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Sweet Sixteen
Directed by Ken Loach
Writing credits Paul Laverty
Cast
Martin Compston .... Liam
William Ruane .... Pinball
Annmarie Fulton .... Chantelle
Michelle Abercromby Suzanne
Michelle Coulter .... Jean
Gary McCormack .... Stan
Tommy McKee .... Rab
Gary Maitland .... Side-kick
Junior Walker (II) .... Night-time
Produced by Ulrich Felsberg
Original music by George Fenton
Cinematography by Barry Ackroyd
Film Editing by Jonathan Morris
Production Design by Martin Johnson
Art Direction by Fergus Clegg
Ken Loach's "Sweet Sixteen" marks a welcome return to the world of his most successful films, like "Raining
Stones," "Ladybird Ladybird," and "My Name Is Joe," the world of the dysfunctional families of the
contemporary British working class, and a movement away from less successful ventures into other times or places like "Land
and Freedom," "Carla's Song," and "Bread & Roses." One difficulty, though, is that Loach seems
always to build the same pre-formed moral into his films. If you're sympathetic to the director's leftist politics, which
most critics are, you're not going to have a problem with the message. Still, the feeling that a pre-theorised lesson is being
taught does occasionally clash with Loach's simultaneous all-out effort to present real life directly, in all its rawness
and unpredictability. Be that as it may, the freshness and authenticity of "Sweet Sixteen," especially in the person
of its protagonist Liam, both the 15-year-old character and the 17-year-old non-actor who plays him, are so powerful that
any real critique is simply blown away.
Liam (Martin Compston) is looking forward to the day his mum will be released from prison (coincidentally on his 16th
birthday, hence the bitterly ironic title), where she's been consigned by her drug habit and some illegal shenanigans with
her criminal boyfriend Stan. Liam hates Stan, and the feeling is mutual. In his effort to pry her loose from Stan's evil influence,
Liam dreams of providing his mother and himself a new place to live in a furnished caravan with a view, "a place to start
all over again." The problem is that to finance his dream, he is forced, paradoxically, to get more and more deeply enmeshed
in the underworld that he's trying to escape. His cohort in crime is his best friend Pinball (William Ruane), a devil-may-care
hothead who is led, through jealously, to eventually compromise Liam in the most fundamental ways. Kicked out of Stan's house,
Liam is forced to move in with his sister Chantelle (Annmarie Fulton), a 17 year-old single parent who's estranged from their
mother, and they begin to dream of becoming a family again. The plot thickens, unresolvable dilemmas are created, dreams prove
illusory, and things end badly.
As always in a Loach film, however, what redeems the grim scenario recounted above is the abundant laughs that the director
always manages to find in his working-class heroes cleverly ripping off the system. Liam and Pinball, both 15, are a delight
as they brilliantly perpetrate one gutsy, outrageous scam after another, for example, when they invent a way to speed up their
heroin deliveries by enlisting the aid of their pizza-delivering buddies. Or just little hilarious things like air-conducting
an opera on the radio of a Mercedes they've just stolen, great little gags that pop up every few minutes. Incarnated convincingly
by first-time actors, these spunky figures remind us of the glories of the supremely natural Italian neo-realism in the late
1940s, yet also a whole lot funnier. Martin Compston, who's a natural, is particularly charismatic in the role of Liam and
has, I think, a fine career ahead of him.
A further mark of the film's authenticity is the ostentatiously impenetrable Greenock-Glaswegian dialect that these characters
speak. It goes without saying, of course, that every inch of the grimy locations is truthful to the point of pain.
