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From: John Moseley
Category: Films
Date: 07 January 2005
First a man dies in a balloon accident. Various people try to stop the accident and one of them, who has been having a picnic with girlfriend Samantha Morton, is Daniel Craig. Another is Rhys Iffans. Next we see students in a lecture theatre, brows furrowed with the effort of taking on philosopy lecturer Craig's theory that love might be nothing more than a bio-chemical trick to make us reproduce. I know. Wow. Yes, this is to be a film of ideas, albeit really simple easy ones and, as if to explicitly flag up its devotion to abstract thought, it begins, at a relentless pace, to use cliches like shorthand, brutally unconcerned about the audience's emotional engagement, the plausibility or three dimensionality of the characters or anything resembling pacing or care in developing the story. It's breathtaking. At the same time as it rushes into the plot like a lover with no concept of foreplay, it's also incredibly boring. At the same time as it's making a feeble gesture towards trying to convince you it's intelligent, it's phenomenally stupid. Joe Penhall's script is like a cardboard maquette of a script, held together with sticky tape. About its surface can be seen quick felt pen jottings: 'loving relationship - an artist and a philosopher - two angles on the mystery of existence' 'stalker appears, obsessed with man - he's pretty weird!' 'bring up question of what love is, leading to...does anything really mean anything at all???!!' 'Philosopher increasingly unnerved by stalker - his relationship suffers!' 'Emotionally wrenching birthday dinner. Show how communication has almost completely broken down between couple with impersonally banal sub-Mamettian dialogue followed by pause followed by...sudden outburst of emotion!! Potential to be v. powerful.' 'Bring in couple with baby for sense of meaning' and so on. And it's all really about as plausible and emotionally involving as that, those notes, that's it. It's so limp and fleshless that the director and director of photography compensate with lots of pyro camerawork, the steadicam pinging around like a pinball as Craig becomes increasingly pissed off at Rhys Iffans for stalking him. The stalking is handled particularly badly, Iffans going mental and desperate almost immediately, before he's even been properly introduced. Worse the film makes the absolutely classic mistake of making the crazy guy retro zany looking and having him be played by Rhys Iffans, as if he's a DJ with a Hoxton fashion stylist girlfriend rather than a sad, lonely, homosexual sociopath who lives in a dump. Why do filmmakers do this? Why do they choose to be shit rather than good? Why do they feel this faithless need to fill their films with witless Dazed&Confusedisms when they have nothing to do with the script? The same thinking has our hero and heroine living in a three-storey, galleried, opulantly floored and decorated loft conversion. The house is genuinely beautiful and I hope to live in something similar myself one day, but I don't go to the movies to get home decor ideas and I don't expect even moderately successful artists and philosophy lecturers to live in places likes this. I wondered if the director and writer had ever actually seen any other films. While I was thinking this, the friend I'd gone in with was thinking that they ought to show this film in film schools as a negative exemplar. Afterwards we agreed that it was far worse than some of the films we have hated most in our lives, 'Betty Blue' and 'Subway'. At least those films were brazen in their shallowness and emotional manipulativeness and at least they carried off their sentimentality and trendy flashiness with the desired effect. This film didn't know what it was doing. It comes on, as I've said, as if it's going to be sort of intellectual, but all it really manages are a couple of laughable scrapes at the tip of Richard Dawkins' iceberg. The rest of it is just the tediously familiar stalker plot, the inappropriate styling and the epileptic camerawork. And for a film that tries, however limply, to engage with the mystery of life, it does a great job of becoming part of the problem because there are some fairly illustrious personnages associated with its creation, none of whom, at any point, seems to have said with sufficient force to stop the rot, we're roasting a turkey. And one can only wonder, how can this be? Ian Mckewan, from whose novel the film is taken, has been producing rubbish for years, so he's not to be relied on. He's Barbara Bush's favourite novelist and he makes a tidy living, not least from the numerous sales of film rights to his books, a process that has so far produced one gem (the cement garden) and at least three dogs. One of latter, The Comfort of Strangers, was scripted by no less a writer than Harold Pinter with no beneficial effect and the film under discussion's producers have repeated the trick here by employing a playwright with a hot reputation to script, somehow effecting the creation of a piece of garbage. How is this possible? How do people with reputations as intellectual heavyweights produce such flimsy, willthisdocanIhavemychequeplease pap and still hang onto those reputations? Is it that the producers want the playwright's names but not really their ideas and so set about butchering the scripts of all interest and intelligence as soon as they arrive, but force the writers, through devious, Faustian contracts, to take the credit? It could just be. Or is it that these guys are playwrights, not screenwriters? No, Pinter wrote Accident and The Servant, both excellent films. But Penhall I'm not sure about. He's one of these guys people say is good at the moment, the same way they say Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking) or Sarah Kane (Blasted) are good, when they're not. Ditto Mckewan whose been getting away with it for years. I'm not sure how this process works, but it could be something to do with networking or it could be that critics are not very bright or a bit of both. Or it could be that they're all shape-changing alien lizards wbose aim is to slowly drive us insane by telling us things are good when they're quite obviously not. Philip French made this film top 10 in the Guardian for a couple of weeks and said, 'Ian McEwan's celebrated novel reaches the screen intellectually diluted but still dramatically potent.' I don't know. Life really is very perplexing, possibly meaningless.
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