Mr Nice, a biopic charting the rise and fall of Howard Marks, Oxford graduate, friend to the Secret Service, associate of the Irish Republican Army, father of four and, most notoriously, a prolific importer of narcotics, is not exactly Mr Engaging. It is not even Mr Focussed. In fact, it is a mystery (Mr Ree?) why it was made as a compressed biography spanning 30 years – from Marks’ schooldays in the 1950s to some emergency dental work in prison in the 1980s – reducing itself to a film that says: “Don’t do – or sell – drugs”. It could have been Mr So Much Better.
Arguably, Rhys Ifans is well cast as Howard. Alas, he lacks critical distance. You want to sense Howard’s intellect – how it is trapped by his surroundings, how he appears to abandon it, scraping through university. Ifans barely suggests the depth of the man.
He captures his chirpy smile as Howard coasts through life, but fails to suggest his motivation.
The writer-director is Bernard Rose, who quit the Hollywood mainstream after the twin failures of his Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved and adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, having discovered the freedom of digital video. Mr Nice represents his first film for a decade with a significant budget. In essence, it is the film of Marks’ one-man stage show – it even begins with a recreation of this event. The show was effective because audiences could bask in the presence of a man who has lived a colourful life, was a fugitive from justice, got caught, did time, but appeared to have no regrets – rather, shared disrespect for the law with his adoring public. The film does not benefit from this dangerous frisson. It softens the sense of danger that Howard undoubtedly felt.
There are some exceptions. Howard’s first encounter with a Republican terrorist (David Thewlis) he hopes will help with his imports leads to a scene where he faces a knee-capping. When Howard inhales on his joint and pulls down his trousers in preparation for the wound, it is unclear whether the terrorist’s decision not to shoot him is determined by the proximity of the drug or the sight of Marks’ genitalia. Rose films Howard’s arrest with the camera fixed upon him, so we hear the sounds of his family crying in the house as he is taken outside; this is the only moment when we feel his anxiety.
Ultimately, Rose cannot replicate Howard’s tone. Instead he gives us a collection of scenes with no catharsis. Howard’s argument is that the war on drugs is pointless: How can you go to war against something that makes people happy?” The film suggests that Howard survived because he appeared to co-operate with the authorities without being a snitch. You never sense how he did this, as his testimony led to his IRA friend being chased by police. Mr Nice really needed to be more Mr Subversive.
Torture porn is a moniker usually applied to graphically violent horror films such as Saw and Hostel, which feature protracted sequences that dwell on the process of murder. It also applies to co-writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh’s drama The Stoning of Soraya M, which, as its title suggests, builds to the mob-inflicted killing of its title character.
Set in a small Iranian village in 1986, it portrays a young mother of four, Soraya (Mozhan Marnò) who refuses to divorce her jailer husband, who in turn wants to marry the 14-year-old daughter of a convict at the prison where he works. The convict hopes that by giving his blessing, his life will be spared. The husband wants to take the two sons to live with his new wife, leaving Soraya to raise two girls on her own, but the proposed settlement leaves her with no source of income. The husband contrives a situation where Soraya goes to work for a widower neighbour, who has a son with learning difficulties. He then accuses Soraya of being unfaithful. Community justice demands the death penalty, which is duly carried out in an extended sequence designed (successfully) to horrify the audience.
Although the dialogue is in Farsi, the film resembles nothing less than a television fact-based but highly sentimental “movie of the week” of the sort shown on the True Stories’ television channel. This is unsurprising, since it is an American production. Its producer, Stephen McEveety, was also responsible for The Passion of the Christ and Jim Caviezel even turns up in a small role as a journalist, Freidoune Sahebjam, on whose book the film is based. The showiest role – no pun intended – goes to Shohreh Aghdashloo of House of Sand and Fog and 24 fame as Soraya’s aunt. She tries desperately to save her niece’s life through mediation. In the end, she throws her hands in the air.
I have no doubt that audiences are supposed to leave the cinema feeling shocked and appalled, ready to apply pressure on their governments to force the banning of stoning; although interestingly McEveety has not chosen to produce a film about the death penalty in the United States. (The phrase “Don’t poop where you eat” comes to mind.) However, I was left wondering about the widower, also accused. Was he stoned as well?
I wasn’t entirely convinced that the film got the causes of mob rule quite right.
Soraya’s parents are absent from the story. Was Soraya like the 14-year-old whom her husband wants to marry. The story would have been better served by a fiction that allowed the holes to be filled, rather than truth milked for melodrama.
