of Scorsese's work Hugo is about fantasy as compensation for symbolically castrated men. The damaged automaton is explicitly identified with Georges, but also stands in for the crippled Gustav – a troubled war veteran on a one-man crusade against society's undesirables, not unlike the psychotic anti-hero of Taxi Driver (1976). The child is father to the man: on one level, all these doublings and displacements mask an Oedipal scenario where an intrepid son must come to the aid of a parent who “magically” appears fearsome and helpless at the same time. On another, Hugo testifies to Scorsese's desire to reinvent cinema for himself – and sure enough, this marvellous film makes some of the oldest tricks of the trade feel brand new.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 31, 2011. 

“Lie down with me, Watson,” murmurs Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) to his chum (Jude Law) as gunmen blast away at the locked door of their train compartment in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Adding to the ambiguity of the situation, our hero is dressed in full if unconvincing drag, and has recently tossed Watson's new bride (Kelly Reilly) out of the moving train into a river. 

We can assume, of course, that he is acting from honourable motives throughout.  Which doesn't alter the fact that by this point – in the immortal words of Giles from Buffy The Vampire Slayer – “the subtext is rapidly becoming the text”.  

Affecting a high-pitched giggle and habitually addressed by his brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) as “Shirley,” this Holmes is perhaps the most flamboyant action hero in Hollywood history, discounting the George Hamilton spoof Zorro, The Gay Blade. Truth be told, the character has little in common with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation aside from his name and the label “eccentric genius detective”. Doyle's Holmes was grave, courteous and logical; Downey's is manic, obnoxious and a slave to infantile emotion (“I repress nothing,” he declares with pride). A closer comparison would be Johnny Depp's mincing Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean films – or the Great God Pan with a touch of Inspector Clouseau.


Undisguised high camp, A Game of Shadows feels somewhat more honest than the earlier work of its director Guy Ritchie – one of the last New Lads still standing, which is to say that he has always tended to exaggerate macho swagger to the point of parody. Still, there's nothing ironic about his tendency to view women either with indifference or with outright disgust: his debut Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) contained not a single female speaking part, while his then-wife Madonna hit a career low as a queen bee who learns her lesson in Swept Away (2002). Here, not much more respect is accorded Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), the quasi-love-interest in Ritchie's earlier Sherlock Holmes (2008), who is brusquely ushered off the stage after serving as the villainess in a sub-James-Bond prologue.

Back in his Baker Street digs, Holmes is discovered by Watson in the obligatory state of frenzy, sipping embalming fluid and trying to disguise himself as a piece of furniture. Ostensibly, he's bent on disentangling the threads of an international terrorist conspiracy centred on the sinister Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, whose performance is one of the film's more subdued). In fact, he seems more distraught about Watson's planned marriage, which he campaigns against rather as Cary Grant strove to forestall Rosalind Russell's departure from journalism in His Girl Friday (1941).

Happily, a threat to Watson's life gives Holmes the excuse he needs to start his friend on a wild-goose-chase across Europe to a peace conference where Moriarty plans on starting the First World War a couple of decades ahead of time. As a sop to convention, the pair have a woman in tow – and not just any woman, but a glowering Gypsy fortune teller played by none other than Noomi Rapace, the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

But nothing really matters here beyond the nudge-wink banter between the leads, who appear utterly comfortable with each other and with the innuendo-laden material, Law slipping back into his “straight man” role as if into an old glove. Still a seductive and daring comic actor, Downey has enough invention to stop his schtick from going stale, and enough charm to make his self-indulgence part of the fun.

Too bad the same can't be said of Ritchie as a director. A Game of Shadows looks as murky and cluttered as its predecessor, and recycles many of its tiresome tricks, from the fetishism of period weaponry to the overuse of slow motion. Once again, Holmes' deductive talents mainly have to be taken on faith – aside from his ability to predict exactly what will happen during the fight scenes.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 29, 2011.

As retro musical novelty acts go, the Chipmunks have lasted less well
than the Muppets.

