The Week in Cinema: 24.06 -- 30.06

-- a selection of short-form reviews of films watched this week --

Moneyball (dir. Bennett Miller, 2011)

✭✭✭✭✩

What is an American movie? Or, rather, who is America in the movies? I don’t expect to have an immediate answer. American movies, particular that of American ‘sports movies’, tap into something of a national zeitgeist – a will, or willingness, to find success in a world that has no limit to anyone but the protagonist themselves. It is this concept of limitation that compels such figures to perform as they do, (or to be written as they are), often at their own peril, open to private loss, and often without the ability to turn around. To lose is to wake up alone and damaged, whereas to win is to rise as the hero of your own dream, to be loved, wanted and alive. There are losers due to the prior existence of such winners, and there are winners because American is a site of accomplishment and victory – sport is a muscle relief to a history of ‘greatness’, a reminder that the body is still capable of delivering anything. You do not need to be American to watch American movies, (it is the only viewpoint I have,) but the sense of myth and belief in the individual can be sourced by anyone with an understanding of film, or enjoyment of the screen. American sport, in cinema, is an imaginary game as much as it is a real one, played on grass or concrete. You look to see, and cinema simply fills in the rest. America is as bold as colour as any. Moneyball is an American movie – in every sense, in every scene – captivating from the start to finish by virtue of that very fact. Brad Pitt (starring as one-time child star, now coach of Oakland Athletics baseball team) and Jonah Hill (assistant GM Peter Brand), confronted by limited finances and growing pressures to compete with a rigged industry, employ a sabermetric approach – players assessed on a statistical, numerical-percentage basis – to guarantee future success. Success and defeat are felt on the pitch and at home, Beane aspiring to be a good father as far as he can be an adequate coach. Miller, as later satisfied with Foxcatcher, looks to this myth of America – a portrait of life as a business, with only winners and losers – and, alongside Zaillian and Sorkin’s script, elevates it to heroic levels. Moneyball is at once Greek tragedy and American sports, a tale of capitalism and a tale of the everyman.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (dir. Ben Wheatley, 2018)

✭✭✭✩✩

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus finds a contemporary landscape in Ben Wheatley’s latest tragicomedy, a household farce slowly burning on familial dissent, loathness and unearthed sin. Colin (played by Utopia and Kill List’s Neil Maskell, a regular to Wheatley) gathers together his scattered family in a Dorset estate for New Year’s celebrations, only to find animosities restoked with the invitation, unbeknownst to him and others, of their estranged, playboy-brother, David. Such circumstances colour the occasion with an apocalyptic, theatrical shade – one that any audience member belonging to a family can grimace at, knowingly – and the “family as a body” motif, borrowed from Shakespeare, corrupted and dismembered throughout. Wheatley is a master of low-budget grandness, director, screenwriter and editor (the latter maybe the most impressive of all) in a glorious display of his talent. Far from the heights of Kill List, but brighter than his previous feature, Free Fire, Wheatley delivers another successful, fluid piece of cinematic art.

Anima (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2019)

✭✭✭✭✩

Thom Yorke falls in love on a Prague tramway, whilst cascading into a dreaming sleep, lurching between cinematic set pieces, chance encounters and Chaplin-esque landscapes. Filling the void since Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 release Phantom Thread, Anima works as a companion piece to Yorke’s newest album, an extended ‘dream video’ featuring a triad of songs from the collection: ‘Not the News’, ‘Traffic’ and ‘Dawn Chorus’. In search of a woman glimpsed on a train (played by his real-life partner, Dajana Roncione), Yorke comically slumbers from scene to scene, the piece reuniting him with dance choreographer Damien Jalet – who also worked on Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake last year. It is a tender darkness visited by this sleepwalking figure, as if freshly wounded from the slight contact at the onset. Yung’s anima finds transcendental expression as dance and film cohere uniquely to the breath of Yorke’s electronic soundscape, music in/to which you are lost, not unlike the majority of Radiohead’s output, a mood of repetition and sombre refrain. Anima (much like Wim Wenders’ Pina or Suspiria) demonstrates the ease and edge by which dance and cinema align themselves, the visual platform a stable in which to inhabit sense and memory.