Room

Based on a novel by Emma Donoghue, who also wrote the screenplay, Lenny Abrahamson's ‘Room’ is actually a garden shed. There are no windows and the only door has an electronic code on it. This is home to Joy (Brie Larson) and has been home for the ast seven years after the man we know only as Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) abducted her when she was just seventeen.  

There is little back story here so we assume her abductor is just keeping her for sex which he visits her for whenever the fancy takes him. The film isn’t based on any specific incident but clearly there are similarities with several real life abductions. For the last five years ‘Room’ has also been home to Jack (Jacob Tremblay), Joy’s son, a product of her situation and possibly the only thing that keeps her sane.

Their captor holds total power over their lives, if they cross him then they’ll be no electricity, heat or food provided. When he visits Jack has to hide in the wardrobe as Joy repays him for his generosity.

The two of them live by a routine, endless days of cooking, reading, attempting to exercise and watching TV where Jack believes everything he sees is pure fantasy. It's tempting to say he's not far wrong there. Joy has kept Jack from realizing the horror of their situation but as she becomes more desperate to escape and hatches a rescue plan, she has to re-educate him to prepare him for the fact that there’s actually a whole world outside the door.

Joy fakes Jack's death and persuades Nick to bury the alleged corpse. Jack escapes, discovers the outside world, alerts the police and gets them rescued, all at the age of five. This bit is the most improbable of many improbables contained within the script.

Outside things have moved on and a seven year chunk of Joy’s life is missing. Joy's parents have divorced, her school friends have moved on and her promising athletics career is history. While her father (William H. Macy) harshly judges her, her mother (Joan Allen) is supportive but they soon slip into typical Mother-Daughter quarrels and the media almost destroy her.

The concept of the film is a good one but the script is sadly lacking particularly in regards to their highly questionable escape plan and subsequent rescue. The film also focuses more on their adjustment to life outside of their room rather than the imprisonment itself which is perhaps a shame. However 'Room' is saved by some strong performances from Larson and particularly from Tremblay, who is absolutely brilliant especially for someone so young.

The Danish Girl

Set in Copenhagen in the mid-1920s, The Danish Girl is based on the true story of the first person to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

Einar and Gerda Wegener are a seemingly normal couple who are both painters but while Einar (Eddie Redmayne) is a renowned landscape artist, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is struggling to make an impact with her portraits. On the surface they appear happily married and are trying for a baby. Something which shouldn’t pose too much of a problem as they seem to be jumping each other at every opportunity.

When one day Gerda is struggling to hit a deadline and needs a female model but one isn’t available, she asks Einar to put a dress on and stand in. When he does, they both seem to like it. From that point onwards Gerda encourages him to dress up in her clothes and wear her makeup. She seems to see it as a sort of a kinky dressing up game and indeed, at first, most of the time it ends up with them in bed. When she catches him secretly wearing her lingerie under his clothes, she likes that too and again they end up having sex.

They start going out in public with him dressed up as a woman, now known as ‘Lili’ and no one suspects that it is really Einar. I don’t know how well the real Lili passed for a woman but Redmayne's Lili was far from convincing, undeniably a man in a wig and the only person he/she gets a reaction from is a gay man (Ben Whishaw) who he inadvertently pulls. Which doesn’t go down too well with his wife.

Gradually it becomes clear that Einar isn’t so much keen to get his wife out of her underwear but to get into it himself as he becomes more and more obsessed about what it would be like to be a woman. I find it hard to believe this is how you discover that you are transgender as I thought it was something you grappled with almost from childhood but what do I know. Perhaps he did but the film doesn’t tell us. 

They seek help for Einar but the doctors either prescribe shock treatment or want to lock him up. Eventually they find a more open minded doctor who suggests that Einar become part of his experiments into gender reassignment. This leads Einar to submit to a succession of untried medical procedures which will eventually kill him.

This may have started out as a film about a transgender man but where the film actually excels is in its telling of the story of a woman who is married to someone who isn’t who she thought they were.

Saint Gerda takes everything that is thrown at her in her stride and that is some achievement. Gerda is not the successful artist in the family and it is only when she starts painting portraits of ‘Lili’ that she finally starts to get noticed as an artist. This perhaps goes some way to making up for gradually losing her husband.

When Einar decides he wants to become Lili she just goes with it even though her own needs are often compromised along the way. At times it’s painful to watch as he thoughtlessly withdraws himself from her until eventually he leaves her totally alone. Yet Gerda’s devotion to her marriage and to her husband is unflinching even when Einar’s childhood friend, Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts), expresses a clear interest in the sexually frustrated wife. Come the sad ending, she is still there by his bedside.

This is Gerda’s film or more precisely its Alicia Vikander film. While Eddie Redmayne seemed somewhat overwhelmed by his role, which seemed to consume him and then spit him out the other side, Alicia Vikander totally owned her role. I suppose it didn’t help that I kept looking at Redmayne and seeing Stephen Hawking in drag, which isn’t a great vision, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Vikander is fantastic here.

Of course in real life Gerda was herself bisexual and painted lesbian erotica but this wasn’t mentioned in the film. Not sure what the Academy Awards committee would have made of that.

Joy

You would perhaps think that making a film about the woman who invented the Miracle Mop wouldn’t be a very good idea? Well, you’d be right. However we didn’t know this before we saw the film ‘Joy’ with its stellar cast, well respected director and hints of award nominations in the offing. So perhaps they’d somehow woven a silk purse out of a sow’s ear (or whatever the saying is)? Nope.

