Isabelle Huppert makes us thoroughly believe in Marie, a driven coffee farmer who refuses to recognise that it’s time to leave her unspecified African country, which has fallen into the hands of rebels and child soldiers. The French Army, her erstwhile protectors, are on their way out. A funky DJ on FM is playing right-on reggae and reading the runes, too stoned to know he’s actually on the losing side. Her ex-husband (nicely raddled or dubious in the hands of Christopher Lambert) is tired of hanging round and sells her out by cutting a deal with the knowing local mayor and his mini-army. As the film flashes to and fro through time (you have to watch the colour coding in Marie’s frocks), one realises that the terrifying rebels are going to lose, but the new powers-that-be may hardly be better for a white farmer. They bowl up to the farm and slaughter the child rebels who have occupied it but are sleeping off a massive drug overload. Oh, and her son has turned into a lunatic. In the last moments of the movie it seems that she has flipped. That leaves one sympathetic character, a rebel leader who seeks sanctuary in the farm and dies. One suspects he’s only makes a nice impression because he’s gorgeous and says very little.

This is all wonderfully executed, so to speak. But its message seems pretty anti-African. It seems pro-white and pro-capitalist and to that extent you’d have thought it might appeal to a right-winger such as me, even if as a corrective to the standard Noble Savage anti-colonialist norm of film-making.  

The film certainly seems to be saying that Africa drives all its inhabitants mad, white or black. For a lot of the time, there’s no-one to admire except Marie. After all, she’s the only productive person around. But, as a black African points out to her, she’s only determined not to lose what’s hers. Her position is not really stated, though, and certainly not by her. She isn’t in Blixen mode (remember Streep’s defence of “My Kikuyu”?). But Marie does strongly believe that when all else is said and done, she has earned her right to call Africa her home, and believes all the Africans who know her will willingly acknowledge the fact. I think the film is saying she hasn’t and they won’t.

If this is a true portrait of Africa, then I’m inclined to think the place is sunk. But I wonder in what sense Denis’s movie has captured more than a concatenation of all that’s dangerous about the Continent? I have too little sense of Francophone Africa to know whether there is any chance that this is a true picture of any plausible ex-colony. It had elements, to be sure, of bits of the Congo, but only the worst. It certainly is no sort of picture of Anglophone Africa, and plenty of bad stuff is happening there, to be sure.

Ah well. This is a compelling story and one can identify up to a point with an awful lot of the characters in it. But the movie itself is strikingly short of heart and – I would say – of meaning.

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I am always quite prone to inhabiting the characters I watch on the screen. It was most pronounced whilst watching Steve McQueen, especially in Bullitt. Dream on, etc. 

I have often day-dreamed about being Tony Blair’s ghost-writer (and general political guru, come to that). I can’t say I fancied myself as Ewan McGregor, however. He didn’t do the job of inhabiting the ghost badly, but there was something a little Norman Wisdom about his performance. I found it hard to be believe the rather severe and knowing Olivia Williams (in the Cherie Blair character) would put out for him. He didn’t quite convey the worldy-wise, world-weary soul who knew about the whole wide world but not – as it happens – politics. He was too much the larky innocent.

I decided in advance that I would accept Pierce Brosnan in the Tony Blair character. I know Brosnan is capable of self-deprecating wit, and I thought that a certain implaccable impeccable blandness might be quite suitable for the Blair figure, and well within Brosnan’s quite small range. Indeed, to be cruel about it, to capture the enigma of Blair, it was quite an advantage to be an actor who hasn’t a very plausibe interiority.

But what an extraordinary film this is. I spent a good deal of the time wondering what it would be like to be the real Blair, both in real life in general and if he were watching this film in particular. I can think of no other real-life person who has had to watch his imagined but entirely plausible assassination. 

There is of course the long-standing Blair conundrum that he is a real-life character who has been so much on display and yet contrived to remain so private. He is larger than life and yet also spectral. But he now has to contemplate a story in which his seeming emptiness and real actorliness is enacted and contemplated and leveraged into a thriller in which it is postulated that he is assassinated. This must have been one of the lurking anxieties of the real-life Blair. Of course, it is possible that Blair years ago learned how to put his public persona out there as a through-going substitute for his own self. It may be that his openness is a deliberate carapace. I have always thought that Tony Blair’s transparency was purposively opaque.

