Review: THE REALM

We first see a man in a blue suit on a beach take a phone call. He turns and strides into a building, goes (in a Goodfellas-style continuous tracking shot) through the kitchen of a restaurant, picks up a plate of prawns and delivers it to a table of high-lifers in style. The moment is small in their lives but noted as a kind of pulled favour by the lunch host. That's Manuel, political stoker and boiler. The conversation is as rapid as the music video cuts but you're not meant to get details, just the vibe that you are watching wealth and privilege. In a loo break during the lunch the president hints to Manuel that he is about to come into a promotion. Later, he wakes from an afternoon nap into a scandal filling the media like a burst water main. He's at its centre.

Most of the course of this film is his efforts to first staunch the flow of damage to the government he's part of and then, as more fellow conspirators are thrown under buses by the party, he himself is on the plank. The gigantic second act of this Spanish political thriller is taken up with this struggle as Manuel dialogues his way through fall guys and old faithfuls in need of bolster as his chances of getting out clean drain like dirty bathwater.

There is no ambiguity about his guilt, the film depends on our knowing that for the character to deal freely with his co-conspirators. What is the crime involved? Well, it's a kind of siphoning off of public money with a land zoning scam. Details emerge slowly in this story of information as wealth but you get the idea. More importantly you see how a character who is aware of his own sin but oblivious to its effects develops from forceful arrogance through an increasing desperation as his political survival turns to one of physical life and death.

Antonio de la Torre gives Manuel a performance that picks up nuance as his character must, going from an unchallenged bluster through a kind of acquired begging to an animal wildness as he sees the struggle become mortal. There are certainly times when we might wonder if we can follow him with such a lack of remorse for his actions but it is well before he is made a clear victim the we understand how novel this journey is. This is nowhere near the overwrought bombast of Bad Lieutenant or the more tragic downward slide of Raging Bull. He has chosen, in strength, to be a bad man. We long to see him understand this and for the moment it happens. When it does it is the least Hollywood of climaxes you could expect from the spectacle you've been witnessing. A question. Fade to black.

Robust cinema that rises above its risk.

Review: LONG SHOT

Romcoms need to sell you the conflict early and fast. Political satires need to steer a tight channel between whimsy and cynicism. Both ask you to indulge them for the promise of a big, preposterous resolution. So what happens if you soften all of this and try to inject some everyday grind in among the one liners and physical gags? You get Long Shot and it takes a little adjustment.

It opens on a neo-nazi den where Seth Rogen's Fred tries to pass for one of them, gets found out and runs through a window and splats onto the footpath below looking like he's broken his neck. He gets up and taunts his incredulous tormentors. That is comedy. Charlize Theron's Charlotte, Secretary of State is coddling a Trumpish Bob Odenkirk president into endorsing her as a future presidential candidate as he repeats ideas she's just fed him as though they are his own. That's satire. The real meet cute of this movie is the collision of those two. I spent the first twenty minutes swinging between wanting to laugh more and preparing for some hard cynicism. Both happen and then they stop and then they start again.

Fred meets Charlotte at a charity do and they realise they knew each other as teenagers when she was his idealistic and hell-hot babysitter. Decades on, he's an idealistic journalist and she a political golden girl. After he takes a verbal swing at the Rupert Murdoch figure (an unrecognisable Andy Serkis) and then takes a massive fall down a staircase he's so lodged in her mind that he's engaged as her speechwriter. The middle act that brings them together despite contrary forces is a series of travel locations and tight spots that veer between farcical and poignant. Rogan playing to his audience with a well known and appealing shtick of intelligent goof and Theron again showing a flair for comedy using poise to generate laughs (see also Cary Grant in his own romcoms).

And then we get the big break in the third act where characters choose between happiness or aggrandisement but we also get the tightening swing between the two types of comedy and where earlier scenes felt frustrating and directionless there is now resolution. But it still feels like it has taken too long to get to this point.

What saves this frequently very funny film from collapse is the demand we develop to see more of the leads. However hokey or deflated it gets we perk up at the interaction of Rogen and Theron who get the best lines but do work as a comedy pairing. Theron completely outclasses Rogen but even the awkwardness of this seems to work.

In the end it feels less substantial than it has been, nesting into a goofy feelgood conclusion that, for all its genuine issue-facing, feels warm. The romcom has won. I liked it the more time I had to think about it which is the opposite of more audacious fare from earlier decades like Bulworth or Wag the Dog which tripped over their self-congratulation without the irony they were labouring to create. Network or The Candidate this aint but it kinda works, anyway.