The only real problem with the film, in addition to the sense of a pre-scripted moral mentioned earlier (which is easily
enough forgiven in the face of the film's inventiveness), is that Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty revert to some shameless
melodrama to wrap things up. It's not that it's badly done, or embarrassingly unconvincing. It's just that whereas the rest
of the film has seemed so open-ended, at least on the level of event (there's one particularly wonderful surprise regarding
a gangland killing), at the end genre elements take over and we suddenly know exactly where we're headed. While in many ways
a victim of his surroundings, Liam has been portrayed as a bold, natural leader willing to do whatever he needs to do to fulfill
his dream, and thus the reversion to the inevitability of Greek tragedy seems misguided. But this is a minor fault, ultimately,
in a movie that reflects so deeply, and so powerfully, on the savagery and innocence of youth.
Signs
Cast:
Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, Cherry Jones and Patricia Kalember
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Screenplay by: M. Night Shyamalan
Distributor: Touchstone Pictures
Some people think too much. M. Night Shyamalan is one of these. The bigger problem, however, is his mouth. After he made
The Sixth Sense in 1999, the enormously talented young filmmaker all but proclaimed himself the new Hitchcock. His next movie,
he said, would establish the Shyamalan "brand."
That film, Unbreakable, was disappointing, in large part because he worked too consciously to solidify a style. He based
his creative choices on what he wants his oeuvre to look like 50 years from now rather than the specific needs of the movie.
Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his son (Rory Culkin) search for clues to the crop-circle mystery in Signs. He does the same
thing in Signs, while taking his Alfred Hitchcock obsession to the extreme. The music that plays over the opening credits
is too clearly meant to evoke Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho, with the climax being an out-and-out homage to The Birds.
Visually, the credits call to mind black-and-white films from the 1940s and 1950s.
Shyamalan's name, as director, writer and producer, is writ large, as if he believes he already is - like Hitchcock -
the biggest drawing card for his films.
This all would be funny if the 32-year-old filmmaker didn't seem to be deadly serious. He really thinks people will go
to his movie because he made it, when they really will go - no matter how many magazine covers he's featured on - because
it stars Mel Gibson, and it looks scary.
Signs is scary, but it also is daft. With Unbreakable and now this, daftness has become as pronounced an element of the
Shyamalan style as his fascination with the supernatural and the afterlife.
Brian De Palma, another self-conscious stylist and Hitchcock fanatic, knows how to slow the pace at crucial moments to
heighten suspense. Shyamalan slows the entire movie and instructs his actors to speak in monotones. And he frames shots to
call attention to the artifice. Gibson's character, Graham Hess, has a strained conversation with a pharmacist at one point.
Shyamalan shoots one character, then the other, positioning them both in the centre of the frame looking directly at the camera.
It's as if the director is encouraging us to giggle, but at what? The dialogue isn't funny. Only his shooting style is.
At other times, it's less clear what reaction Shyamalan is trying for. Near the end, at what should be the most intense moments,
his characters don't react the way we expect. The audience's fear is undercut by thoughts such as: Why don't they run? Why
aren't they hiding in cupboards? Shouldn't someone be hysterical?
Perhaps Shyamalan is trying to distinguish Signs from other films to show that it isn't just another sci-fi horror movie,
but he also is distancing it from normal human behaviour. His missteps are sad, because The Sixth Sense was a perfect synthesis
of commercial moviemaking instincts and personal artistic concerns. He achieved that breakthrough through hard, conscious
effort. He said in 1999, after he'd made one small-budget "personal" movie that nobody saw (Praying With Anger)
and a small Hollywood movie (Wide Awake) that failed both artistically and commercially. Since then, Shyamalan has chosen
to use popular, mainstream genres - a ghost story, a superhero tale and now science fiction - to explore his deepest concerns
about family and spirituality. Signs is a heartfelt movie that deals more nakedly with his core concerns than any of his other
Hollywood films, and it doubtlessly will deeply touch many people as well as frighten them.
But profundity and daftness are an uneasy mix. Signs may well become a huge commercial triumph on the order of The Sixth
Sense, but it feels like a cult favorite.
Hess is a farmer and minister who lost his faith after the death of his wife. People still refer to him as "father,"
but his main concern now is raising his two young children. His childlike younger brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), has
moved in to help out.