The best that can be said for this lazy, irritating children's film is
that the digital animation would have looked technically dazzling five
years ago, and that Alvin himself, the cheekiest of the
squeaky-voiced Chipmunk brood, seems like an accurate caricature of a
horrid little boy.



Voiced here by Justin Long, Alvin is the oldest of three brothers, the
others being Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler), the nerdy one, and plump
little Theodore (Jesse McCartney), the most innocent.

There's also a trio of girl chipmunks, known as the Chipettes and
characterised as less enterprising versions of the boys; as this
suggests, the values of the series have hardly moved on since the
1950s, when Alvin and friends were first created.



In their latest adventure, all six Chipmunks embark on an ocean cruise
where they cause endless headaches for Dave (Jason Lee) their
surrogate dad. Eventually they find themselves stranded on a tropical island,
allowing director Mike Mitchell and his team to work in some lessons
about self-reliance along with the cover versions of Lady Gaga songs.



The actors who serve as foils to the Chipmunks get little opportunity
to shine; as a whiny music producer, the comedian David Cross seems
set on exploring how far he can go in self-abasement.
 Lee remains an easygoing fellow, but his crows' feet have grown more prominent, his manner more subdued.  Caring for chipmunks has decreased his zest for life.

War Horse

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 24, 2011.

Though based on a hit stage play – adapted in turn from Michael Morpurgo's 1982 children's book – War Horse arrives on the big screen as a quintessentially cheesy Steven Spielberg exercise in overwrought sentiment.

Having previously visualised the horrors of the Holocaust, slavery, and invasion from Mars, Spielberg now undertakes to show us the First World War through the artless eyes of a horse named Joey, whose sole desire is to return to the English countryside and be reunited with his plucky young master (Jeremy Irvine). Acquired by the army on the day war breaks out, Joey takes part in a smashingly choreographed raid on a German camp, falls in with a couple of youthful deserters, befriends a sickly French orphan (Celine Buckens), and generally acts as a magnet for the compassion we humans selectively display even in the midst of slaughter.

A far more fluid director than his idol David Lean, Spielberg excels at emulating the broad sweep of an official battle painting, then homing in on the horrified or numbed reactions of those thrown into the fray. Still, in deference to the intended family audience, the film treats warfare in a sanitised, even romantic spirit. There are rousing speeches, thrilling action sequences, and shocking but mainly bloodless deaths – plus a few touches of earthy British humour courtesy of co-writer Richard Curtis, who long ago offered a very different take on the trenches in Blackadder Goes Forth.

Coming from a filmmaker who increasingly views himself as America's cinematic laureate – a Lincoln biopic is next in the pipeline – War Horse might be understood as a consoling allegory timed for the tenth anniversary of September 11. But like Tintin, the other Spielberg extravaganza of the season, the film feels almost exultantly empty.  War is presented as an inexplicable natural phenomenon; there's virtually no interest in the specifics of history or in psychology, human or otherwise. Every scene is a set-piece, every character an archetype – though the humans register rather more vividly than Joey, a purely emblematic figure who accepts his fate with the blankness of an equine Forrest Gump.

Through the darkness, innocence will prevail: this is the sum total of what Spielberg can allow himself to say.  Coming from a filmmaker in his mid-sixties, the simplicity of this Christmas message seems more forced than persuasive.  Even children are capable of asking what came after World War One.

Happy Feet 2

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 24, 2011.

Whenever he gets the chance during interviews, the director George Miller likes to talk about archetypal heroes and universal myths. But his own films are much less boring than this suggests:  ever since Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), he's specialised in eccentric, unwieldy constructions, filled with random-seeming digressions and outsize set-pieces.

Like a splintering sheet of ice, this enjoyably wacky 3D sequel to Miller's computer-animated Antarctic musical Happy Feet (2006) soon divides into fragments that drift in separate directions. The nominal lead penguin is Eric (voiced by Ava Acres) – son of Mumble (Elijah Wood), the hero of the first film – who has trouble dancing along with his brothers and sisters. His quest for meaning and purpose leads him to The Mighty Sven (Hank Azaria), apparently the very first penguin to learn how to fly. In the meantime, we follow the adventures of a pair of sexually ambiguous krill (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt) whose dialogue is littered with desperately ingenious puns (“Goodbye, krill world”).