There is a further amusing and teasing twist. In the movie the Cherie Blair figure has, let us say, a more important role than Cherie is generally supposed to have had in real life. If I were her I would rather angry because the implication is that whilst Tony is of interest to everybody more or less whan accurately portrayed (as the world supposes) the woman’s role has – as usual, she may say – to be bent all out of shape to be fictionally attractive. And a winsome attractiveness remains, damn it, a large part of the cocktail.

I would add very tentatively that this is a thoroughly European (not really Anglo-saxon) film, but it has big dollops of Hitchcock in it.

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We open as a grand Recchi family dinner is being prepared in a Fascist-style, 30s villa of great Milanese severity. Instantly, the seriousness, the portentousness, of Milan – its northern-ness, its spiritual heritage, its being an honorary member of the Hanseatic league – was brushing with its being one of the fashion Valhallas. With some of  the Fendi family as muses if not more, the movie ought to have got much of this stuff right, but for all that I was enraptured I was not wholly convinced. It was striking how the servants were so formal, as though in a restaurant, except for the housekeeper whose familial role was beautifully etched throughout.

I half hope the top echelon of Milenese business society is of this sort, in its seriousness and elegance, and even its connectedness. The lesbian daughter was splendidly done: punky, wry in dissidence. It’s a pity that the movie’s main message was about the necessity to escape from bourgeois constraints as though these were nowadays of the sort more common to an Edith Wharton story.   

This was a foody movie, but in a family setting, so rather more Babbette’s Feast or Joy Luck Club than Bella Martha or Big Night. I say that: the big love story really gets going when the chatelaine falls for the chef in his father’s restaurant.

Things do get strikingly potty in the open air love-making scene, which made me think of Elvira Madigan, an effort which I haven’t seen for several decades but which remains the byword of pretentiousness. The loving couple’s behaviour thereafter seemed to swing into melodrama rather than anything more closely observed or accurate or ordinarily convincing.

Never mind my whingeing: the look of the thing, Swinton’s central performance, and many of the conceits were ravishing.

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One obvious problem with the movie is that it has patches of what I think was supposed to be comedy. These moments of skippiness undermined what little claim the effort had to capture what seems to have been the true awfulness of the Tolstoys’ later life together.

The greater difficulty is that the film treated nearly everyone as rather lightweight and even trivial. The tyro male secretary is sweet but naive and ineffectual. Tolstoy is a dithery old duffer.

The ur-Tolstoyan Chertkov is portrayed as a mincing, grasping, manipulative acolyte who succeeds in getting Tolstoy to sign over his copyrights in the new will which is the pivotal concern of the story. The movie floats two possibilities, I think. One is that Chertkov is seeking his private interest in this deal, and the other is that he is more obviously an idealist, who is seeking to put Tolstoy’s writing in the public domain, free of commercial taint (though maybe with fresh power for Chertkov as a sort of literary executor). Neither of these options is hugely attractive, granted that we have grown at least vestigially fond of Sofia and concerned for her well-being.

A little research reveals that Chertkov was actually quite a considerable publisher in his own right. So he wasn’t the almost comic moralising chancer the film shows us. Further reading suggests that Chertkov actually persuaded Tolstoy to assign his copyrights to first one daughter of the marriage and then, later, another. These women were perhaps idealist Tolstoyans, and close to Chetkov, but – contrary to the film’s thesis – Chertkov emerges as less nakedly selfish or aridly ideological in his actions than we are supposed to believe him to be.

The more one reads about Countess Tolstoy (say in Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Tolstoys) the more one feels that she was a serious figure driven to the brink of craziness by her bizarre situation, married to a man of whom the best that can be said is that he was made cruel by principle. The movie doesn’t take us there. I don’t know where the fault lies (in Helen Mirren’s portrayal or in the production’s assumptions or bits of both), but we have a portrayal of Sofia in which she is a bit too silly to be fully engaging. I can’t quite decide whether I think the film’s Tolstoy is rich enough, but I feel pretty sure its Sofia is far too shallow.

