The Dictator

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 17, 2012.

Sacha Baron Cohen off his game can out-perform most comics in peak condition, which makes The Dictator worth seeing as an interesting failure. Perhaps fearing over-exposure, Baron Cohen has dropped the semi-documentary ambush format that carried him through his breakout hit Borat and its still funnier follow-up Bruno: this latest outrage is straight fiction, even if its director Larry Charles remains indifferent to storytelling technique beyond keeping his camera in place to catch the ad-libs.

Glowering in an Osama beard, military decorations pinned to his chest, Baron Cohen cuts an alarming figure as Admiral General Aladeen, supreme ruler of the fictitious, oil-rich North African nation of Wadiya (as in “Wadiya reckon?”). Crass, murderous yet oddly genial, Aladeen is Borat strutting the world stage, an embodiment of everything America loves to hate. Yet his brutish egoism also serves as a funhouse-mirror reflection of the US will to power: his personal tastes seem wholly Westernised, particularly when it comes to bed partners (an early cameo by Megan Fox redefines the term “good sport”).

Movie convention tells us that Aladeen is due for moral re-education, a process launched when he comes to New York to address the United Nations. Newly clean-shaven after an assassination attempt, he flees onto the streets of Brooklyn, where he's mistaken for a Wadiyan dissident by a hippie activist (Anna Faris, rather ill-used) who's prepared to tolerate his antics out of PC respect for cultural difference. Meanwhile, his place is taken by a gormless double (Baron Cohen again), a subplot that could have been developed further if the writers had any interest in narrative as such.

In essence, Baron Cohen is a very pure clown, with his precise enunciation and his tall, lean body like a stretched rubber band.  If he makes bad taste a point of honour, it's simply because this is usually the shortest route to the biggest laugh. His unforgettable turn as the child-hating villain in Hugo proved that his talent is not at all reliant on outwardly “edgy” material; even here, one of the best routines proves to be innocent circus stuff, with Aladeen retrieving unlikely items from his pockets as he dangles from a high wire.

If Borat recalled the immigrant comedy of the Marx brothers, this time round Charlie Chaplin's Hitler burlesque The Great Dictator (1940) serves as a more or less explicit reference point (one wonders if anybody on the creative team has seen Chaplin's less-heralded follow-up A King In New York). Occasionally it's possible to detect a political meaning beneath the wearying torture and rape gags: the early scenes lend themselves to hawkish interpretation – chortling through an effort to justify Wadiya's nuclear program, Aladeen clearly qualifies as a regional threat – while the climax lays some progressive cards on the table at long last.

But for all his bravado, Baron Cohen (unlike Chaplin) seems reluctant to take the risk of committing to any definite satirical attitudes: nothing here is sustained, neither the feelgood redemption narrative nor the insistence that the jolly hero is a genuinely fearsome monster. Fewer punches are pulled in Tim Burton's new vampire comedy Dark Shadows, with Johnny Depp as a comparably out-of-touch autocrat more actively ready to spill blood.

Trishna

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

Michael Winterbottom is regularly heralded as a filmmaker capable of applying the same no-fuss technique to any subject, whether it's Casey Affleck beating women to a pulp in The Killer Inside Me or Steve Coogan enjoying a series of expensive meals in The Trip. Predictably, his latest venture as writer-director comes as yet another surprise: an adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy's classic novel about the tragedy of a “ruined” working-class maiden, relocated to modern India as a vehicle for the leading lady of Slumdog Millionaire.

That Trishna is Winterbottom's third Hardy adaptation suggests a surprising overlap of interests between the regional writer and the cosmopolitan filmmaker.  In fact, Winterbottom has long been drawn to Hardy as a chronicler of tradition upended by the arrival of modernity – a story that continues to play out around the world, and a theme that correlates with the typical Winterbottom vision of contemporary urbanites as atoms whirling in a void.

