Review: CRIMSON PEAK

So, it's a ghost story.

It's more a story with ghosts.

Edith explains this more than once in the opening scenes of Crimson Peak. She's writing a novel. Already she's been told to put a romance in it and then she has decided to conceal her gender from publishers by drafting the book on a typewriter. And behind her, writer director Guillermo del Toro is telling us that we should cast off ideas that we're in for a horror movie. It's not a clumsy breach of the fourth wall as much as a kind of wink to anyone who has followed his career. So far he's made popcorn genre films in English and highly original dark fables in Spanish. Well, this is a dark fable in English.

There are indeed ghosts. They are fleshy but also ashen. Trails and dribbles of ectoplasm flow around them like the spectres in The Devil's Backbone. They are scary when you see them but they are also messengers. What's on show here is not horror but melodrama and it is played as a kind of spoken opera. The grand orchestral score for once in a contemporary film really has a welcome place. Edith's insistence on the relationship of ghosts to the story plays, in effect, like a theme in an overture.

The plot is a compound of gothic melodramas like Jane Eyre or Rebecca. Young and beautiful and Edith (a golden Mia Wasikovska) falls for the suavely dark Sir Thomas Thorne (the utterly dependable Tom Hiddleston) as he tours the Americas seeking investors for his clay mining machine. His sister, the arch and sinister Lady Lucille (a posh accented Jessica Chastain) slinks through the society crowd like a crimson serpent and descends a gothic stairwell like seven Mrs Danvers all at once. We're not talking new, here, as much as well expressed.

As a child, Edith was warned by the ghost of her mother to beware of Crimson Peak. And it is to a crimson peak (a natural phenomenon explained in the second act) that she is drawn. The mansion is slowly sinking into the blood red clay. The ceilings in some rooms have caved in; snow falls gently through the holes. Corridors give way to more corridors. The basement, accessed by an ancient lift, is filled with vats of bloodlike clay that could hide many bodies. And the cupboards and the recesses, the bathtubs and the entrances crawl and slide with the blood red dead.

Edith runs through this increasingly grave life decision like a gothic heroine. Well, she would if she weren't written as she has been. While she is under constant threat, at first from the ghosts and then from her sister in law and even her new husband she is more of an action heroine. And it is this that lifts Crimson Peak from being a beautiful but pointless melodrama to a Guillermo del Toro film.

Mia Wasikovska's bright performance goes from naivete to hard, canny survivalism as the full picture of where the real threats are coming from. Without this element, character and performance, the film would be pedestrian, if spectacularly so, on the same shelf as almost everything by Tim Burton after Ed Wood. Until this role solidifies it can be difficult to see where del Toro is going with the material but as blasting mini opera about life's mistakes it takes an honourable place beside the Spanish speaking masterworks. Perhaps a little softer than Pan's Labyrinth, which might well disappoint, but this could be the mellowing maturity brings and that might well spell more depth. We shall wait. We shall see.

Review: MAPS TO THE STARS

Havana is a star of a certain age and rapidly shooting toward invisibility in the night sky. Benjie is still a child star but is on probation in a sequel after almost self immolating on a drug binge at thirteen. His nail hard mother guards his progress while his Beatle-quoting father relieves the stress of the Beverly Hills A-list as a kind of physiopsychiatrist. Carrie Fisher (the real Carrie Fisher) recommends a "chore whore" to Havana whose last one is in a recovery oubliette. This is Agatha, whom we actually meet first as she alights a bus to Hollywood and magnetises the driver of the limo she has arranged (beyond her means). She is scarred with burns. Getting that story will prove dramatic.

Take all this and handle it normally and you might have a passable melodrama or, more likely, a stinging satire pushing boundaries set by Entourage or perhaps a more humane contrapuntal narrative fugue by a Robert Altman or a Paul Thomas Anderson. But, no, David Cronenberg is at the helm and we are not going to get out of it so easily.

Don't get me wrong, the narrative machine is well oiled and works with a Swiss movement. DC even rolls back the visual style to a muted high-placed Californian good taste. The Terror of Toronto is at his least when he allows the action and linear pull enough sway to make you forget it's him. At his best, whether elbow deep in bizarre prosthetics like Videodrome or shiveringly rareified like Crash, he serves up a muscular narrative and throws the essay booklet in. At his best, he is all about the notion.