Everyone is brought back together for the extended climax, imaginatively built around a single topographic situation: a tribe of penguins trapped in a deep, slippery valley of ice. The narrative barely moves forward as Miller and his team "cover" the ensuing rescue efforts from various angles, almost in the manner of a TV news crew recording an unfolding event. The film seems conceived partly as a 3D map of imaginary terrain, partly as a grab-bag of satirical-philosophical observations – but hardly at all as a chain of events arranged along a single narrative line.

A far more original talent than anyone at Pixar, Miller remains a naïve artist as well as a genuinely experimental one; like Baz Luhrmann or Yahoo Serious, he's the kind of magpie happy to pick up shiny cultural gewgaws without worrying much about where they originate. Who else would have baby penguins strutting their stuff to a rewritten version of “Sexyback,” or a herd of elephant seals racing across the ice to the theme from Rawhide? Nothing could be more Australian than this willingness to take any old half-baked idea and give it a go.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

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

Tintin looks odd, there's no getting around it.  He still sports his orange quiff and wears his familiar ensemble of plus fours and tan trenchcoat, but the boy reporter originally created by Belgian comic-book artist Hergé in 1929 just isn't who he used to be. 

To be precise – as Hergé's twin detectives Thomson and Thompson might have it – this Tintin is a “motion capture” creation modelled after (and voiced by) the actor Jamie Bell, inhabiting an idealised 3D universe halfway between animation and live action.

Filled with reflections of all kinds – as well as other “virtual” images, such as those seen in telescopes – the film seems conscious of presenting Hergé's hero in a distorting mirror. But as so often with director Steven Spielberg, it's hard to tell whether the weirdness is wholly intentional or whether he simply didn't think it through.  Tintin is as much like a real adolescent as Mickey Mouse is like a rodent – so why pursue the alienation effect of making him look more “realistic”?  Equally, why use 3D to bring “depth” to a body of work which remains, in every sense, proudly two-dimensional?

In Robert Zemeckis' fine adaptation of A Christmas Carol (2009), the eerieness of the motion-capture technique felt in keeping with the Gothic exaggerations of the source material. But there's nothing remotely Gothic about Tintin's exploits as chronicled by Hergé, however many hidden chambers or ancient secrets he manages to uncover. On the contrary, the appeal of the books lies in their evenness of tone: the flat, bright colours, the unchanging panel layouts, the supporting characters who go through the same routines whenever they appear.

The first chapter of a planned trilogy, The Secret of the Unicorn is reasonably loyal to the plot of the Hergé album of the same title, with some elements borrowed from other books – notably, Tintin's introduction to Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), the spluttering old seadog who accompanies him through his later adventures. 

The story begins at a market somewhere in Europe, where the purchase of a model ship leads to the chance discovery of a mysterious scroll. Eventually, Tintin joins Haddock on the race to find a long-hidden treasure ahead of the villainous Sakharine (Daniel Craig). Briefly kidnapped, then cast adrift in the ocean, Tintin and Haddock commandeer a plane from some minor villains and head for the Middle East, with Thompson and Thomson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) – Keystone Kops as drawn by Magritte – in tepid rather than hot pursuit.

In spirit if not in appearance, Spielberg's Tintin remains close to the Hergé original: inquisitive, upbeat, and a trifle prissy, especially when confronted with Haddock's drinking habits.  His goodwill and zest for life make a welcome contrast to the sourness of the director's other famous adventurer, the finally somewhat unpleasant Indiana Jones.

On the other hand, Spielberg and his team have deliberately chosen not to emulate Hergé's visual style.  The characters are often veiled in shadows reminiscent of film noir; the half-imaginary camera rarely stops tracking and pivoting, as if to flaunt its freedom within a supposedly solid space.