A great novel by any standard, Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a frank attack on puritan morality as well as a reflection of Hardy's own gloomy fatalism.  Trishna is a much less realised work – even if the vagueness comes disguised as knowing ambiguity. Winterbottom has retained the shape of the story, and even some of its imagery, such as the comparison between the humble heroine and a caged bird.  But while Hardy's Tess is mistreated by two very different men, Trishna (Frieda Pinto) has only one to contend with: Jay (Riz Ahmed), a wealthy, Western educated playboy whose father owns a chain of hotels.

Tess' troubles begin when she is raped by a local aristocrat, but Winterbottom avoids telling us if Trishna initially consents to Jay's advances – and indeed, how far she feels love or desire for him at any point.  Likewise, we can only speculate whether Jay's misogyny stems from his rootless Western upbringing or from a covertly-held set of “traditional” values.

If anything links Winterbottom's recent projects beyond a generalised sense of anomie, it's the portrayal of predatory male sexual behaviour, in forms that range from horrific (The Killer Inside Me) to casually boorish (The Trip). Despite his “progressive” leanings, his approach to this theme is not exactly one of feminist outrage; indeed, there's some kind of spiritual link between the semi-anachronistic figure of the "heartless" cad and the director's own distance from his subject-matter, an admission made virtually explicit when Jay orders Trishna to dress up and strike poses for his benefit.

Winterbottom is always fond of asking his actors to ad-lib, but this time round the key exchanges between Pinto and Ahmed are too clumsy and obvious to have much dramatic force.  Still, you could say that “going through the motions” is what his films are mainly concerned with: his characteristic attention to the routines of labour – here, workers toiling in the fields or chopping vegetables – mirrors his disingenuous approach to filmmaking as just another job.

The glancing editing technique leaves room for a lot of conventional local colour, from shots of monkeys and peacocks to glimpses of studio recording sessions and dance rehearsals in Mumbai, where Jay hopes to launch his career as a film producer. There's a touch of reflexivity here, making a point of how Trishna is both similar and different to its Bollywood equivalents. But again, the irony would be sharper if we had a better idea of the modest heroine's attitude towards her new, worldly friends.

In fact, we're rarely encouraged to speculate about Trishna's psychology or her motives, mixed as these might be.  Almost to the end, she remains a passive character (far more so than Tess) defined by her beauty, her willingness to submit, and her mysterious self-containment.  It's as if she embodied the true spirit of India, eternally beyond the grasp of Western man – though this is one more idea that Winterbottom would never be corny enough to spell out.

Iron Sky

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 10, 2012.

Are Nazis funny?  Mel Brooks proved they can be, at least in defeat: The Producers is nothing if not a tap dance on Hitler's grave. This premise of this Finnish-German-Australian science-fiction satire is less reassuring, positing a fresh generation of young Aryans born and bred on the moon – where their forebears fled in 1945 – and itching to spread the gospel of racial purity.

Previously best-known for his Star Trek parodies, the Finnish director Timo Vuorensola has conceived Iron Sky as a political cabaret in a genre frame – the kind of thing Joe Dante pulled off in Homecoming, his 2005 horror-comedy about the Iraq war. Earth's last best hope is an African-American male model turned astronaut (Christopher Kirby) launched into space as a publicity stunt to aid the re-election of a future US president (Stephanie Paul) closely resembling Sarah Palin, who spends her days climbing a Stairmaster in the Oval Office while surrounded by her hunting trophies.

Though the gag of equating Nazis and present-day Republicans shows a willingness to boldly venture into new worlds of bad taste, the novelty value soon wears off. Much of the would-be edgy humour is feeble and misjudged, particularly when the hero is transformed into a white man by a modern Dr Strangelove (Tilo Prückner). For all his anti-American bravado, it's unlikely that Vuorensola would turn down a chance to direct in Hollywood: though his action sequences have a Thunderbirds stiffness, the special effects are far slicker than required by the Z-grade approach.

King of Devil's Island

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 3, 2012.

