Bridge Of Spies

Bridge Of Spies is a historical drama 'inspired by true events' which tells the story of a spy swap during the Cold War. It sees Steven Spielberg in collaboration with the Coen Brothers in collaboration with Walt Disney. Quite a combination.

In Brooklyn in 1957, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested under the suspicion of being a Soviet spy. James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a mere insurance lawyer who is asked to defend Abel in order to show the world that the American justice system is just and fair, even though the public have already convicted him.

Donovan may be defending the most hated man in America but he wants to do right thing, legally, by his client. That isn’t easy when even the judge has already reached his decision.

When Abel is convicted Donovan has the foresight to persuade the judge not to send him to his death. He foresees a time when having a Soviet spy in your jails could be useful.

Donovan is vindicated when an American U-2 spy plane is shot down over Soviet territory and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), fails to destroy both the plane and himself, as ordered. The Soviets capture Powers, convict him as a spy, and send him to prison.

When the Soviets get in touch with Donovan, he is sent out to East Berlin to negotiate a prisoner exchange. This he has to do as a private citizen rather than an American official. Any deal is further complicated by Donovan’s wish to also release another US prisoner, a student called Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers).  

Overall it is pretty good film if you can cope with the large dose of American patriotism that it comes served with. Patriotism that attempts to paint the East Germans as clowns which I'm sure they weren't. There’s also the totally over the top (and unnecessarily so) crash scene of the U-2. This is the only nod to your typical Hollywood action movie which this thankfully isn’t. The rest of the two hours is mercifully free of any other such gimmicks.

The film seems to be largely historically accurate and the cinematography is fabulous with some great scenes of cold war Berlin such as the construction of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie etc.

Tom Hanks is solid as Donovan but it is Mark Rylance who shines out as the star of the film. His understated performance as Rudolf Abel is pure class.

‘Bridge of Spies’ shows that the power of a good story can still stand up on its own even in modern day Hollywood.

Inside Llewyn Davis

Set in 1960s Manhattan, Inside Llewyn Davis is a week in the life of a struggling folk musician. It's Reality TV done Coen Brothers' style, only the Coens aren't going to get the character to play up for the cameras now are they? This is warts and all, well just warts actually.

We meet Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) singing on onstage at the Gaslight, then we see him get beaten up in the alley behind it. At the end of the film we find out why and in between we find out about the man himself.

There’s a lot to find out but not a lot to like. He’s penniless, homeless and largely clueless, singing his heart out about ‘life’ whilst drifting through his own. He lives from day to day, gig to gig, couch to couch unable to take care of himself, his friends, his family, his lovers, ex-lovers or for that matter even a neighbour’s cat.

 

We don’t particularly like him, he doesn’t particularly like himself and his ‘friends’ such as fellow singers Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan) view him mainly with disgust and loathing.

He is a man capable of performing passionately behind a microphone but not in real life. Perhaps at one point Jean thought he could, as she's possibly carrying his child, but she was wrong and now she wishes to dispose of it.

When Jean and Jim attempt to take their music mainstream and have a stab at stardom, Llewyn wants no part of it feeling his music should be good enough as it is. It is an attitude the viewer should applaud but you don’t because you really don’t like the man. Even when we find out about the unexpected loss of his former singing partner, who killed himself, we don't feel any sympathy for him. 

Normally in films like this the lead character would have got a lucky break or suddenly got over himself, found a nice girl and discovered a personality but this is the Coens... So that isn’t going to happen. He is what he is. A man stuck in his own insular world where his own actions continually cause him to go nowhere.

In the end you want him to get punched in the face again because you have had more than enough of Llewyn Davis. If that is the case then you’ll like the ending.

Clearly we’re not supposed to like Llewyn Davis the man but as for the film... well it’s an interesting idea to make a film about an unlikeable character going nowhere but possibly not a great one. Still, I quite liked it.

True Grit

‘True Grit’ has been remade by the Coen Brothers, which becomes the second remake I've seen this year and it’s only February. I hate remakes almost as much as I hate sequels. The Coens have attempted to justify their new film by saying they wanted to 'go back to the source material' of Charlie Portis' novel and do a more faithful adaptation rather than a remake of the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Which I think was a pretty good film first time around... wasn't it? It’s just a hazy memory and I haven’t read the book either.

The Great Lebowski himself, Jeff Bridges, plays Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon is Texas Ranger ‘La Beef’ or LaBoeuf even. The undoubted star though is young Hailee Steinfeld, who is outstanding as a headstrong teenager, 14-year-old Mattie Ross. A stubborn girl who will stop at nothing to revenge her father's death. Not difficult casting though, just get a stubborn teenager to play a stubborn teenager, there's plenty around.



As she continually proves throughout the film she is well capable of taking care of herself, except perhaps when guns are involved. In her pursuit of the man who murdered her father, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), she seeks out Cogburn. Cogburn is a Federal Marshall with a reputation for not bringing in his prisoners alive, which endears him to Mattie. Unfortunately he is as equally effective at getting drunk as he is at killing.



