On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan is my favourite author that I've never read but I do like the films based on his work, so his 'On Chesil Beach' intrigued me.

It is the story of Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle), two young university graduates from different cultures. She is a talented and ambitious violinist from a wealthy parents (Emily Watson and Samuel West) while he is the son of a schoolteacher (Adrian Scarborough) and an artist (Anne-Marie Duff). His mother is brain damaged following an horrendous incident with train door.

They meet when Edward, a little drunk after celebrating his exam results, gate crashes a CND meeting because he feels he badly need to share his success with someone, anyone. In Florence he feels he's hit pure gold and wants to share more than just his exam results with her.

Like other McEwan adaptations all this back story is revealed in flashbacks from where they are now which is their bedroom in a quaint seaside hotel on Chesil Beach in Dorset on honeymoon.

Edward is eagerly anticipating the big moment of consummating their marriage while Florence is absolutely dreading it. I think she’s too posh for that sort of stuff and despite the fact he’s positively gagging for it, he bottles it. This creates an uncomfortable situation and even the waiters who serve them dinner laugh at them. This is the 1960s but nothing is swinging here. Nothing is zipping either. Why did they never sort that zip out?

It is excruciating for them but especially for us and a bit of a surprise really considering how natural, normal and intimate the scenes of their courtship were. Then the thing that understandably finally kills off their attempts at sex is Edward’s premature ejaculation. Clearly this wasn’t covered in the sex manual Florence had been terrifying herself with but how he got himself that worked up when so little progress seemed to have been made on the seduction front I’m not sure. The film is so overwhelmed by its momentum impeding flashbacks that its enough to put anyone off their stroke.

Florence legs it on to the beach where they argue and eventually she offers a compromise deal, herself as a dutiful but sexless wife. He’s not buying that, he thought he'd signed up for the whole package, and I don’t blame him. So apparently that’s it. One crap shag and its all over. That’s a worry and if true how did anyone ever get born?

Given that the book is only a short novella, the film feels padded out and McEwan has indeed added some extra scenes. These include quite an eye-opening one thirteen years later, set in a record shop run by Edward. A child, Chloe, appears in his shop and she is clearly Florence’s daughter. She is aged about twelve.

So whatever Florence’s hang ups were she got over them pretty quickly didn't she and with a member of her string quartet, Charles. Whereas in the book she remained single and filled with regret, here that is clearly not the case. Perhaps her failure to consummate her marriage was actually down to unresolved feelings for another man?

In all a disappointing film, that never really exploded into life even when you think it ought to. Sorry Ian, I don't buy it.

The Book Thief

As this is a film that is narrated by Death himself (Roger Allam) you’d expect this to be a depressing sort of affair, particularly as it looks at the Second World War, genocide and all, from the German peoples own angle and specifically one young girl but oddly it isn’t. If that was its target, it missed it by a mile.

That young girl is Liesel Meminger (Sophie Nélisse) who is abandoned by her communist mother and subsequently adopted by the Hubermanns, Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson). Her brother was supposed to join her but died before he got the chance.

Liesel cannot read and Hans starts to teach her, using the basement walls as a blackboard. Hans has refused to join the Nazi Party and his business suffers because of his stance, so he has plenty of time on his hands. From this Liesel develops a love of books, which is sort of difficult with the Nazis burning so many of them.

The only book she has, The Grave Digger's Handbook, came from her brother's funeral. She steals another from a Nazi book-burning ceremony and a woman who Rosa does the laundry for, Ilsa Hermann (Barbara Auer), invites her to see the vast library she has at home where she nicks another. This lasts until her visits are terminated by Ilsa's husband .

As well as exploring her relationship with books and her new parents, the film delves into her friendship with a schoolmate Rudy Steiner (Nico Liersch). Rudy thinks he's in love with her, almost as much as he is in love with the black US athlete Jesse Owens, a devotion for which he is roundly mocked at school.

Then there is Max (Ben Schnetzer), a Jewish friend of the family who is allowed to hide out in their basement, to whom Liesel reads to while he lies ill.

The story is all over the place, totally unfocused and deftly sidesteps around any topic that might have proved harrowing or exciting even. As a consequence the film lacks any real sense of tension or danger. People even die as nicely as possible and without a mark on their bodies, even if their house has collapsed on top of them.

Then there's the way the whole cast speaks in English but with pseudo German accents, throwing in the odd actual German word to hilarious effect. Make your mind up, either do it fully in English or in German with subtitles.

It is a good film ja? Nein. Sadly average.

War Horse

‘War Horse’ is a children's book by Michael Morpurgo that I wasn’t really aware of until recently. I’m assured it’s a cracking book and that there’s also a rather good stage production of it using life-sized horse puppets. That’s perhaps where it should have stayed.