Imagine a version of Oliver Twist that never leaves the workhouse. Sound like fun?  Well, neither is this “true story” set in 1915 at a remand centre on an island off the coast of Norway, where teenage boys are preached at, starved half to death and bullied through endless bouts of punishing manual labour. Rebels are subjected to flogging or worse at the hands of the mealy-mouthed governor (Stellan Skarsgard) and his neurotic second-in-command (Kristoffer Joner, resembling a crumpled, moustachioed David Bowie).

This is a technically competent but monotonous movie, using handsomely academic shots of windswept beaches to help maintain a mood as bleak as the weather. The director Marius Holst seems to think that the grimness is somehow deep and meaningful – but the notion that piety can serve as a mask for complacency and sadism is hardly new.  Nor can the film itself avoid gloating over its mounting cruelties, tightening the emotional screws until we long for the victims to take revenge.

The younger actors represent stock prison-movie types: there's the model inmate (Trond Nilssen) counting the days till his release, the feeble-minded weakling (Magnus Langlete) singled out as an easy target, and the mysterious newcomer (Benjamin Helstad) who dares to fight back. For good or evil, the adults have the showier roles: Skarsgard has become the boringly transparent operator of a Dial-A-Hypocrite service, but Joner's fragility adds a haunting dimension to his monstrous character, suggesting depths of self-pity barely touched on in the script.

Delicacy

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 3, 2012.

The slender, doe-eyed Audrey Tautou is rarely far from the world of fairy-tale, and this unusually structured romantic comedy is something like Beauty and the Beast told in reverse. The first quarter hour introduces us to Nathalie (Tautou) and her boyfriend François (Pio Marmaï), who seem the perfect young couple until François is killed in a car crash.

Numb with grief, Nathalie returns to her office job where she finds herself pursued by two contrasting men. Fleeing from her suave, married boss (Bruno Todeschini), she falls into the arms of a scruffy, balding Swede named Markus (François Damiens), a humble chap who can't believe his luck.  After a single kiss, Nathalie backs off – but Markus is smitten, and sets out to win her heart through sheer persistence.

Delicacy is based on a bestselling novel by David Foenkinos, credited here as co-director with his brother Stephane.  The book aspires to the literary equivalent of Tautou's twee charm (“She had gone through adolescence without trauma, and she respected crosswalks”) but the film strays almost by accident into a more interesting area, like a thought experiment designed to challenge received notions of romance.

While Nathalie's friends and colleagues tut-tut over her developing bond with Markus, viewers must decide for themselves how to respond. Is it true that Damiens is “ugly” while the equally quirky-looking Tautou is infinitely desirable?  How much do outward traits matter anyway when it comes to love? Given the potential of the theme, it's too bad the film winds up dominated by broad, conventional characterisations and tepid farce.

Act of Valor

A version of this review appeared in The Age, May 3, 2012.

Directed by former stuntmen Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, this independently-produced action movie is backed by the US military and conceived quite literally as a recruiting commercial. Half-a-dozen uncredited Navy SEALS star as versions of themselves – but whatever the pretensions to authenticity, there's clearly nothing realistic about the depiction of military life as a non-stop rollercoaster ride, with brawny men of honour zipping around the world to gun down Mexican gangsters, Russian arms dealers and Filipino jihadists.

The battle set-pieces depend on mobile point-of-view shots in the manner of a “first-person shooter” video game, while the heroes are characterised so feebly they barely register as individuals even in death: nothing could be more embarassing than the lyrical interludes of soldiers romping in the surf, except for the scenes where they trade slangy banter (“This could be big trouble in little China”) or wax sentimental about their families back home.

Once in a while the filmmakers will throw in something almost bizarre enough to be entertaining: a flip-flopping camera to simulate the feeling of being rolled in a carpet, some leering shots of a Russian gang moll in her underwear, a close-up of a grasshopper that suggests a fleeting imitation of The Thin Red Line. The finishing touches are provided by a free-associating narrator reciting Spartan slogans in a bullfrog voice recalling the brother in Everybody Loves Raymond: “War is a country of will.  There's no room for sympathy.  If you're not willing to give up everything, you've already lost.”