I have a problem with one aspect of Rooster. At times you need subtitles to understand what he’s saying because his rambling is totally incoherent at times. The Coen's are big on accents, so I've no doubt they got the accent they wanted but when you add in that he’s a drunk as well... subtitles please. That's not something I usually say, I’m not into subtitles.



Beefy too is looking for Chaney but for another crime he committed, so he and Cogburn team up and set off in pursuit but refuse to take a ‘girl’ into Indian territory. Mattie is having none of that and she chases them down. They reluctantly accept her and set off across terrain where it always seems to be snowing, just like Sheffield.



Cogburn’s general behaviour and particularly his drinking soon cause Mattie to lose faith in him. She is right to be disillusioned as the trail to finding Chaney goes cold and only by chance do they eventually find him.

The film is actually a bit simple for the Coens. You keep looking for the hidden meanings but there aren't any. It’s just a straightforward, decent film and it’s much funnier than I expected. Rooster even turns out to be a bit of a hero in the end.

Good film but... I'm still not sure why they made it.

A Serious Man

We don’t go on the park this morning because despite some heavy rain dog training this afternoon is on. At which MD is hopeless, although in his defence I suppose he has had a few weeks off and also he gets into a fight, which in his defence, I would say wasn’t really his fault. I’m always sticking up for that dog.

Meanwhile L is out running and cycling. I’ve done a bit of maintenance on her bike for her, swapping her back to bog standard flat pedals and reassembled her bike computer for her, putting back the parts I had stolen to fix mine. When she gets back after an hour’s cycle she tells me she’s done a grand total of 0.38km. Ah, she likes to take it steady but not that steady. I think I may have reassembled it wrong.

Later we’re at the cinema only to find that our membership cards have expired. So we have to fork out on renewal fees. The upside is our first two films are free, so tonight’s is a freebie and what a weird one it is. Then again it is the new Coen Brothers’ film, so what did we expect.

‘A Serious Man’ is clearly a dig at the lives and faith of a Jewish community in late 1960s America but of course if you don't know a whole lot about the Jewish faith then you could be stumbling from the off.

Just to make sure you are stumbling from the off, the film opens with a possibly irrelevant, possibly not, prologue set a century or two earlier and spoken all in subtitled Yiddish. In it a woman stabs an old man because she thinks he's a dybbuk, that’s a dead person possessed by an evil spirit. She’s wrong because the old man starts to bleed before getting up and wandering off into the snow outside. Does this action perhaps lead to a curse being bestowed up on someone? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

Could this someone be Larry Gopnik, a physics professor who is the main focus of this story? Larry is hoping for a life long tenure from his University but things are slowly starting to go wrong for him. Not least of which is an anonymous letter writer trying to derail the tenure.

On top of this his family life in comfortable suburbia is rocked when his wife informs him that their marriage is over and she wants to marry someone else. This someone else is, inexplicably, Sy Ableman, supposedly a pillar stone of the local community but in reality a patronizing old git. Meanwhile his kids are proving to be even more of a handful than kids are supposed to be. His son likes to dabble in marijuana and is consequently in debt to the school bully, is running up debts on an account with a record club at his Father’s unwilling expense whilst generally being more concerned about the poor reception on the TV than his studies.



Then there’s Larry’s daughter, who is saving up for a nose job with money straight out of Larry’s wallet and spending the rest of her time washing her hair, that is when she can get in the bathroom. Larry brother is occupying the bathroom, when he’s not sleeping on the coach, bringing to the family his medical, social and gambling problems. Larry is incredibly hopeless in the face of all this adversity and his wife soon banishes both him and his brother to the Jolly Roger Motel.

At least this gets him away from his goy (non-Jew) neighbour who is encroaching on Larry’s garden with his building plans but not from the Korean student who is pushing envelopes of cash onto Larry to persuade him to upgrade the F he gave him, while simultaneously threatening to sue him for defamation...

Now let’s just stop right there shall we. If you’ve broken cinema rules and not turned your phone off, then perhaps you ought to fire up Google right now. Google ‘Schrödinger's cat’, which is something we see Larry teaching to his physics students. Do it now, rather than afterwards like I had to.

Schrödinger's rather unpleasant, and hopefully theoretical, experiment consists of a live cat, a vial of Hydrogen Cyanide and a small amount of radioactive substance all together in the same box. If even a single atom of the radioactive substance decays, a relay mechanism will break the vial with a hammer and the cat will die. The point of it all is that no one can know what is happening in the box without looking inside it. Therefore according to the laws of quantum physics, the cat must be assumed to be in a superposition of states, e.g. both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when someone opens the box that they can find out the condition of the cat.



The F grade student and his father have grasped the theory of Schrödinger's cat, if not the maths of it, which is why he got an F. Like the cat, their bribe is seemingly alive and dead at the same time until Larry decides what action he is going to take. This film is possibly far too deep for its own good.



So, Larry, along with us (the audience), is slowly going out of his mind, particularly as a mathematician he’s used to things adding up, and he goes off to consult with the local Rabbis to find out just what he’s done to upset Hashem (God).