Perhaps Alexandra Popoff’s forthcoming biography of the countess will put us straight.

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EOD people work to save lives by outwitting the best efforts of bomb-makers to make tamper-proof devices. By chance I’ve met a few of these people and came to the conclusion that it is very hard indeed to know what makes them tick (so to speak). I am pretty sure that Staff Sergeant James, our hero, is beyond atypical.

I suppose it is just possible that an eccentric EOD person might, on his first day in-theatre, strut off down a street toward a job, putting himself and – what is worse, his team - at hugely unnecessary danger. Rightly, his number two, Sergeant Sanborn, smacked him for that. James’s behaviour is all the more incomprehensible granted that he is a father.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that James, shortly afterward, would take off alone into the back streets of Baghdad in pursuit of the people who’d murdered a young boy he’d become fond of. Or was he trying to find the family of the boy?

And would he really for reasons of vanity have put his whole team at extreme risk whilst he defuses a car bomb which could just as easily have been blown-up conventionally?

But the last and greatest oddity came when James heads off into the unlit backstreets, with his unwilling little team, to seek out some bombers. This was plain madness and if he’d insisted on doing it, I imagine that his team would have waved him off and good riddance.

I don’t know how unlikely it is that James and Sanborn and one other soldier would be wandering around in the desert in their Humvee, unescorted, and come across a raiding party of Brit privateers replete with human bounty and a flat tyre. The Brits sneer at the Yanks, because that’s what uppity Brits do in Hollywood movies, and a gun battle unfolds in which the Brits get their come-uppance.

In another necessary Hollywood trope, Sanborn – black, lovely, steady, funny, redemptive - gets to be the sniper hero with James as his spotter. It is a great scene, beautifully done.

This is a wonderful film and it has a stillness at its heart which is surprising granted the ferocity of much it depicts.

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Depending on my mood, I find the assumption of male homosexual superiority – especially in anything to do with looks, behaviour and general all round human understanding – appealing, risible and rather loathsome.

I expected the film to be an homage to queer loveliness, and indeed to represent a sort of gay triumphalism. It did.

The revelation, however, is that beyond the soft gay porn (with its weird debt to Leni Riefenstahl via Armani) this movie was rich in feeling and observation.

I haven’t read original Isherwood novel. Still, I went along to it with a vague feeling that Colin Firth didn’t have the range to get us through this introspective adventure. I knew, of course, that Julianne Moore would hold her end up pretty well, and she did. But Firth was a revelation. He was the sort of hero I think of as Nabokovian. Sensitive, selfish, picky, yearning. Delighted by the innocent sinfulness of America, where depravity is a condition. 

Firth slyly blossomed. His grief wasn’t laboured. His being studious was lightly borne. And above all he was completely convincing as an unhappy man who was cracked open by the niceness and beauty of a new companion.

There was much understated ribaldry amongst the army of middle-aged women who had turned out to the screening. They were tickled to have become fag-hags for the afternoon.

I write this just before the Oscars, and hope Firth wins his class. On his BAFTA form, there ought to be a great little speech from him.

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I fear that political correctness and certain narrowness of view rather did for this movie. I never saw Ian Dury live, but I listen to his songs a good deal. They are fine pieces of English comic verse, sung clearly to excellent rock music. So how come this movie never really got to grips with There ain’t arf been some clever bastards? Point is: this lyric was Dury’s paeon to mainstream and old-style, upmarket smartness, and he was full of it himself.

Maybe the movie’s problem was that it never quite located Dury in the social and artistic scales. It could not quite face his being lower middle or middle class, in an art school era when social mobility was even more pronounced than it has been for many decades and even centuries. If Dury chose cockney or mockney as his idiom, that’s fine but it was a choice and it verged on self-parody.

You will say that the movie showed his wife, girlfriend and children in that fuller light, nicely spoken as they all were. And even Dury tells his son that the family wasn’t posh but more, “arts and crafts”. As in: bohemian, or even William Morris quaint. He praised education and all that. This was accurate, I guess. And yet, Dury’s self-consciousness and theatricality, his persona, his posing, weren’t quite there.

