Foring Radio

In his first dramatic feature since he won Oscars and box-office esteem with The Departed, Martin Scorsese turns Denis Lehane�s creepy novel Shutter Island into a dark, intense thriller about madness, trauma and violence arranged as an elaborate homage to Hollywood�s less respectable genres.

The prow of a boat emerges from a billow of fog, revealing a pair of grizzled detectives in fedoras, nervously smoking cigarettes. It�s 1954 and US Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), are making their way to an asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island, a remote spot of land in Boston harbour.

They have come to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient who vanished without trace from a secure cell. Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the head psychiatrist, explains that Rachel, who was incarcerated for killing her three children, is semi-catatonic and unable to look after herself. Not long after their arrival, a hurricane gathers in the harbour, providing Teddy and Chuck with enough of a diversion to sneak around the hospital. Scattered clues seem to point at a massive conspiracy, involving Nazi doctors, human experimentation and government cover-up. Soon, the mysteries are piled up in a heap, with Teddy crumbling under the pressure to put events in order.

This is Scorsese�s fourth collaboration in a row with DiCaprio, a partnership that has come to define his recent films. The actor does extraordinarily well with what is a difficult, slippery character, driven and distracted at the same time and, in each one of the various layers of the story, spot on his mark. Around him, the rest of the formidable cast take their turn in devouring rich, meaty characters, but more than that, Scorsese pays individual tribute to these character�s long history in B-movie cinema. The camera creeps up behind a chair to reveal Von Sydow�s scowling face in a crash of lightning, a malformed prisoner steps forward from the shadows in the corner of his cell, Kingsley�s evasive doctor fiddles with his bow tie as his eyes dart across the frame.

Scorsese�s ambition with Shutter Island is to distil the essence of all the old RKO chillers, inky noirs and cop thrillers of his youth into one dizzying concoction. There�s no better man for the task. Scorsese is the master of American cinema genres and has attempted all of them bar the Western; Musicals, Bible films, road movies, gangster epics and remakes. The director has an encyclopaedic knowledge, not just of titles and genres, but individual shots, moods, tones and compositions. Shutter Island is his chance to reveal the depth of that appreciation.

There are flaws, particularly in the over-explained final section, but none of them are damaging enough to detract from what is a devious, beautifully crafted folly. Shutter Island is not the neo-noir classic it might have been, it�s a touch too flashy and unhinged for that, but it is an energetic and entertaining B-Movie, as intended. A B+ Movie, in fact.

Neil Jordan�s first original screenplay in a decade sees him return to Ireland for a gentle, unassuming fable about family, faith and love. Ondine�s lyrical title derives from German folklorist Friedrich de la Motte Fouqu�s 1811 novella Undine, where a water-nymph bewitches a Saxon knight. The story has formed the basis for dozens of films, including another beautifully photographed Irish-set fairy-tale, The Secret of Roan Inish, which John Sayles and cinematographer Haskell Wexler made in and around Rosbeg in Donegal in 1994. Although that film was a bit of an oddity for the passionately political Sayles, you can�t say the same about Jordan, who has always shown a fascination with fairy-tales and fantasies; alternate worlds where alternate things happen.

Syraceuse (Colin Farrell) is a fisherman who operates a boat out of a harbour on the Cork coast. Once married to the shrewish Maura (Dervla Kirwan), he has given up the drink and devoted himself to looking after their sweet young daughter Anna (Alison Barry), who is on kidney dialysis and uses a wheelchair to get around. One day, while trawling the green waters, Syraceuse finds a beautiful woman (Alicja Bachleda) half-drowned in his nets. When she is revived, she explains she has no memory of who she is, or what happened to her. Syraceuse puts her up in an old cottage and promises to keep her presence a secret. But his daughter discovers the woman, now called Ondine, and believes she is a selkie; a mythical mermaid who looks human and can walk on land but who belongs to the sea.

Ondine is a strange girl, and strange things happen when she is around. Syraceuse had been struggling to land a catch but when she sings a song from his deck, the fish jump into the nets. Later, her presence seems to have a curative effect on Anna, who has been waiting for a kidney transplant. Could Ondine really be a magical being, come to land to find love and bring good luck? Meanwhile, Syraceuse is struggling with his sobriety, regularly attending confessions with the local priest (Stephen Rea) in lieu of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Farrell has emerged from his shallow Hollywood period as a decent actor. He struggles with the sing-song strangulations of the Cork accent (sounding at times like he is laughing and choking in the same breath) but beyond that, this is a mature, involving performance. He plays Syraceuse in a minor-key, resolutely understating the potentially unwieldy sweep of his character and searching out moments of intimacy and empathy. Opposite him, Bachleda is well cast as the tattered waif Ondine, almost silent for the most part but communicating an ethereal presence throughout.

