A Few More To Cross Off Your List

The above title is a little reference. Long ago, there was a parody of F R Leavis titled “A Few More Books To Cross Off Your List”. This post possibly inaugurates a series in which I devote some short(er) reviews to films which may be passed over without dishonour to the cinephile. One has to doubt that there is no lesson to be drawn from the fact that every film in the following selection is English.

A Good Year (2006): ah, bless Ridley Scott – he really flunks the Turing test with this one. I don’t know who told him he should go anywhere near comedy, never mind rom-com. This is an excruciatingly, violently schmaltzy, Richard Curtis-y exercise in perky winsome performances and painfully naff humour (sped-up footage of a car going round a roundabout??), a kind of contrived plastic forgery of a rom-com where a super-rich Square Mile prick (Russell Crowe doing an English accent) happily finds the best in life on a French vineyard by learning a little lesson about his feelings, with a few great chortles on the way. It feels like a film made for Noel Edmonds. Scott’s style chops aren’t nearly enough to salvage this from the dull plot, the meaningless movie romance based on no chemistry, the cheesy needle-drops trying to shove us into a jolly mood, the faux-smart dialogue (a house “filled with a patina” – filled?), the mugging line-deliveries, the cutesy British smirking behind naughty peekaboo camera angles on the women, the hopeless desire for us to somehow miraculously find it all breezily charming. 

I would question the sanity and moral foundations of anyone who laughed once or even came close. If someone even said “I didn’t think it was funny” as if it were reasonable to disagree, I would mark them. No shit it’s not funny, what kind of monster would imagine it might be? And yet, I’ll give it this – I don’t think Scott did any of this cynically. I think it’s an actually honest, well-intentioned but helplessly inhuman gesture at the genre that turns out tacky as fuck because Scott doesn’t understand this Homo Sapiens “comedy” idea – what purpose does it serve them? Does it look something like this? A stab at humour which turns out more like a wrist-flick. This perversely makes it interesting to watch, and not even to hate-watch exactly. I was quite hooked on an analytical level. It’s slightly bad form to keep making hostages out of a film’s dialogue but, to paraphrase Albert Finney’s character, you can learn a lot from a director’s failure, including how much more pleasurable it is when they succeed.

The Duchess (2008): A biopic of Georgiana Cavendish has some inherent potential for a budding Kubrick or even a contemporary Rossellini, and the cast – Ralph Fiennes is the Duke, Hayley Atwell is his mistress Bess and Keira Knightley is the Duchess – are all sturdy pros. What will this film tell us about life in England in the 1780s? We perch with polite interest. But it’s indifferently written by a couple of nobodies and lifelessly directed by Saul Dibb, who I think we can venture to say is also a nobody. It has almost no proper scenes or dynamism, it’s just an interminable mosaic of brief interactions with inconsequential, banal dialogue that incrementally build up to a stifling tension as the power-structure traps her. The only real scene in the entire film is when the Duke tells her to come back with him and she says no. That’s your lot. A strange feeling to the film results, as it’s never clear why any particular incident has been chosen over anything else, we’re just hovering through these individually pointless, cumulatively draining moments. That’s because it’s a BBC film, with a TV conception of a story, not a cinematic one. Gradually it emerges that at least it’s not going to go in the most obvious direction – she’s not going to win. It also becomes clear that this is a melodrama – the Duke is the most monotonously cardboard monster, Casaubon with a hard-on, when the film would instantly have opened up and become more interesting if it had shown us the apparently more successful relationship between him and Bess (a relationship rigorously excluded from our view, to stick the audience solely with the Duchess at all times). 

It’s also not the sort of film to show us anyone from lower classes or to mention where all the wealth comes from, or to explain the Duchess’ politics in any meaningful way other than some fluff allusion to the fact she has some. Nothing dilutes our attention from the gorgeous country house and grounds and the need to maintain genealogy in a world where capitalism hasn’t quite happened yet. And sure enough I always enjoyed looking at the screen for the duration – superb set design, great costumes, some wonderful compositions, all of that is sumptuous. But it’s still dead - too shallow to be intellectually satisfying, too glancing to create emotional intensity even when intended, too decorous to have any force; there are no particular observations about the social situation we’re shown other than to say arranged marriages can be a rum-do. Even if that were the director’s only objective, The Duchess goes about it in a diffuse, incurious way. All these provocative opportunities to make us see the trails of class structure from our past in the hierarchies of today, then nothing is done with them – perhaps it does tell us something about England by example.

Greed (2019): A rich man obsessed with the movie Gladiator throws a glamorous disco party to celebrate his birthday and gets the workers to dress as Roman slaves but secretly one of them blames him for the death of her mother in a Sri Lankan sweatshop fire and opens a lion cage so she can watch him die. The end. Apart from the annoying out-of-chronology bullshit, this could have been a good film in theory – an unflattering “takedown” of the rich, a depiction of class war. But it also wants to be a comedy and the jokes don’t work, all being delivered in a kind of hip off-hand way that makes them seem smug and feeble, so it just ends up being a not very angry version of things that, even if we had never spent a moment on the Left, we already knew. The vehicle for the political message is David Mitchell doing his flustered middle-class Englishman routine, about as flaccid a choice as they could make for this. 

The credits roll while heavy-handedly displaying a bunch of statistics about wealth inequality, and even that could have worked but the impact is blunted and smoothed over by having Abba’s “Money Money Money” playing over them. Winterbottom and Coogan did The Look Of Love together and that film is so much better than this one - it really felt like a truthful portrait of the wretched vanity and its collateral damage that summed up the risible Paul Raymond, and was a far more engaging film. Here, it’s all very right-on in a lofty, superficial and overly mild way when it needed to be dark, coldly furious and not joking.

Ammonite (2020): an anodyne anecdote, amirite? Stuffy, dainty Campion pastiche, and a completely futile exercise since it’s got nothing to say other than ritual deference to the most boring id-pol propaganda imaginable (ooh, her horrid husband! Ah, the lovely love of lesbians!). Lots of silent scenes, wordless with no music, hush now, ever so subtle, to make the Bold Frankness of the nudity and pissing that much more of a bourgeois sensation. Like a lot of these 21^st century hyper-English BBC films, muted “human interest” stories with no visual distinction, the time to make this sort of thing (if there ever was one) was the 1940s. It’s a joke the way they still churn them out in the 2020s and expect us to seal-clap because there’s something rude in it. I mean, I am still pro sex scenes, but they can’t turn a Guardianista chick flick into a classic, just as, I'm told, you can't turn a hoe into a housewife. 

I suppose there could have been some morally slovenly evening when I might have been swept up in a patriotic paroxysm (and sex-change operation) and decided this was just the ticket for cinema today. But I gave it every chance and I dutifully followed every not-very-nuanced exchange and tilted it to the light to try and catch every scintillating aspect of symbolism in fossils getting excavated and all the rest of it, and ultimately it’s no good. I come to bury Ammonite, not to praise it.