I think the difficulty is that the movie thought he had to be the disabled victim, of institutions and even class attitudes. The Spastics Society is given a hard time for not having the imagination to see that Spasticus, Autisticus was not suitable for their mainstream purposes. But the society did him the favour of triggering one of his best songs and he might have done them the favour of understanding that they were bound be less outrageous than he. Crank time on a bit, and his song is of course much less shocking.

Ditto: Dury’s pleasure in the suicide of one of his earlier carers. Maybe he was deeply angry with the man, and maybe he had a right to be. We had plenbty of the wounded Dury. But I agreed with his girlfriend in being thoroughly fed up with Dury and this example of what I took to be his self-indulgence. 

However, my main irritation is not with Dury, but with the rather bog-standard reading of British social life which underpinned the movie and which led to him becoming rather monochromatic.

(These are, by the way, the failures which marred Control, about Ian Curtis and Joy Division).

And another thing. Ian Dury’s song-writing was sharp, and his singing was clearly articulated to focus on the words. Yet the movie’s sound balance and the approach to the songs didn’t give us that. Here again, it was too rock ‘n’ roll rather than properly theatrical or wordy or actorly.

I think some of what I’m aiming to say here has been captured by the interviews I’ve read with Ian Dury’s son, Baxter.

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Men have all kinds of ways of imprisoning women, or at least they used to before feminism and other forces sliced away lots of the old relations between the sexes.

Revolutionary Road revisits an old riff. This is that a post-WW2 generation of women were shoved back into suburbia and domesticity after their brief excursion into freedom and even bohemianism before and during the war. So far so consistent with the experience of several middle-aged women I knew well in the 1970s. I say – because it is conventional – that they were shoved into this condition by their menfolk returing from war and seeking to pick up work and patriarchal roles. This is consistent also with a riff that says that post-war men wanted their children to be seen and not heard (as was explored in a rather thin way by Kirsty Young in her recent TV shows on changing family life). Actually, I think the trap was more systemic than that. Couples wanted affluence and a stable family life and men and women alike fell into a way of life which did drive quite lot of women nuts. Many of those that weren’t nuts were narrowed.

I have known other ways in which women were repressed, or rather struck deals with their husbands in which they agreed to make nice in exchange for security. This is to say that some post-War women agreed to be one-man girls, and to put away flirtatiousness, in exchange for the dogged loyalty of their weak husbands. Such women were locked in a golden cage of their own making.

Revolutionary Road posits a different sort of female frustration, and whilst it was quite interesting it never quite rang true. It happens that I have never met or heard of a woman who suffered this condition, namely that though she had children and security she wanted her husband to overcome his own weakness, and live on her work in order that he should blossom in some unspecified and presumably more or less bohemian way. I have known women who wished their husbands would stop fantasising on some mythic ambition or other and instead focus on her and the kids. But I haven’t known a Revolutionary Road twist on that tale.

I may be being unfair. You could argue that April Wheeler (Winslett) was a person who transferred her dreams of being exceptional onto her talented husband Frank (di Caprio) and that he did indeed let us know that he wasn’t all that thrilled with corporate life. So April’s frustration wasn’t only that she was trapped in domesticity but also that her husband didn’t care either that she was or that he was. I accept that this is an interesting twist.

All the same, we have what I think is just as big a problem. This is that the film could not be bothered to explore the idea that the couple’s suburban life was not awful and that beibg exceptional does not have to consist in being bohemian or 60s-ish.

The reason why a modern author and film-maker might like the Revolutionary Road hypothesis is surely that it involves a man who sells himself out to the corporation and only his insightful wife (being a superior being, naturally) truly feels the pain of this betrayal. (Twist: yes, it’s true, American Beauty had the man as suffering and insightful and the women as bitches, so that’s a decent counter-intuitive Mendes approach.)

One of the things which is missing here is that against the 9-to-5 cliches which Revolutionary Road plays to, there was the glimmer of real hope that our sell-out counter-hero is on the brink of a genuinely exciting development in his career.  But neither man nor wife are allowed to spot or enjoy this development in his life, which is portrayed as just another gawdy enticement by the devilish forces of Mammon.

