By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Their
Finest and Colossal
Their Finest
Pleasure
in Their Finest (and I certainly had
some) relies on a triple nostalgia: for Britain’s heroic Blitz years of 1940
and ’41, for the plucky patriotism of English films at that time, and for the humane
coziness that English movies brought to
a pitch of charm and wit, mainly in the Ealing
pictures after the war. Made with high craft by Lone Scherfig, it’s
about a propaganda film patched together
for fast release after the Dunkirk rescue. That operation saved the neck of
Britain’s almost cooked goose from Hitler’s army, inspiring some great
Churchill rhetoric and this movie (and Christopher Nolan’s massive Dunkirk, coming in July). Using an
English beach, fake boats, retro effects and a corny script (but isn’t Casablanca fairly corny also?), Scherfig
still gives us a fine sense of that amazing, frightening time on the “sceptr’d
isle.”
No
Churchill (just posters), but here is Jeremy Irons as a war minister, knocking
off a chunk of Henry V to rally the filmers.
He also saddles them with the need for a gung-ho Yank hero, a volunteer pilot
who can’t act. This doubles the stress of the young scripting team, played by Gemma
Arterton and Sam Claflin (romance beckons, of course). Helping the American empowers
snappish old pro Ambrose (Bill Nighy), who recovers the zip that once gave him
dash as a matinee idol. Has Nighy ever given a bad performance? Or one not
graced by his sly, deft, mildly dotty finesse? As this vain but touchingly
committed ham, he has the sort of scene-lifting fun that Peter O’Toole bestowed
on My Favorite Year.
Scherfig
made a star of young Carey Mulligan with another look-back story, An
Education. He won’t do the same for Arterton, with her smaller luster, yet
she is game, pretty and heartfelt. In the final quarter there is a small plot shock,
but Their Finest can, like Britain,
take it. Though a comedy in its best tactics, the film has a good strategic
edge: we sense the bombs, the blood, the personal losses. And many lines crackle
(even the weird “spawning spontaneously in the sawdust”). Dunkirk will find its own way to the famous beaches, no doubt
closer to Joe Wright’s Atonement and
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Colossal
There
endures a certain resentment of Anne Hathaway. Envy? She does resemble Audrey
Hepburn plus Shakespeare’s dream of a perfect rose. Maybe it’s the contrast with
her slightly tinny, American voice, or because her talent doesn’t always rise
to her beauty. Cast those doubts away for Colossal.
As
screw-up Gloria, Hathaway is funny and fetching and often goofy-drunk. Her
British lover (Dan Stevens, the long-lamented Matthew Crawley of Downton Abbey) kicks her out of his
swank Manhattan digs, so she returns, tail dragging, to her hometown. There the
hub of interest is a bar run by Gloria’s childhood pal, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis,
who seems to be reaching for an improbable convergence of Russell Crowe and
Paul Giamatti).
The
director, finely named Nacho Vigalondo, wrote a script that also seems to drink
a lot. The “plot” involves Gloria’s startling, hungover insight that she has a behavior-controlling
brain link with a huge monster lizard terrorizing Seoul, South Korea (as in old
Godzilla days). Down at their past playground, Oscar also gets into
trans-Pacific telepathy. Not even the combined gifts of James Joyce and Ray
Bradbury could find a tight narrative thread, but that barely matters.
The
strangeness, as sitcomical Americana intersects Korean panic mobs (maybe a bit too topical right now, in the age of Kim
Jong-Trump), makes Colossal one of
those oddities you won’t forget – movies like Eat the Peach, Trees Lounge, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Plot Against Harry, Tremors,
Withnail and I, Slow West, Wise Blood, Chan Is Missing, O’Horten and Whiskey Galore. And I’ve never liked
Hathaway quite this much before.
SALAD (A List)
Twelve Outstanding British WWII Movies ranked by quality, with director: Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings), The Life and Death of Col. Blimp (Michael Powell), The Purple Plain (Robert Parrish), 49th Parallel (a.k.a. The Invaders; Michael Powell), Hope and Glory (John Boorman), Atonement (Joe Wright), In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, David
Lean), The Bridge on the River Kwai
(David Lean), One of Our Aircraft is
Missing (Michael Powell), The Cruel
Sea (Charles Frend), The Dam Busters
(Michael Anderson) and The Cockleshell
Heroes (José Ferrer).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
At
the grand “Night of 100 Stars” at Radio City Music Hall in 1982, singer Tony
Bennett felt the jitters before going on, but “Orson Welles was backstage, and
he stood there smoking a big cigar and staring at me. He could tell that I was
having a case of the butterflies, and with perfect grace he said to me, ‘I go
to every party at Sinatra’s house, and he plays nothing but Tony Bennett
records,’ Just at that moment the announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Tony
Bennett!’ Orson knew exactly what to say to help me get through. No wonder he was
a great director.” (From Tony Bennett’s memoir The Good Life).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Gulley
Jimson (in The Horse’s Mouth) has a
sexual forwardness rare for Alec (Guinness). He had slyly spoofed the machismo
of military men, taking it to a high level in Bridge on the River Kwai and Tunes
of Glory. He admired alpha-male friends like Jack Hawkins, Bill Holden and
Harry Andrews, and envied Richard Burton’s stellar wallop. Piers Paul Read’s
biography suggests a closeted gay or bi impulse but never finds the closet key.
Possibly Alec didn’t either (and had a strong marriage).” (From the Alec
Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Keira Knightley in a peaceful moment of Atonement (Focus Features, 2007; director Joe Wright, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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