For Herge, every narrative element seems equally important, but for Spielberg action takes precedence above all else: at best, his set-pieces come as close as cinema can to pure kinesis, creating the illusion – as on a funpark ride – that gravity has temporarily been overcome. By far the highlight of the film is a downhill chase sequence that unfolds as if without a cut, the characters leaping between vehicles while the “camera” performs elaborate aerial manoevures to keep up.

Enjoyable yet forgettable, this is both one of Spielberg's most typical films and one of his emptiest.  You could take it as yet another symptom of his android tendencies, what you might call his Pinocchio complex: like the hero of his great A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Tintin never quite becomes a real boy.  But there's an echo too of another of Spielberg's great role models, Peter Pan: a child at play in a world that refers to nothing beyond itself, sealed in time like one of those model ships.

Tower Heist

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

The opening shot of Tower Heist shows a giant 100-dollar bill, painted onto the bottom of a penthouse swimming pool.  That gives a fair idea of what to expect from Brett Ratner's latest throwaway caper, where the commercial calculation of the filmmaking is paraded as if it were part of the joke.

The penthouse is home to Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a crooked businessman whose arrest spells financial doom for many, including the innocent staff at the Manhattan apartment block where he's lived for years. To make things right, dutiful building manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller in standard worrywart mode) decides to pull off the robbery of the century, with help from his colleagues and from a more experienced local thief (Eddie Murphy).

If you're hoping that Tower Heist will channel some of the righteous anger of the Occupy movement, you've come to the wrong address. Nor will Ratner easily be mistaken for a hot-shot action director: the climactic scenes of Josh and his team climbing onto window ledges or dangling from roofs are played for laborious slapstick rather than thrills.

At least the package includes a number of first-rate actors in roles that are well within their comfort zones: Matthew Broderick as a timid ex-banker, Tea Leoni as a ball-busting FBI agent, Casey Affleck as a whiny creep. Even Murphy gives one of his more energetic recent performances, though his motor-mouthed, domineering approach makes him an awkward fit within the ensemble.  Casting him alongside Vince Vaughn might be a better bet.

The Salt of Life

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 22, 2011.

Orson Welles' final masterpiece, F For Fake (1973), contains a dizzying sequence devoted to what Welles calls “the fine outdoor sport of girl-watching”.  Were that sport part of the Olympics, the hero of Gianni Di Gregorio's new film would be guaranteed a place on the Italian team.

Now in his early sixties, Di Gregorio didn't have his career breakthrough until 2008, when he wrote, directed and starred in Mid-August Lunch, a gentle comedy about an ageing bachelor still under the thumb of his ninetysomething mother (Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni).

The Salt of Life – the superior Italian title translates as “Gianni and the Women” – brings back both the imperious mother and the dutiful son.  This time, though, Gianni is a family man, with a teenage daughter (Teresa Di Gregorio) and a pleasant but distant wife (Elisabetta Piccolomini). Forced into early retirement, Gianni spends his days running errands, fretting about the potential loss of his inheritance, and ogling much younger women on the street.

The premise could have been handled crassly, but Di Gregorio is the rare filmmaker with a genuinely light touch.  As an actor, he has the sleekness of an ideal head waiter, despite his stiff neck and the bags under his eyes. He directs with a similar self-effacing skill: whenever Gianni goes for a stroll, the character's lecherous thought processes are revealed through seemingly offhand point-of-view shots that double as documentary glimpses of summer in Rome.

The Salt Of Life is unabashedly filled with touristic pleasures, and Di Gregorio is acute about ways that frustrated sexual longing can be diverted into other kinds of consumption: white wine at lunch, a blissful early-morning cigarette.

Beneath the sunny surface, this is also a story about a man dealing with the awareness of mortality (his mother's and his own).  Only gradually does it become clear that Gianni's impulsive behaviour, and heavy drinking, may be symptoms of a nervous breakdown in slow motion. But the film retains a spirit of wry, clear-eyed indulgence: in their appreciation of female beauty, Di Gregorio and his alter ego are very much at one.