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Remember all those 1950s movies in which slick modern capitalism and slick cosmopolitan lives are both sexy and soul-destroying? They usually starred (inter alia)  Tony Randall, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson. They involved multiple twists of allegiance since the audience was supposed to thrill to the sophistication, and deplore it as a disgrace. The wickedness on show was posited as thoroughly American and also un-American. It was partly a matter of the city versus the country, but also the virtues of the market versus the virtue of the prairie.

Up In the Aircovers this territory, but with a severe risk that it is a bit of tract. First, the Clooney character, Ryan Bingham, is a corporate downsizer (a shark, so a creature of the market) and at times his hapless victims are given all too much chance to come off as though this were a Michael Moore movie. Secondly, Clooney’s footloose lifestyle is all too obviously soul-destroying. Until that is, he is disastrously opened-up by his burgeoning attachment to a fellow road-warrior. (Alex, manfully played by Vera Farmiga, who was compelling in The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas, 2008.) In short, in the early passages of the film, one worries that the event is not going to be hard-hearted enough to be consistently funny. It never quite is. Indeed, at first it took all Clooney’s charm to make one take any interest in Ryan.

One feared that this would not be a worthy successor to Thank You For Smoking or Charlie Wilson’s War. But the piece did get some beef, if it was served patchily and with a little reserve. The twist comes when we find Natalie, a tinny-voiced young business girlie, sweeping into Clooney’s downsizing outfit and take it into the internet age. This character was a delight to a middle-aged audience. She was just as we oldies like to think the young to be: thin-skinned, PC, brutal, gullible. The idea that downsizing would be better done by remote control allows Ryan to seem almost noble in his insistence that redundant employees have a sort of right to be bounced face-to-face in acts of honest cruelty.

Actually, I think the younger woman gets dealt a bad hand by the film: it caricatures her. Indeed, one might also argue that Alex gets let off rather lightly. Is there any more universally admired figure nowadays than the older woman trying to have it all? 

If we switch genres, we see that this is a cowboy film. Clooney is the roving loner, reaching retirement or redundancy as technology (the web standing in for barbed wire) threatens his honest tough way of life. In important but odd passages, we se Ryan as a public speaker whose pitch is a sort of Nabakovian existential post-materialism. He lives in hotels and out of a rolling suitcase because it has a minimalist appeal to do so. His holy grail is to be a top-earner of airmiles, but he has no consception of the leisure journeys he might make with them. This is the restlessness of the cattle drover.  He is seduced into dallying and becoming sedentary by a good tough broad or a prairie Madonna (Alex doing duty for the town whore in the bustier and his sister standing in for the virtuous teacher in gingham), but circumstances condemn him to get back in the saddle.

I say this film isn’t tough enough. But there were one or two wonderful sustained passages (especially when Clooney and his two women are in play). There were plenty of sharp laughs and one stand-out joke when Clooney says stereotyping (a little like profiling) was good enough for his mother (ancient wisdom) and is good enough for him. “It’s quicker”, he says, non-judgementally. That’s true of course and he reminds us that stereotyping does not necessarily condemn (or celebrate) every member of the class being described: it stands or falls by working efficiently as a description of the average of the class.

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My Life Without Me
Nine Queens
Le Gout Des Autres
Walk the Line
Ray
Confidence
Waltzes With Bashir
Summer Things
Shaun of the Dead
5 x 2
Volver
Rachel Getting Married
Pan’s Labyrinth
All About My Mother
The Wrestler
Gomorrah (in my all-time Top Ten)
Finding Nemo
Sous Les Bombes
The Barbarian Invasion
Sideways
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
The Piano Teacher
Bourne Ultimatum
Slumdog Millionaire
In the Mood For Love
Talk To Her
Michael Clayton
Three Kings
Monsoon Wedding
Gosford Park
Juno
Junebug
The Queen
Etre et avoir
Secretary
Thank You For Smoking
Internal Affairs (Hong Kong)
The Departed (see above)
Flying Daggers
American Ganster
The Pledge
Into the Wild
Gosford Park
36 quai des Orfevres

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