The film starts on an unsettling note. Awakened by a sound in the night, Hess and Merrill go dashing through the high
corn. The children wander about, as if sleepwalking. When Hess reaches the girl she asks, "Are you in my dream, too?"
The boy motions to a giant pattern made in the field and - introducing the religious element that plays such a big part in
the movie - says, "I think God did it."
The children, played by Abigail Breslin and Rory Culkin, are as spooky as the extraterrestrials believed to have made
the patterns. Especially Breslin. She has an otherworldly stare, not unlike a young Christina Ricci, and she makes odd movements
in the air with her hand. She seems to be tuned to a higher frequency than everyone else is.
The way the characters react towards the end isn't the only thing that seems distractingly unrealistic. Until the climax,
Hess and his family are shown as part of a larger community. It's fitting that the film focusses on the family at the end,
but everyone else drops out of the story long before they need to. At several points, when it becomes obvious the Hesses are
dealing with something bigger than pranksters, anyone would reach out - however futilely - for help. Or skeedaddle!
Hess doesn't. He believes space invaders are roaming the countryside, using his cornfield for a parking lot, but he stays
put with his family, waiting for his faith to be tested.
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Road To Perdition
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tyler Hoechlin, Paul Newman, Jude Law, Daniel Craig, Stanley Tucci
Directed by: Sam Mendes
Written by: David Self
Distributed by: DreamWorks
Rating: 15
Road to Perdition is based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, and since the late 1970s,
graphic novel has been the phrase of choice for an adult demographic still infatuated with comic books. Graphic novels are
the proletariat of comics, so to speak, but theyre still comic books -- something that might cause film historians to stumble
a bit when it comes to Road To Perdition.
Directed by Sam Mendes, it's in the middle of a time when comic book-to-film transplants are in vogue, if only as noisy,
popcorn-bucket crowd-pleasers. Road to Perdition is anything but. Mendes, who left many in anticipation for a follow-up to
his excellent 1999 debut American Beauty, has topped himself here with a stylish, artsy, and enthralling manifestation of
the gangster picture.
The story, regardless of source material, is a good one, and its opening voice-over, I spent six weeks on the road with
Michael Sullivan in the winter of 1931, invokes the beginning of Stephen Kings serial novel The Green Mile. Both films coincidentally
star Tom Hanks, but their greater similarity is their seamless integration of the audience into their somewhat nostalgic vision
of Depression-era America.
Miles apart by geography - The Green Mile took place in the death row cellblock of a prison in the Deep South, while Road
to Perdition finds its setting in Capones Chicago - the two films feel as though they might really be just around the corner
from each other, so strong is the you are there quality of the narrative and its production design.
In this film, Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, although the movies point of view is that of his eldest son, also called
Michael (newcomer Tyler Hoechlin, remarkably chosen from among over 2,000 auditions). The elder Sullivan works as a hit man
of sorts for local mob head John Rooney (Paul Newman), strong-arming debtors and those who have fallen out of favour into
payment, silence, or worse. But his close relationship with Rooney, almost a father-son bond, has put him at odds with Rooneys
own grown son, Connor (Daniel Craig), and in a fit of rage, Connor kills Sullivans wife and younger son.
When Michael comes looking for revenge, he finds that the doors once open to him as a favourite son of the mob are now
closed, and in the meantime, Rooney has countered by hiring a mysterious and sadistic hit man of his own named Maguire (Jude
Law), with orders to dispose of Sullivan.
Part of the movies unflinching and remarkable period feel is its strong Irish heritage, from characters named Sullivan
and Rooney and Maguire to the inflections in Thomas Newmans haunting and commanding original score. (There are several noteworthy
sequences in which Newmans music takes centre stage over a montage of images.) The movie draws its characterization, too,
not from the script or the dialogue, but from this cultural atmosphere of men quick to temper and drink but strong in family
values, honesty, and loyalty. Those were, not surprisingly, resplendent themes in the great mob and gangster movies of the
past, like Martin Scorseses Goodfellas and Francis Ford Coppolas classic The Godfather Trilogy, and in many respects, Road
to Perdition gives those films a run for their money.