Isabella Rossellini

A version of this article appeared in The Age, December 17, 2011.

“He died, poor Spanky,” sighs Isabella Rossellini. She's talking about her late lamented pet pig, who makes a brief appearance in her new essay-documentary Animals Distract Me, which she wrote and directed in collaboration with a couple of friends.

Still, she has plenty of other animals around her, as she explains over the phone from her country home, a converted barn in Bellport, Long Island. “Right now, at my feet I have my three dogs, Terry, Pikachu, and Pinocchio, who are always with me.” There's also a cat who spends most of his time in her nearby guest house (“We meet in the garden”) plus six chickens and a rabbit.

Rossellini's bond with the animal kingdom is the subject of Animals Distract Me, commissioned by the American cable channel Planet Green, and screening at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image alongside selected episodes of her short film series Green Porno, which feature her dressing up in paper costumes to re-enact the mating habits of insects and other creatures.

Animals Distract Me is similarly conceived as a series of vignettes, supposedly depicting Rossellini's routine on an average day: “I get up, and go to work, and go to a photographic studio and go to lunch and then do my study at home in the evening.” At every turn, she's distracted by glimpses of animals, which trigger musings on topics from psychology to consumer ethics to the theory of evolution (Charles Darwin is played by Rossellini herself in a fake beard).

It's tempting to see a confessional side to this storytelling device. Having been in the public eye for most of her life as an actress and model, Rossellini now purports to take us behind the scenes and tell us what's really on her mind. Yet she rejects the suggestion that she set out to play with the world's perception of her as an icon of glamour. “I don't care about my image, whatever that is,” she says firmly. “I never worked to create an image, I worked for what is interesting.”

Rossellini, 59, says that she always wanted to make films of her own, but that it took her a while to find the confidence. “I was intimidated by the role of the director - the fact that you have to command a big crew of fifty to 150 people, that it's difficult to get financed.”

For showing her another approach, she credits the Canadian eccentric Guy Maddin, who cast her as an amputee beer magnate in The Saddest Music In the World (2003). Like Maddin, she uses small crews and prefers to operate on a modest scale. “I don't see this as just a step towards something else, eventually a feature film with Tom Cruise.”

Rossellini says she inherited her love of animals from her famous parents, actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini. Growing up, she always had dogs and other pets around her. It was Roberto who gave her a copy of King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz, the book that introduced her to the scientific study of animal behaviour. Her own films are designed to instruct as well as amuse; in this sense, she's following in the footsteps of her father, who saw cinema as a tool for education above all.

Though Rossellini is clearly passionate about Darwin's theories, she also describes herself as a Roman Catholic – and when she talks about her environmental concerns there are echoes of the language of the church. Eating seafood from waters that have been over-fished is, for her, “one of the things that is the biggest sin.” Then there are “second-degree sins” which can be mitigated by circumstance. “For example, you know, I can eat chicken, but I like to eat free range organic chicken rather than a chicken who has been in a cage all his life and has never walked once.”

Besides being involved with environmental organisations, in recent years Rossellini has spent a lot of time training guide dogs for the blind; in Animals Distract Me, she proudly displays certificates testifying to her efforts.

When she started, she says, she was living in a Manhattan apartment with limited room for pets. “I was having this desire to be in close contact with animals, and really have an experience first hand, instead of just reading about them. Of course I had my dog Pat, but it isn't enough, you know – one dog for fifteen years. But if I volunteer for the Guide Dog Foundation I can see many dogs.”

Nowadays, she says, her main responsibility is “whelping” - that is, supervising the birth of puppies who will be trained later on. “I take care of the delivery and I look after the puppies for the first six weeks of their lives, with their mama. And then I take them back to the city and another pregnant mama is sent to me.” Perhaps not coincidentally, her next planned film project is another series of shorts similar to Green Porno – but dealing with animal maternity instead of sex.

Asked about her favorite animal movies, Rossellini nominates Charlie Chaplin's classic The Circus (1928) which she watches for inspiration (“It's my ceremony”) whenever she sets out to make a film of her own. “It's just so funny. I don't even know how he made that donkey run after him! And those monkeys...”

