Fences

Fences is an adaptation of an award winning play by August Wilson and even on the big screen it still feels very much like a play being very dialogue driven. There is a very small cast and very few scene changes, in fact very few scenes at all but those that are there are quite long. So perhaps it could have been more concise but if people standing out in the yard talking about not much of consequence is your thing, then this is for you.

It’s the sort of thing that some directors, say like Quentin Tarantino, are fond of doing, so how will Denzel Washington get on? This is very much his baby (excuse the pun, that bit comes later) as he is both the director and the lead actor.

It is 1950's Pittsburgh, Troy Maxson (Washington) is a former baseball player and an ex-con who now works as a dustman along with his friend, Bono (Stephen Henderson), the only white face in the film. Every evening Troy comes home to his wife Rose (Viola Davis) and his son Cory (Jovan Adepo). While on payday, Troy's son by his first wife, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), drops in for a loan to prop up his ‘career’ as a musician, a loan which Troy always resists.

Then there is Troy's brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), whose house they are living in because Gabriel, who suffered a head injury in the war, is too busy battling imaginary hellhounds in his head. Oh, and Troy’s building a fence either to keep something out or to keep something in.

The film drip feeds us bits of his life story as we go along. Troy is a bitter man, resentful that he feels his baseball career stalled because of his colour but unwilling to acknowledge that times are changing and so he prevents his son from taking up a place on the college football team because, he says, the same thing will happen to him.

Troy is a complex character but thoroughly selfish and unlikable, ironically the prejudices that once held him back he now seems determined to keep alive and to inflict on everyone else. Yet his wife stands by him throughout even when it is revealed he’s had an affair and is soon to be a father all over again. In fact, everyone holds him up as being a great man except his son. After having had all other avenues to better himself closed off by his father, he leaves home to explore the only career left open to him in the Marines.

As a film it is powerful and engaging, what it lacks in actual story it makes up for with some very strong performances. Denzel Washington really inhabits his role and is very good but Viola Davis is even better.

Good but not great.

Toni Erdmann

The film Toni Erdmann examines the father-daughter relationship by way of a German comedy of sorts, when we didn’t really think such things existed.

Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller) is a workaholic businesswoman who, in her father’s (Peter Simonischek) view, is neglecting not only her family but herself too. All that counts to her is her career but he wants to spend time with his daughter. Therefore, after the death of his ancient dog, he heads off to visit her in Bucharest where she is a management consultant specialising in 'outsourcing', basically firing people on behalf of their clients.

Whilst she seems efficient at her job, he quickly realises that she is far from happy with her life even though she pretends to be fine. He ends up telling a business contact of hers that he's hired a replacement daughter because his real daughter is too busy to spend time with him.

Having been shocked to see him in the first place and with not really having time to entertain him, she is relived when he is persuaded to return home after only a few days. Only for her to run into him again at a city bar while she is out with some friends. Except only this time he is in 'disguise', he is Toni Erdmann.

At this point, as things gradually get ever more bizarre, I’m not sure if Toni is for real or whether she has ‘Toni’, or more perhaps accurately an imaginary father, inside her head.

Either way ‘Toni’ worms his way into her life, handcuffing himself to his daughter making her feel even more trapped by life than she already feels. Yet after this, she still takes him to work with her where he tells outlandish tales to her clients and even introduces himself as the German Ambassador to Romania.

Yet, wherever she goes, she presents the same deadpan face to everyone. From her business clients, to her father and even to her secret lover\work colleague Tim (Trystan Pütter) where we get the most emotionless non-love scene on the planet that ends in a threesome of sorts with a plate of petit fours. 

Then she throws a nude party perhaps symbolic of how exposed she feels in her job. It doesn’t really go down well with anyone except her subservient Romanian assistant Anca (Ingrid Bisu) who would do almost anything to please her boss. Even there though she cannot escape her father who turns up as a furry Bulgarian ‘Kukeri’ creature.

It’s certainly a different sort of film and I liked it. Now stand by for Hollywood to make a real mess of a remake.

Denial

Denial is based on a 1996 legal case between Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), an American professor of Holocaust Studies, and the historian David Irving (Timothy Spall). Irving sues Lipstadt over her book ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in which she accuses Irving of being a Holocaust denier and falsifier of history.

The trial is held in Irving’s native England where the burden of proof is with the accused not the accuser. Basically she has to prove that the Holocaust happened. Easy right. Not so.

Lipstadt, a runner and a dog lover (so you have to like her), engages a top legal team to fight her case. This actually means that she doesn't in the end have to prove anything as her legal team totally take over. So she can pretty much get back to her running and dog walking for the next few years as the process rolls along.

In fact solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) treat her more like a naughty child than the one accused. They quarrel about how to approach the case with Lipstadt wanting to take the stand herself and bring in Holocaust survivors to testify while Julius prefers to simply present the facts. So off they go to try to find proof of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Denial must have been a tricky film to make when you consider the topic, the potential for emotional bias and the fact the majority of the viewers either knew or could accurately guess the outcome of the trial. Which does not leave much scope to build meaningful tension but overall I think overall they did a decent job.

In court, Irving, serving as his own lawyer, has an answer for everything but not usually a very convincing one. So things progress as you would expect and hope until Mr Justice Gray (Alex Jennings) throws the defence team slightly off balance when he asks whether Irving might not actually be lying as they claim, if he genuinely believed the Holocaust didn’t happen. It is the one moment of ‘almost tension’.

Denial is easy to watch, informative but perhaps just lacking that vital dramatic spark that would have made it great.

Loving

Loving is based on the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving who travelled to Washington, DC from their home in Virginia to get married in 1958. The reason they travelled so far was because Richard (Joel Edgerton), a bricklayer who build their home and seemingly practically everyone else's, was a white man while Mildred (Ruth Negga) was a black woman. Unfortunately their home state was one of the remaining states that still banned marriages between whites and non-whites.

Not that getting married in another state made much difference because the local Sheriff (Martin Csokas) and his deputies soon raided their house in the early hours to enforce 'God's Law'. Presumably they were hoping to catch them having sex, which was also illegal between whites and non-whites, but had to settle for them simply sleeping side by side. When they pointed out their marriage certificate on the wall they were told that the certificate had no significance in Virginia.

The Lovings were charged with 'cohabiting as man and wife' and pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to a year in prison with the sentence suspended on condition that they left the state for 25 years. So they upped sticks and moved to Columbia.

Richard was a quiet, private man of few words who just wanted to be left in peace to live his life but his wife was more feisty and she agrees to two lawyers, Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) and Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass), fighting their case. 

In the meantime, feeling frustrated by being unable to visit their families, they quietly moved back to Virginia where they live on the outskirts, trying to stay below the radar but clearly not too far below the radar as their situation gets featured in Life magazine which gives their case valuable publicity.

When the local courts find against them their lawyers take the case to the federal Supreme Court where the court decides that prohibiting interracial marriage is in fact unconstitutional.

Loving is an informative and pleasant film but a bit on the slow side, it inches along at times, but at least it’s not the overtly sentimental melodrama it could have been. Some more back story would have been nice, perhaps about how they met, and although the Lovings didn’t want to attend the court case I certainly would have liked to have done. Instead, in keeping with the rest of the film, the court’s verdict is delivered in a rather low key phone call to Mildred.