Harry Brown
Director: Daniel Barber
Cold Souls
Director: Sophie Barthes
9
Director: Shane Acker
An unwelcome revenant is the urban vigilante picture, which has been popping up in our cinemas with increasing regularity since the daddy of the sub-sub-genre, Michael Winner’s Death Wish, cleverly exploited the fears of middle-class, mid-1970s America. It’s no surprise to learn that a Death Wish remake is on Sylvester Stallone’s agenda – he describes the original as “a classic morality tale where you take a civilised man and take away everything that matters to him so he becomes primitive again”.
And this is the essential plot of Harry Brown, a grim and supposedly gritty vision of modern London in which a respectable pensioner (Michael Caine in the title role) takes the law into his own hands following the murder of his best mate by a pack of feral youths. “Do you really think Mr Emphysema’s got it in him to top a load of hoodies?” asks a baffled and unsurprsingly ineffectual copper. The answer lies in the mild-mannered widower’s personal history in the military, including hints of dark deeds in Northern Ireland.
Indeed, the film seems to suggest that some of the more extreme tactics employed by the British Army in Ulster might well be the solution to some present-day mainland problems in what is theoretically peacetime, but which the film-makers present as an undeclared war between classes and generations.
Harry Brown’s quasi-realist phantasmagoria of “broken Britain” is given unwarranted class by Martin Ruhe’s unsettlingly ominous cinematography and Caine’s characteristic downplaying of even the most emotionally extreme scenes.
It is, of course, encouraging that this living legend of British cinema should be, at this late-autumn stage of his career, willing to depart so dramatically from the relative cosiness of “nice” films like his last outing
Is Anybody There? and seek out more confrontational material. But it’s a pity that his search for creative challenges should have led him to such a thuddingly opportunistic, two-dimensionally exploitative script.
It may not be the most inviting of titles, but deft metaphysical comedy Cold Souls reminds us that surface impressions only tell part of any story. This debut feature from writer-director Sophie Barthes stars Paul Giamatti as himself – or, rather, a fictionalised version of himself. Part of the joke is that, while many viewers will be familiar with Giamatti’s lugubrious face from numerous big-screen appearances in recent years, he’s not exactly “famous” as such.
This means that Barthes has considerable latitude to concoct a fanciful, quietly science-fictional tale around Giamatti’s established screen persona – a combination of nervousness and gloom. “Giamatti” is clearly ambitious with regard to his career, but intelligent enough to realise that Hollywood stardom is both unlikely and undesirable.
In the film, “Giamatti” has reached a creative impasse during rehearsals for a Broadway production of Uncle Vanya. His solution is unorthodox. After reading about a futuristic form of surgery, he undergoes a painless procedure whereby his soul – in a super-compacted form – is extracted and kept in storage.
The “unburdened” “Giamatti” immediately notices considerable differences, as does his bemused spouse (Emily Watson – not playing herself.) Unforeseen complications ensue when “Giamatti” is offered the chance to carry the soul of an actual Russian poet, all the better to get into the proper Chekhovian spirit. This leads to his becoming messily entangled with St Petersburg criminals who are engaged in an unusual form of “trafficking”.
The narrative of Cold Souls leaves itself open to allegorical interpretation. The soul-extraction business, as conducted under the avuncular eye of Dr Flintstein (David Strathairn) is both a parody of new-age remedies and also a sly dig at the predilection of Americans, especially American celebrities, for outlandish, often surgical solutions to personal and professional problems.
It’s the kind of thing that could easily be played as zany, cockeyed weirdness, but Barthes wisely keeps the temperature pretty cool throughout. Exploring bizarre concepts, characters and situations with a deadpan matter-of-factness results in a likeably offbeat affair that’s frequently funny and occasionally hilarious.
Shane Acker’s 9 is expanded from his Oscar-nominated, 11-minute dialogue-free 2005 short of the same name. The titular character is a tiny humanoid made of what looks like sacking with “9” drawn on his back and mechanical eyes on his head. He wakes up in a disorienting post-apocalyptic dominated by vast, vicious robots, in which a handful of entities similar to himself face near-constant mortal danger. If 9 and his pals are to survive these perils, they must discover why – and by whom – they were constructed, these questions sparking a spiritually-inflected narrative that isn’t without the occasional nod to Tolkien.
While 9 may not be the most original story you’ll ever encounter and is saddled with a cumbersomely conventional score by Deborah Lurie, Acker does manage to endow proceedings with an atmosphere – whimsical jauntiness at one moment, thrillingly tense the next – that’s disarmingly distinctive. The result is a fast-moving, uncompromising affair that will surely be too scary for many children. Its 12A certificate means it is supposed to contain only “moderate sustained threat” – a judgement that’s hard to square with some nightmarish sequences which would grace the oeuvre of co-producer Tim Burton.
Neil Young