A junior rabbi tells him 'things aren’t so bad' and cites the car park as proof of the wonders of God. Larry isn’t impressed.

A more experienced rabbi rambles on for ages about a dentist who desperately tried to find the meaning of the Hebrew words 'Help Me’ that he found engraved on the inside of a goy patient's teeth but he finds no meaning. Larry isn’t impressed. Perhaps the rabbi is telling Larry he’s better off not worrying about it, sometimes there are no reasons for things that happen in life. Perhaps the Coen brothers are telling us we’re better off not worrying about trying to find meaning in this film.

The only person in the film who threatens to come up any answers is the lawyer enlisted to solve the problems Larry is having with his neighbours encroachment but the lawyer drops down dead just as he’s about to deliver up his findings.

The most senior rabbi of all, Rabbi Marshak, won't even see Larry. He’s seemingly too busy listening to a transistor radio confiscated from Danny, Larry’s son. This, after Danny’s Bar Mitzvah to which Danny turns up stoned, is returned to him by Rabbi Marshak.

So the story rambles and roams all over the place and goes nowhere and everywhere. This isn't unusual in a Coen's film but usually the journey to nowhere is a bit more exceptional than this or perhaps you just needed to be Jewish. It has the usual dark comedy laughs but it’s certainly not hilarious. It all makes for a very strange and challenging film.

Folk in the know say the film is a retelling of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible, in which God and Satan bet on whether Job will remain faithful as Satan makes life as uncomfortable for Job as he can. Apparently the three consultations, even the whirlwind that comes at the end, it’s all in there. Yep, this film is definitely far too deep for its own good.

So does Larry remain faithful? Well so far he has, unlike Sy Ableman who was attempting to take another man’s wife. Suddenly God seems to get even with Sy and he dies in a road accident, coincidentally the same road accident that Larry is involved in, but he escapes unhurt.

Finally Larry cracks. He gives into temptation with the Jewish woman next door who sunbathes nude and invites Larry to ‘take advantage of the new freedoms’. Then he rubs out the Korean’s F grade... and the cat is dead. Then it just ends, in Coens style, with a ‘come see me’ call from his Doctor and a whirlwind approaching his Son’s school.



This is probably one of those films that grow on you. In fact the more L and I discuss it and the more I Google it, the more I like it but basically it helps if you know a bit about quantum physics, a lot about the Hebrew bible and oh, perhaps a bit of familiarity with the music of Jefferson Airplane.

No Country For Old Men

The new film from the Coen Brothers 'No Country For Old Men', is an adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy. It is a perfect choice for them. I am sure they must have chosen his novel because it is so close to their usual style.

Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out hunting somewhere near the Mexican border when he stumbles across a host of dead bodies. Further investigation reveals a drug deal gone wrong complete with a truck full of drugs and bag containing $2M in cash.

His mistake is to make off with the cash and so from originally being the hunter, he suddenly becomes the hunted, as he is pursued by several interested parties. Chief among these is a unconventional hit man with pageboy haircut, who has been hired to find him. This man, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), has two weapons, a silenced shotgun, and pneumatic air gun normally used on cattle. He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake as he relentlessly pursues Moss.



For some time Moss evades him but you just know it’s going to end in tears, or rather blood, at the hands of the clearly unstoppable and psychopathic Anton. He is a killer without any humanity, no one gets in his way. Even being involved in a car crash fails to stop him. When he is shot by Moss we get a great scene of him fixing the bullet wound in a leg, which reminds me of Terminator but with extra blood.

Meanwhile the local ageing sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) is supposed to be chasing them but doesn't really want to. This is ‘no country for old men’ and he doesn’t really want to get involved.

The drugs people also send another hit-man, the cocky Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) who Anton doesn’t want on his patch, so he gets rid of him too.

If there’s a moral to this film, I guess it’s just that the money isn't worth it but Moss quickly goes beyond the point where Anton would let him return the money and live. Anton offers to spare his wife if he returns it, but not him, and there is no chance of negotiation. Moss chooses to have one last try to keep his life and the money. Although Moss’s motives are mainly greed, you still feel yourself rooting for him.



The film builds the suspense but then just as you're gripped by the two main characters and their riveting duel, things change. In true Coen’s style, events you would think to be crucial to see, are not shown and Moss winds up dead but you don’t see it happen. Later when Anton finds his wife and tells her he’s going to kill her because he's promised her husband, you presume she winds up death but again you don’t see it.

The film is a very well-crafted thriller, tense with moments of humour but also brutally violent. Far gorier than Sweeney Todd. While the plot itself isn't too complicated, the characters are. I was gripped for every moment of it, every time the truly frightening Anton is on screen you feel nervous of what he's going to do next. My only criticism would be that after the breakneck pace of the first hour and a half the last bit plodded a little.

Obviously there is no happy ending. Well there really wasn’t an ending at all but then again, how do you expect a Coen brother's film to end. They leave you with a load of dangled threads that you expect to be neatly tied up but as is often the case with their films, it never quite works out that way.

We collect my parents, in far easier traffic this time, and head home, for a small drop of white wine and a slightly larger drop of red.