idgreenwood Reviews

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

The Elephant's Kick

[9/10 · 24 August 2004]

From a UK perspective, Moore's tabloid, scattergun approach is not perhaps how we'd go about the business of exposing George Bush. Many have criticised this film as a mess, with some justification. At one moment, he lacks all subtlety and it is as if he has handed a sequence over to one of his teenage fans (the "coalition" sequence, with its monkeys and spliffs); at another he is very subtle (Ms Lipscomb, in her pain at the loss of her son, uttering the very same words as a similarly bereaved Iraqi mother - except that you wonder if Moore actually noticed that, and if he had, would he not have picked up on it and brandished it in our faces as he does other connections?)

The effect is dreadfully uneven. Why, you want to ask, did Moore not examine the unwillingness of any senator to endorse the complaints raised about the Florida election in that otherwise excellent sequence near the beginning of the film? Why did he not anticipate the obvious counter-polemic from his opponents and refer even once to the fact that Saddam's regime was, actually, pretty horrendous?

It was obvious from the start that legal restrictions, starting at a trivial level, would dictate much of what we saw ("that Taxi Driver guy" indeed! Affleck's people give name-check permission: Pacino's obviously do not!). One wonders how much of rather greater significance had to be pulled. Not, presumably, the brand of T-shirt proudly worn by the Oregon lawman (does Moore really need product placement?). Nor the Mickey Mouse logo tellingly worn by another character, surely being lampooned. Or not. Hard to tell.

I am glad this film was made and released. John Berger, in today's paper, believes that, uniquely for a work of art, it may ensure George W fails to get re-elected. But America is such a strange and frightening country that the opposite may equally well be true.

To Be and to Have (2002)

Too Many Questions Left Unanswered

[1 August 2003]

&Ecirctre et Avoir has been well received in the UK, but it leaves too many questions unanswered to be fully satisfactory. In his quest to produce a charming film, director Philibert risks sentimentalism - a Gervase Phinn-like patina of nostalgia which no practising teacher will swallow. Some questions:

It is hinted that M.Lopez will lose both job and home in the near future. Who decided that: he or his Education Department? And who controlled M.Lopez and his school - decided what methods and resources he would use? Why were we shown so few of these: French teaching in France must amount to more than repeated dict&eacutees?

Was this a special school? All the pupils the film highlighted seemed to have moderate to severe educational problems: were there no bright, intelligent children in that village?

Philibert seems to have left out far too much, and settled for (occasionally repeated) scenes of slow, gentle (and not especially inspiring) pedagogy. Yet there was a startling moment where M.Lopez, advocate of peaceful solutions to pupil quarrels, suggested to his leavers that they "get stuck in" if they are challenged at secondary school!

So what was the point? Little children say and do sweet things? Some teachers are amazingly dedicated and patient? Places like this still exist in the backwaters of France? That third question begins to show up the weakness of the film: it settles for sentiment and shies away from a point of view. Low marks, M.Philibert - I'd say around quatre, virgule, sur dix.

Via Dolorosa (2000)

An honest attempt to turn bewilderment into art

[16 June 2002]

In 1999 English playwright David Hare undertook a short visit to Israel and the occupied territories in search of... what? Material for a play? A better understanding of a major contemporary issue? A feeling that Hampstead, London, is not perhaps quite at the hub of the modern world? What resulted was not a play, but a stage monologue, and Hare, not a trained actor, chose to perform it himself, met with some success, took the production to America, where Via Dolorosa, as he called it, was filmed in performance at the Booth Theater.

Via Dolorosa, the pathway of sorrows, is a plain man's journey through the complexities and impossibilities at the heart of the Israel/Palestine problem. Hare is by turns puzzled, amused, infuriated and deeply moved by the opinions, some deeply held, others casually prejudiced, which he meets. He brings to life for us the various people encountered on the way: his translator, a British Council worker, an august Palestinian politician, a desperate Israeli lawyer, all of them opening his eyes, up to a point, to the tragic situation in the Middle East. Yet he returns to Hampstead a sadder man, certainly with no ideas for a play, with no solutions to the problem, but perhaps with a little wisdom to share with us.

As cinema, Via Dolorosa probably works better than some other efforts to preserve stage performances on film. It is simply photographed, with no more than brief bracket-scenes shot outside the Booth Theater. As a playwright, Hare knows all about pacing and varying his story; just occasionally you wonder how better an accomplished actor might have handled the material. But since it is such a personal tale, and since Hare seems to have no political axe to grind, it is easy to lose yourself in the spellbinding narrative and forgive the odd arm-flap or vocal swoop.

Strong partisans of either persuasion may find Hare's even-handedness hard to take. Those of us of his generation who share his bewilderment are grateful for his honest attempt to turn sadness into art.

If.... (1968)

The film of my life...

[10/10 · 6 February 2001]

The majority of those who saw If.... must have wondered into what strange world they had arrived - a world where chaplains were produced from drawers, where people were mercilessly machine-gunned yet survived, where tigerish fights were enacted naked in transport cafes. Odd places, English public schools [US=private schools], they must have concluded. And yet... my first reaction, on seeing this extraordinary film in 1968, three years after emerging from just such a school myself, was how accurately, to the last detail, Lindsay Anderson had hit off the atmosphere, the ethos, and especially the sounds of these places. Indeed I swore that he somehow must have had access to my own school, though clearly filming it eighty miles away in Cheltenham. Only later did I meet other ex-public schoolboys, each of whom swore it was based on theirs!

If.... is a film of massive authority; a perceptive, funny, infinitely sad exposition of how a repressive regime can reduce its most promising subjects to a state of wretched nihilism in which even the ultimate doomed gesture is no more real than any of the others. My friends from the state schools could barely distinguish the surreal from the all-too-true in this film. I idolised Michael Travis and, like Wallace, Knightly, Bobby Phillips and the girl, would have followed him anywhere.