As with The Godfather, the bond between fathers and sons, and the kind of intra-mafia legacy that develops from it, is
most important. At the core of the film is Michael Sullivan and his son, played strongly on-screen by Hanks and Hoechlin.
Filmmakers can, of course, count on Hanks, but it is Hoechlins performance that substantiates the movies excellence - only
time will tell whether Hoechlin is simply gifted or Road to Perdition is a good example of a natural actor responding to a
top-notch director, but Hoechlin is the movies most valuable commodity. Without him or his performance it doesnt work.
Hanks, meanwhile, is always good, usually great, and occasionally incredible. He falls short of incredible here (having
carried Cast Away to box office success and an Oscar nomination, this must have been easy work for the actor, and you can
forgive him for coasting) but is most definitely great, turning in another fundamentally strong performance that Mendes can
use as his trump card. Hanks has been criticized in the past for playing roles whose politics too obviously fall into the
Oscar-bait category - for instance, an AIDS victim in Philadelphia, a national hero in Forrest Gump, or a World War II soldier
in Saving Private Ryan - so the low-key and not entirely charitable role of a mafia gun may be the tonic he needs to get his
harsher critics back on board. And the public, who have always made his movies a success, will be satisfied with the Tom Hanks
theyve come to know over the last decade. Even though this is a darker role for the veteran actor, it is not a sinister one;
beneath the dubiously likeable façade of a hit man lies the subtle, comic undertones that Hanks has always worked into his
screen style.
In the wings are screen legend Paul Newman and the constantly maturing Jude Law, both of whom have limited screen time
but make the most with what theyve got. Law, in particular, makes an impact with his unnerving performance as the maniacal
hit man Maguire, especially in his few scenes with Tom Hanks. (There is a scene halfway through the movie where the two men
sit across from each other in a diner, much like the meeting of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat, that, because of Laws
ease, seems entirely plausible within the movies sphere.) But never once does the movie elevate either of these characters
to the level of prominence that it gives to Michael Sullivan and his son.
More prominent than any of the characters, however, is the movies stunning visual design, thanks in large part to cinematographer
Conrad L. Hall, whose work with the camera is almost a tangible component of the movie. Hall (he also did the photography
for Mendes in American Beauty) conducts a stunning exercise in mise-en-scène here, a manipulation of light and shadow and
placement of set pieces and actors within the frame that simultaneously appears completely coordinated and completely coincidental.
The contrast between light and shadow is striking, and viewers will have the feeling that if the Coen brothers had shot The
Man Who Wasnt There in color, this is what it might have looked like. Thanks to the seamless editing of Jill Bilcock (whose
last feature, Moulin Rouge, was similarly fluid despite being an even greater editing nightmare), Halls great exercise comes
across as a visual masterwork.
Truthfully, Road to Perdition is a film that grows in retrospect, for the surprising straightforwardness of its narrative
is one that belies the great complexity and intricacy of the goings-on within. It is not, like so many of Tom Hankss movies
have been, a showcase for great performances, at least in the traditional sense; here, the actors are subordinate to the visual
content. But within that context the actors drive the film, playing terribly flawed men in a world whose coldness is almost
tangible in watching it. The title, on the surface, appears to be a reference to Miltons hell, as John Rooney tells Michael
Sullivan that the only guarantee in their line of work is that none of them will see heaven. But for the younger Sullivan,
the road to Perdition is something else - the road on which he spent six weeks with his father, traveling to the titles rural
lakeside community. It is a wonderful duplicity, and one that encapsulates the movies tendency to hide its greatness in the
shadows.
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