The middle section of the film, a collection of deliberate distractions and odd character moments, is almost entirely horizontal. It�s as if Jordan is treading water, waiting for the right moment to bring his finely-spun elements together. But he delays too long, the story drags and his characters wilt. The twisted knots of the plot are not nearly as complicated, sinister or compelling as they might have been. Whatever elusive magic the story contained dribbles away. Indeed, audiences might entertain themselves during the late-stage longeurs in trying to guess how this fantastical story will resolve itself in the real world. There are few options and Jordan picks the obvious one.

The story might be bumpy and the dialogue uneven, but Jordan is immensely skilled in creating mood. Ondine is, simply, a beautiful film to look at. Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle�s lush, hazy images are underlined by a haunting score from Kjartan Sveinsson, the keyboardist in Icelandic band Sigur Ros.

Capitalism: A Love Story is director Michael Moore�s call-to-arms against the robber barons that have brought America to its knees, a mix of comedy, outrage, economic theory and shock tactics fashioned into an effective, and entertaining, documentary about how the American Dream went sour.

Moore�s thesis is that democracy was corrupted to allow capitalism to prosper. It started with Ronald Regan dismantling the American unions, undermining the workers to increase profits. It continued with the deregulation of the financial services sector, which allowed sub-prime mortgages to evolve, massive debts incurred by people who could never hope to repay them. According to Moore, the simple dreams of the post-war generation � a house, a car, an education � have been perverted by greed, corruption and aspirant popular entertainment into demands for mansions, limousines and easy celebrity. �Capitalism is evil�, he declaims, �and you cannot regulate evil�.

Moore�s populist, rabble-rousing persona is one he adopts in order to make topical issues entertaining to Cineplex audiences. His films are all made up of the same elements: snippets of news-reel and old cartoons, startling statistics and, as always, an embarrassing stunt where Mike takes to the streets to embarrass some pompous jobsworth in a suit. This time, he attempts to make citizen�s arrests on the board of wobbling insurance giant AIG while draping yellow �crime-scene� tape on the granite edifices of Wall St brokerages.

The animations, cut-ups and montages are all very amusing, but as before, it�s Moore�s new reportage that works best. He interviews families in mortgage arrears as the banks foreclose, his camera watching as the police arrive at the door to carry out an eviction. Later, he meets with community groups and union leaders who are forcibly re-housing homeless families to save their neighbourhoods, or staging sit-ins in order to receive their rightful redundancy payments. Moore knows that the human face of any story is the most effective.

The director is outraged that the American banks, with the support of the police, can throw people out of their homes or their jobs without negotiation. Moore returns to his home town of Flint, Michigan, which has deteriorated even further since he made his first film, Roger & Me, there twenty years ago. The place is a ghost town now, filled with empty spaces where there used to be a city. In the film�s most touching moment, Moore accompanies his elderly father on a visit to the site of the factory he used to work at, a flattened wasteland of concrete rubble and twisted steel where a massive industrial plant once stood. The film isn�t an attack on corruption, stupidity, greed and bad governance, but an attempt to discredit capitalism as a social system. According to Moore, Westerners are blinded by the notion that capitalism is the same as democracy. That making money is God�s work and good work, that progress is the nature of things, that we must make new stuff to replace old stuff in a constant flux of consumption.

But what Moore fails to realise, or come to terms with, the fact that American capitalism is no longer about massive industrial plant, armies of workers and manufacturing for export. The complications of the modern money systems are beyond him (as they are beyond me), so all he can offer is a baffled shrug at the complexities of a mutated system. Moore is a fine pathologist, but he can�t offer any prognosis. He can identify what is sick about the American economy, but cannot say what will cure it.

Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet�s new film Micmacs is an entertaining and inventive caper about the international arms trade told with the director�s signature visual flair. Opening with a bang, the first section races through the early life of Bazil (Danny Boon), whose solider father is killed by a landmine in Algeria. His distraught mother is taken away by the men in white coats, and young Bazil ends up in an orphanage. Years later, he�s working as a video-shop clerk when a stray bullet from a gangland shooting ends up lodged in his brain.

Out of hospital, broke and homeless, Bazil falls in with a group of eccentric misfits, the Micmacs of the title, who live in a cocoon of recycled rubbish on the outskirts of Paris. The gang is led by the maternal Tambouille (Yolande Moreau) and includes numbers genius Calculette (Marie-Julie Baup), human cannonball Fracasse (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) and contortionist Caoutchouc (Julie Ferrier).

One day, while diving through a skip for fresh junk, Bazil notices that the two buildings on either side of the street have very familiar corporate logos. One is the firm that made the bullet in his cerebellum. The other made the landmine that did for his dear papa. Charged with a determination to put an end to both companies, he teams up with the Micmacs to pitch both company CEOs (Andre Dussolier and Nicolas Marie) against one another.

Jeunet prefers to show his audience the story, rather than have his characters explain it, so Micmacs is packed with short, snappy, almost silent sequences that, taken together, closely resemble a plot. The elaborate stings which Bazil and friends mount on the two arms dealers make up most of the film�s running time and each is more entertaining and elaborate than the last, using all of Jeunet�s considerable wit.