Laughing heartily, she recalls the scene where monkeys attack Chaplin on a tightrope, biting his nose and pulling down his pants. “I imagine that he had to also improvise with animals – because of course with animals, you can teach them some things, but not all. When he ends up in the cage with the lion and the Jack Russell comes back, waking up the lion, it just makes me laugh every time I see it. I mean, he's a great genius, you know? I can't explain how, but we all agree.”

For Rossellini, communicating with animals is finally a matter of instinct more than reason. “None of the people at the Guide Dog Foundation are scientists, for example,” she says. “They know which dog should marry which dog to have the right kind of puppies – and yet it's not done scientifically. They do it by a sort of sixth sense.”

Yet if we humans can never wholly grasp how animals think, how far is it possible for us to make an authentic connection? “Well, I connect to animals,” Rossellini says. “I don't know if they connect to me, but I think so. I mean, right now when I'm talking to you there are these dogs at my feet, and they always follow me everywhere, so they must be pleased to be with me.”

As she argues in the film, Darwin provides scientific back-up for the idea that humans and animals have traits in common – just as actors discover that certain facial expressions, such as smiling, remain constant across human cultures. “I can see that my dog is joyful, sorrowful, frightened, affectionate, these basic things,” she says. “There is a continuity between us all.”

Melancholia

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 17, 2011.

Released in Australian cinemas just in time for the Christmas holidays, Lars von Trier's latest gift-wrapped parcel of doom and gloom opens with an outwardly festive occasion – a wedding reception for a young couple, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), at a country mansion.

But there are a few things wrong with this seemingly perfect picture. Isolated in the midst of squabbling relatives, Justine proves to be a chronic depressive, battling to get through an ultra-stressful day without breaking down. In the meantime, there's another threat on the horizon: the rogue planet Melancholia, scheduled to pass dangerously close to the earth in the coming weeks. While Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) frets, her husband (Kiefer Sutherland), an amateur astronomer, promises that catastrophe is not on the way. Justine herself has other ideas; still, as she sees it, worse things could happen than the end of the world.

As apocalyptic scenarios go, this one is not terribly probable; but then Von Trier, long known as the chief provocateur of Danish cinema, is anything but a realist. The idea that the earth could be destroyed by a metaphor is both a grim joke and an illustration of the paradox that depression can entail a kind of megalomania, where the entire universe seems coloured by a personal despair.

There's a punk side to Von Trier's sensibility, a need to trash whatever positive feelings we might have towards families, relationships, or existence in general. With one or two honorable exceptions, the wedding guests – especially Justine's nasty mother (Charlotte Rampling) and smarmy boss (Stellan Skarsgard) – don't give much cause for hope in the human race. “Life on earth is evil,” Justine finally declares, recalling the vision of a bestial Nature articulated by Gainsbourg's character in Von Trier's last film, Antichrist (2009).

But as the critic Andrew Sarris once wrote of Billy Wilder, Von Trier is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism. Beneath his posturing, he has the instincts of an entertainer: here he pulls off his usual trick of using frantic handheld camerawork to distract us from the artifice of the plot, while still spoon-feeding us all the necessary visual information.

Scarcely aiming for “depth,” Von Trier's films are full of sarcastic cultural echoes, like travesties of things half-forgotten since we learnt them in school.  On the soundtrack, Melancholia regularly recycles the prelude from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, an archetypal expression of the Romantic yearning for oblivion. A wordless prologue is filled with stock symbols of transience and decay: a lengthening shadow on a sundial, ashes drifting through space. Moving in slow motion, human figures are flattened to the point where they resemble paper cut-outs, as in a Monty Python cartoon spoofing the pieties of the past.

Even the later contrast between the two sisters has a copybook neatness. Where Gainsbourg serves as the voice of reason, Dunst is extraordinary in a role she might have been working towards for her entire career – ever since Interview With the Vampire (1994), where she played an immortal trapped in a child's body, literally an “old soul”.

