You Were Never Really Here

From the novella by Jonathan Ames, comes You Were Never Really Here. A nice family film...

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a war veteran, traumatised  by his past, addicted to pain killers and a hired killer who specialises in retrieving trafficked girls. He has a reputation for brutality but also for getting results, with his hammer. An implement of which he has not so found childhood memories.

He spends his free time between jobs caring for his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) and having flashbacks to his past, as a Gulf War soldier and as the victim of an abusive father.

He is offered a large wad of cash to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the 13-year-old daughter of a New York senator called Albert Votto (Alex Manette), who is missing from home. He locates Nina in an ‘upmarket’ brothel from where he rescues her, killing several security guards and customers on the way. 

Then before he can get Nina back to Votto, he sees on the news that Votto has apparently killed himself. Corrupt police officers then storm his motel room and take Nina off him. They come for him too but he escapes.

He then finds that both his boss and his handler have been murdered in an attempt to track him down. Once they know where he lives they head there, kill his mother and then lie in wait for him. Joe outsmarts them, kills one of them and finds out from the other than the man behind all this is Governor Williams (Alessandro Nivola) who wants his favourite sex slave back and has the power to do it.

Joe gives his mother a water burial and also attempts to drown himself, but a vision of Nina convinces him to save the girl fromWilliams instead.

This is a film where you really need to concentrate, or revise beforehand, as the director leaves you to find your own way but it’s a really excellent film with a great performance from Joaquin Phoenix as the man who is never really there. Although some folk might need a blindfold as it’s a violent film but ‘tastefully’ done with most of the bloodshed off-camera.

Recommended served with a few beers.

Ginger And Rosa

Ginger And Rosa is the story of two girls who were born on the same day in the same hospital in 1945 as WWII ended. The film implies that this was possibly even the very day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The pair grow up as inseparable friends until we get to 1962 when, now 17, teenage hormones have to via for attention with the Cuban missile crisis, as once again the smell of nuclear warfare hangs in the air.

Ginger (Elle Fanning) is the daughter of a conscientious objector, Roland (Alessandro Nivola). Typically he’s now a lecturer, a part-time author writing books about ‘Freedom’ and rather smugly left wing. Ginger takes this all on board, follows the politics of the Cold War and spends a lot of time worrying about how many days they all have left to live.

Meanwhile Roland’s marriage to Natalie (Christina Hendricks) is on the rocks, so it’s easy for Ginger to take sides if she wants to. She chooses her father’s more ‘bohemian’ side, she adores him but has little time for her more straightforward mother.

He’s not a great role model and nor are the other adults in the film. Oliver Platt and Annette Bening appear as an American couple who influence Ginger into joining CND, going protesting and then consequently getting arrested. At least I think they’re supposed to be American as they don’t attempt to hide their accents. Timothy Spall meanwhile, has no accent problems.

Her bestest friend though, Rosa (Alice Englert), is the complete opposite and her home is already broken. She turns to religion and boys rather than politics but adores Ginger’s father as much as Ginger herself does.

Seemingly equally charmed by Ginger’s dad, Rosa starts sleeping with him, which understandably shatters the close friendship of the girls a touch. Whether Ginger agrees with her self-indulged Father’s belief in the 60’s mantra of free love or not, perhaps even Ginger realises that practising this idealism so close to home is a tad selfish and maybe perhaps his other mantra, saving the world, could have waited until after he’d saved his family? Or it may have gone over her head.

Ginger and Rosa are basically two teenage girls that you want to slap, nothing unusual there then, and then of course there’s a husband you probably want to slap as well. Well slap might be a bit too kind.

It’s an interesting film but more of a film about growing up in turbulent times than an enlightening piece about the changes taking place in the world at that time, about which it says little.

The acting is generally pretty good though, if you ignore the annoying fact they’ve imported so many American actors and their accents into a British film. Elle Fanning, a 13 year old playing a 17 year old, is impressive.