The execution and editing of these cinematic conceits is astonishing, as is the director�s complicated set design and hand-made props. With Boon�s mobile face and graceful movement, Micmacs is a live-action cartoon, like Buster Keaton�s take on Snow White & The Seven Dwarves, a mood further enhanced by the thunderous score taken from the archive of 1940s noir at Warner Brothers. Micmacs is a master-class in production design and visual invention, but that�s about all it is. Jeunet�s many fans will be thrilled but those seeking a deeper story, or any story at all, might be disappointed.

A Single Man is told from the point of view of its hero, George (Colin Firth), the single man in question. George is 52 and gay. It has been eight months since his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), died in a car accident while visiting his family, alone, in Colorado. In the house they shared together in Los Angeles, George still grieves. His work, teaching English at a local college, gives him no joy. His only friend, fellow ex-pat Charley (Julianne Moore), is a sad, lonely alcoholic who, like George, has no other friend in the world.

The film opens on what might be the last day of George�s life, in 1962. The first thing he does is check the pistol sitting in a bedside drawer, so the conclusion that he might use it at some stage is unavoidable. George is an obsessively neat man, and performs the same daily routine as he always does, setting out an immaculate suit, finding the perfect tie, polishing his already gleaming shoes. He heads off to class, where he uses a lecture on Aldous Huxley to talk about the myriad ways that humans differ from one another. His students don�t pay much attention, except the cheerful Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), who has a bright smile and handsome face and wonders if his lecturer will take drugs with him. George is tempted, but he has made his plans. And so the day unfolds in a series of careful arrangements, chance encounters and heartbreaking memories.

There�s a line of dialogue that passes almost unnoticed in a scene that acts as a touchstone for the entire film: �Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty�. A Single Man is directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, who made his name re-inventing Italian fashion house Gucci in the 1990s. Ford adapted Christopher Isherwood�s dark novel himself, and when no studio was willing to finance the film, paid for it out of his own pocket. The result is a fine debut, impressively photographed and composed, delicately phrased and paced.

Oscar nominated for the role, and hotly tipped to take home the statue, Colin Firth firmly puts aside memories of his Bridget Jones caricature to deliver a performance of astonishing restraint and emotional grace. Unable to reveal his true nature, George has lived his life from behind a mask, assuming an identity that, after decades, is finally starting to chafe. His tasteful furnishings, perfect clothes and gentlemanly demeanour have replaced his real self, with Ford emphasising the cool, coldly flawless world he has built around himself; his pristine house filled with tasteful furniture, his spotless car and down to the clinically white handkerchief George wears in his lapel pocket. The film belongs to Firth, who turns this sad character study into a tender, universal story of heartache and loss.

Hirokazu Kore-eda�s unassuming Japanese family drama Still Walking opens, like so many Asian films, with images of food being prepared. A lavish meal is assembled in a small kitchen by the elderly Tosiko (Kirin Kiki) and her young daughter Chinami (the monosyllabically named Japanese cult actress You). They are getting ready to host their son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), his sweet new wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) and her young son Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka), the first time he has visited since he got married. Rightly or wrongly, Ryota believes his taciturn father Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), a retired doctor, disapproves of his marriage to a widowed mother and despairs of his chances to find a career as an art restorer.



At the same time, Chinami and her dopey, always-smiling salesman husband are hoping to move into the spare room, a proposal that her mother finds less than appealing. She is settled in her ways, tending to her husband and their garden. The already tense family gathering is made more uncomfortable by falling around the anniversary of the death of the family�s eldest son Junpei, a doctor like his father, who drowned while saving another man�s life a couple of years before. Junpei�s absence haunts the film like a ghost, particularly for Ryota who believes his parents would have preferred that he had been the one to die.



Like the recent Departures, Still Walking is a film about coping with grief through repetition and ritual. Some, like anointing a gravestone with water, are benign, but the other ceremonies that have built up around the tragic death are more sinister. From a cast of talented actors, Kirin Kiki stands out as the blunt and bickering grandmother. She is superb in every scene, her quick hands providing the family with delicate edible treats and her equally quick tongue providing the film with its best moment as she explains the malevolent thinking behind her fa�ade of kindness to the boy her dead son saved. �I'm not cruel,� she tells her son, �It�s normal�.



There are moments throughout that recall the Japanese master director Yasujiro Ozu; lengthy, floor-level domestic still-lives and delicate images of the colourful garden that surrounds the house. The tone, like Ozu�s, is melancholic, tense and muted. At the heart of the film is the dining table, where the family eat, bicker, gossip and, slowly, unburden themselves. The story, which takes place over a single day and night, builds through an accretion of tiny details, oppressive silences and muttered asides, fleeting glances and fluttering gestures. Conversations begin at one point and, almost imperceptibly, conclude at another, some way distant. The root of the drama is revealed obliquely, a slow simmer of long-held grievances that never quite boils over. Restraint, in the end, wins out, but this grimly-held control only highlights the bright flashes of realistic emotion scattered all the way through what is a captivating film.