Seen from afar, Justine suggests a smiling android programmed to fit the part of a fairy-tale bride. At closer hand, that mask dissolves, and we become aware of a range of emotions – fear, contempt, unwilling tenderness – which her blank canvas of a face registers with uncanny sensitivity without ever letting us know where they originate.

From the prologue onwards, close-ups of the anguished Justine are paralleled by shots of the alien planet looming in the sky: two mysteries, one as unknowable as the other. This perverse “marriage” is sealed in an openly erotic shot of Justine sprawled naked by a riverbank, bathing in Melancholia's blue light. Midway between kitsch and sincerity, it's the moment that justifies the film – an image of something neither good nor evil, but simply voluptuously strange.

Route Irish

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

From The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Roman Polanski's recent The Ghost Writer, political thrillers often work best when they keep their distance from reality, imagining the bizarre truth behind events we all know from the daily news. For an old-school leftist like Ken Loach, that kind of playfulness isn't an option; Route Irish may be a slight departure from his usual social-realist mode, but it's still a straightforward protest against the outsourcing of the war in Iraq.

The story begins in Liverpool, where Fergus (Mark Womack), a hot-tempered former soldier, attends the funeral of his comrade Frankie (John Bishop). While Fergus is embroiled in a court case that bars him from leaving the country, he's still determined to find out what really happened when Frankie was killed on Route Irish – the stretch of highway leading from Baghdad to the International Zone, described as the most dangerous road in the world. The moment we hear the well-spoken Haynes (Jack Fortune) give a eulogy praising Frankie's service to a private military company, we can guess where the plot is headed and who the villains are going to be.

Loach has always worn his politics on his sleeve, and has always had mixed success integrating his “message” into a narrative that works on its own terms. Often he relies on everyman protagonists to guide the audience through a complex political situation. Fergus belongs to this tradition of the “ordinary” Loach hero: wiry, stoic, humorous, capable of both violence and warmth. As a stock figure, he serves his purpose, but the film's efforts to turn him into a three-dimensional character – as in his slightly kinky romance with Frankie's widow (Andrea Lowe) – feel like half-hearted gestures. The same could be said for the would-be suspenseful scenes where Fergus is menaced by thugs desperate to get their hands on a missing mobile phone.

For a short while, the film looks set to turn into a revenge fantasy, the progressive answer to 24. There are also moments – especially in the handling of a crucial late scene and its aftermath – when Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty seem bent on subverting what they take to be the moral simplicity of thriller convention. The pat, overblown ending aims to deliver catharsis, but fails to convince on any level.  An act of duty rather than imagination, Route Irish is one of Loach's weakest films.

Decadence: Decline of the Western World

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

As the history of cinema suggests, “decadence” is a basically campy concept – instantly summoning images of Liza Minnelli belting out cabaret numbers or Frank Thring in a bathhouse ogling slaves. But there's scant entertainment to be had from this inane secular sermon fronted by local TV presenter Pria Viswalingam, a mock-diffident chap in a stripy scarf, strolling across the planet in search of evidence of the Decline of the West.

For intellectual back-up with a double dose of sanctimony, Viswalingam turns to a mostly male line-up of pundits ranging from Noam Chomsky – who says exactly what he always does – to Melbourne sociologist John Carroll, author of The Wreck of Western Culture.

Little can meaningfully be asserted about an entity as loosely defined as “Western civilisation,” and Viswalingam often settles for attacking the corrupt materialism of the United States. He also feels obliged to express nostalgia for some lost Golden Age – and so he claims, fairly ludicrously, that the West peaked in the 1960s, around the time of the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War.

For all his sweeping statements, Viswalingam is no radical (“Capitalism works, and works well...it just needs a bridle”). An utterly vague thinker, he makes his pitch to left and right alike, denouncing Wall Street, the Abu Ghraib photos, modern education, celebrity worship, rising divorce rates, falling church attendances, sex tourism and Internet porn. It's enough to make you want to order a Big Mac and watch Transformers.