The film is based on the life of Joy Mangano, she of the mop. It reunites the director and half the cast of the decent ‘Silver Linings Playbook’. It also seems to reassemble almost the same dysfunctional family. Actually this one takes dysfunctional up several notches. In this Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) has to deal with a houseful of kids only some of which are children.

Always an inventor at heart Joy creates her mop and tries to sell it on QVC. It’s initially a disaster when the salesman messes up his sales pitch but the mop gets the blame. Then QVC head honcho Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) reluctantly allows Joy to promote the mop herself. Cue instant success.

Unfortunately Joy is being shafted by her parts supplier and every sale of the mop is losing her money. Her unsympathetic dysfunctional (but seemingly rich) family want the money they have lent her back and financial ruin is just around the corner.

If the focus has been more on the financial shenanigans behind this story then we might have been onto a more interesting film because after an irritating ninety minutes that lead us to her bankruptcy, Joy tracks down the gangster who is head of the parts company. In a brief two minute meeting with a man we've never seen on screen before she hits him with a load of information that we haven’t been party to and that we haven’t seen her collect but it is such powerful stuff that it makes this man back down and give her all her money back. That should have been the film. Unfortunately by then we no longer cared as we all just wanted to get our coats and go home.

What we are left with is a film where both the plot and script are very weak. If Lawrence is going to continue to complain that top female actresses don’t get paid as much as top male actors then her first move should be to get herself a new agent. Plus if she wants to be a feminist and make a film about female empowerment, this isn’t it. 

It turns out this was barely Mangano’s story anyway. The real the Joy Mangano went to university and had a degree in business administration. I hope they’ve apologised to her.

Brooklyn

Based on Colm Tóibín's novel with screenplay by Nick Hornby, Brooklyn tells the story of Ellis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), an Irish lass who emigrates from her home in Enniscorthy, County Wexford to New York in 1950s. She goes at the behest of her sister Rose, who she leaves looking after her mother (Jane Brennan), in search of a life with better prospects.

Ellis arrives in New York seasick and bewildered. She works as a salesperson in a department store and takes night classes in accounting as advised by Father Flood (Jim Broadbent). Initially she misses home but gradually adapts to her new environment.

At an Irish dance she meets Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), an Italian plumber who admits he is partial to Irish girls. Tony turns out to be not only persistent and an avid baseball fan but also quite charming. The new and improved Eilis finally starts to enjoy life in Brooklyn.

Then tragedy strikes back home as her sister dies and Ellis is suddenly heading back to Ireland. Tony is smart and a bit cheeky in that he gets her name on a marriage certificate before she leaves in hope that this will ensure her return.

Despite intending that her return to Ireland would be brief, her stay extended to include a friend's wedding and she reluctantly settles back into life in Enniscorthy along with its small-town mind set. She gets offered a job and another husband, as she is pursued by an old friend in Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson).

The film tries to have us believe that she is torn between the familiarity of her old life in Ireland and the excitement of her new one in Brooklyn. That is as well as being torn between the two men in her life, one of which she’s already married to. Unfortunately while the film presents a pretty solid case for Brooklyn, the Irish case is far from convincing and, quite rightly, Ellis eventually legs it back to America. Anything else really wouldn't have been believable.

Overall though the film is excellent, nothing flash just good old fashioned filmmaking of the kind that a lot of film makers seem to have lost the ability to produce without resorting to special effects and multiple plot twists.

It is without doubt Ronan’s film although kudos to Julie Walters, who as Ellis’s landlady Mrs Kehoe gets to deliver most of the best lines of the film around the dining table of her boarding house.

The Program

I had my doubts about Stephen Frears' film about Lance Armstrong but thought it was worth a look anyway. Personally I think it was way too soon to make this film as no one is in charge of all the facts yet but I suppose cashing in on the Armstrong saga made it necessary to be made now. They’ll probably be plenty more to come.

You probably know the story by now but if you don’t then this will be a real eye-opener. Basically, the massively competitive Armstrong (Ben Foster) doesn’t like losing at anything and is so determined to be the best that he enlists known dodgy doctor Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet) to chemically assist him. Before long Armstrong is destroying everything in his path - rival cyclists, testicular cancer and anyone or anything else that gets in his way. With his seven Tour de France victories and his cancer charity he is an inspiration to millions but Sunday Times journalist David Walsh (Chris O'Dowd) was unconvinced from day one but Walsh stands almost alone in his pursuit of the truth.

The story is pretty much taken word for word from Walsh's excellent book ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ and the film is very true to the book. It doesn't however make for a very coherent story as Frears tries to cram thirteen years of events into the film by presenting a checklist of Armstrong's life. He also decides to use the first half hour of the film to big up Armstrong before shooting him down as if to give a balanced view of the man. I don’t think that was at all necessary.

The film fails to do much more than skim over the surface and never really goes after Armstrong with any real gusto probably because it daren't speculate on what we don't yet know. There are now numerous documentaries that go much deeper than this film does and I'm sure even they haven't got to anywhere near the bottom of this murky saga.

Unfortunately Ben Foster isn't terribly believable as Armstrong, he’s not nearly as intimidating enough for a start, but then I'm not sure who could have pulled that off.

Despite its shortcomings, The Program is largely entertaining and informative but not particularly outstanding.