This is not an attack on Hollywood or even much of a comment on it. The setting, however, is essential. In what better milieu could we trial such a tale of scarifying incest and the passage of sin
between generations than in the central hive of meme production that is the Dream Factory?

Havana knows to air kiss the rival she would sooner eviscerate. Her sessions with Stafford the massaging shrink give us the most Cronenbergian visuals as Julianne Moore (Havana) distorts herself under his (John Cusack's) professional intimacy to the border of recognisability. The star (a particularly honestly freckled Moore) must touch real ugliness for her redemption. The always impressive Moore went to a similar realm in the undersung Safe. Like Keira Knightley in Dangerous Method, she is pushing the envelope with the odd effect that we both sympathise with and recoil from her.

That's the other thing about a good Cronenberg film: performances that go places. Moore's is the most external but the others are no less impressive. The ubiquitous Mia Wasikovska (I should tally how many times I've seen her on screen this year alone) warms us with pathos, terrifies us with madness and somehow also charms us. Olivia Williams steps into frame hard and unflatteringly almost monkish in appearance and turns our frown at her hardness into real pity. Newcomer Evan Bird as Benjie bravely plays a waxwork detachment up to the end, his pubescent forehead pimples giving us a grasping handle on his fragility as he tests our patience with his constantly self-abused power. I also found John Cusack's grown up teen star (a casting decision rather than a plot point) poignant. Current young adult idol Robert Pattinson surely finds a kind of satisfaction as one aspirant actor/writer among a million working a day job.

I've left the plot out of this review because it doesn't need any help from me. This piece that allows its sobering proposition to slowly swell up through the easily conventional narrative has more on its mind than giving us logic dots to join. For it's here on the cinema screen that we are shown our own affection for ideals wrenched earthward as we perhaps maybe might and kinda should aspire not to the stars made of flesh and anxiety but to fabulously refulgent light in the distance of the night whose outnumbering lightlessness taunts us toward the sparks.

MIFFdrawal session 3: Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's GothRom revisits the big screen again in subtle but hearty form. Mia Wasikovska (our own) plays a Jane plain but with a wandering eye and a frustration at the horizon seen from the window doing the same to her as her life: nix adventure. Jane is a furnace beneath her composure and Wasikovska portrays this through her coal black eyes that smoulder from her poise and cleanliness. Then, as this setup demands (of Bronte and any adaptation) all this control must be exposed to disassembling chaos.

Enter Mr Rochester, master of the castle, lands, goods, chattels and anything else in his ancestors' domesday book entry. Dark and sexy as a blue pointer shark he appears in a crash of violent movement as Jane unwittingly spooks his horse while walking through a fog in a forest (blame Charlotte Bronte!) From that point on it's Jane vs Rochester and the tall dark and sexy Michael Fassbender fills a role most memorably substantiated by Orson the Great many decades ago. He doesn't do Orson. He is far closer to the Rochester of Bronte: aristocratic ad hedonistic when not lightlessly gloomy.

He's a good Roch, she's a good Jane. Is it a good Jane Eyre? Yes, because it lets its strengths (undercurrent, unspoken dialogue, robust control over light and landscape to play the atmosphere like a pipe organ) work under their own momentum and forbids the suddenness of melodrama (Bronte's book is fraught but not bodice-ripping). No, it's not a good Jane because the element that might save it from being too plain , the novel's wafting but everpresent creepiness, is turned down so low that it never quite takes to the air. Without the spookiness Jane Eyre can only be a serious study in restrained power. Is it a middling Jane Eyre? No, because the central performances are so exact and never mannered. Maybe middling because the score is a by the numbers string section wash that while not fulsomely everpresent is always unwelcome to my ears and makes a potentially extraordinary film veer toward becoming a resolutely ordinary one.

So, contradictions. I won't rush to watch this again but I'm glad I took the effort.

Little else to say but this from my particular screening. There was an audio anomaly in the first reel or so (assuming reels were in use) which had the pitch wavering down a noticeable microtone every few minutes. This was only noticeable in the music score with its languid strings but it had the curious effect of sounding like 20th century modernism as though the composer, ashamed of his work's conventionality, was twiddling a pitch control in a last ditch effort to gain some edge. It was corrected about twenty minutes in and the problem didn't return. Made me wonder how it happened, though. That pitch waver takes a lot of work in the digital realm but might only be a dirty pinch roller on an analogue machine. That's why called the duration a reel above, by the way.

Now off to find something for tomorrow.....