It appears to be a fanciful tale that perhaps works in those formats, perhaps a cartoon would have worked also but here, where Steven Spielberg tries to tell it as a real story on film, it fails spectacularly.

Yeah it’s got great, well actually overdone, cinematography, loads of dramatic music and an able cast. Sadly they are all asked to play clichéd stereotypes and to work with a script that asks you to suspend belief at the cinema door. Welcome to the equine offspring of a one night stand between ‘Lassie Come Home’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’.

Now I've never trained a horse, but I've trained dogs and simply whispering in their ears what you want them to do doesn’t work. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that it doesn't work with horses either but I suppose I could be wrong.

Then the way the bone hard rock strewn field suddenly becomes ploughable to a foot depth after five minutes of rain was hilarious, almost as hilarious as the plough itself splitting a large rock in two. Again I’m no expert but surely it would be basic farming practice to remove as many of the rocks as possible before you attempt to plough the field? Therefore not making it as hard as possible for your horse, even if that horse does happen to be Joey the wonder horse? The story doesn’t get any less ridiculous from there onwards, very little of it made any sense at all.

Sorry I’m skipping the actual plot here. Farmer Narracott (Peter Mullan), a Boer war veteran (he doesn’t talk about it), buys a thoroughbred horse at a Devon cattle market rather than the usual type of nag you’d use to plough a field with and he uses the family’s rent money to do so. Oops. Commonsense bypass. His missus, Emily Watson, with her brow permanently furrowed (unlike their field) isn’t happy. Cue yet more furrowing of brow. No matter, their teenage son Albert (Jeremy Irvine), occasionally called Albie, trains him, hence the whispering. He names our hero Joey.

Well the field gets ploughed and the crops get sown but then they all destroyed by another freak storm, not unlike the one that got the field ploughed in the first place. Joey gets sold to a captain in the British cavalry (Tom Hiddleston) for use in a suicidal WWI military manoeuvre, so that the rent can be paid.

Once the cavalry have all been slaughtered, Joey ends up in the hands of the Germans where he is cared for by two young brothers, one of whom is only 14 but then presumably after having lied about his age to get in the German army, the pair of them inexplicably decide to desert using the horses to escape. They are captured and shot. Good riddance.

Joey and another horse are now in the hands of a sickly young French girl called Emilie. We only know she’s French because she calls her grandfather ‘grand père’ in a terrible French accent. Joey is only briefly in these pseudo-French hands because soon a group of soldiers with equally bad German accents snatch the horses back. A bit of real foreign language dialogue here would have added a much needed touch of reality and clarity to the proceedings because it’s anybody’s guess what language the ensuing German-French conversation takes place in.

Now Joey the wonder horse visits the Somme circa 1918, where he escapes from the retreating Germans and goes for a gallop across no man’s land, running straight through at least two barbed wire fences... er, no, terribly unlikely. Finally entangled in the wire we get the one great scene of the film as a British and German soldier team up to cut him free from the barbed wire.

Back in the hands of the Brits, Joey is about to be shot because he’s too damaged to save when Albert, himself now fighting and subsequently wounded in the war, recognises his beloved Joey. Quickly the armistice is declared, yet Albert and Joey, suddenly in perfect health again, are set to be parted once more because all the horses are to be auctioned off.

Grand père turns up out of the blue and outbids everyone for the horse, wanting Joey in memory of his granddaughter who has since died. Blimey, ten minutes ago she looked as strong as, well, a horse. Still, it’s a relief of sorts because my partner suspected that she'd resurface later as romantic interest for our Albie. Phew.

I don’t feel guilty spoiling the plot and saying that it all turns out ok in the end because you’d know that from the off. It’s all so inevitable. The more interesting back story was whether Albert's father’s Boer war pennant, which accompanied Joey the whole time, would make it home safely. Thankfully it did.

In the book Joey actually narrates the story (it probably worked better that way around) and it would have been nice for the horse to have said something like ‘That’s All Folks’ at the end to complete the charade but sadly it didn't.

It is, I think, supposed to be a tear jerker and my partner may have shed a few at some point but then she cries in most things and it’s hard not to cry for the horse for putting up with the corny script. Surprisingly the usually able Richard Curtis worked on it. He does reuse what he can from ‘Black Adder Goes Forth’ but even that doesn’t save the film.

I was originally going to say it’s an ok but not great film but the more I think about it, the more terrible it seems. Frankly it was awful, apart from the horse that is, who to be fair, was great, nay, terrific and acts everyone else off the screen. Give that stallion an Oscar and send the rest of them back to the trenches.