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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 21 February 2022

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”  The line is from Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott but it could also be used to describe the plot of Cyrano, a movie based on a stage musical based on the play.  The original source material is Cyrano de Bergerac, a romantic tale set in the 17^th century authored by French dramatist Edmond Rostand and first performed in Paris in 1897.  The work has been adapted many times of the screen including Roxanne, released in 1987 and starring Steve Martin, and a 1990 French version which earned 5 Academy Award nominations including a nod for the iconic Gérard Depardieu.

Those familiar with previous iterations will know it’s centred on an intelligent man with an unusually large nose, Cyrano, who doesn’t believe he’s attractive enough to land the woman of his dreams, Roxanne.  The pair have been friends for many years with Cyrano never revealing his true feelings.  Then along comes Christian, a young, good-looking military man who captures Roxanne’s eye.  Christian asks for Cyrano’s help in wooing Roxanne and, when one lie leads to another, we end up with a love triangle that becomes increasingly complex with each passing day.

Writer Erica Schmidt was commissioned to transform Rostand’s play into a musical and it was first performed in Chester, Connecticut in 2018.  The biggest change in her adaptation is that she’s ditched Cyrano’s ridiculously large nose and made his perceived weakness less obvious.  The Cyrano we see is of short stature and it’s why he’s so insecure about his appearance.  This change also allowed Schmidt to cast her husband, Emmy-winning actor Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), in the lead role (call it nepotism if you want but Dinklage is still terrific).

Director Joe Wright (Atonement) saw the stage musical and reached out to Schmidt with hopes of bringing it to the big screen.  This is the end result and, as we’ve seen with other recent Hollywood musicals, it tries to preserve the intimacy of the story while making things a little grander in terms of sets and costumes.  Dinklage and Hayley Bennett (The Magnificent Seven) reprise their roles from the stage and have been joined by Kelvin Harrison Jr (Waves) and Australian Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom) in the key supporting roles.

It’s an old-fashioned story which has been beautifully told.  Like something out of a Shakespearean comedy, the characters humorously skirt around the bleeding obvious without harnessing the courage to express their inner thoughts.  It’s something many will relate to – a classic fable of unrequited love.  You can sense Cyrano’s love for Roxanne (“even her imperfections are perfect”) but understand his timidness when comparing himself to the handsome Christian.  His secret love letters also remind us how the pen can be mightier than the sword.

The songs, sung live on set as opposed to in a sound stage, have been cleverly constructed by Aaron and Bryce Dessner (music), and Matt Berninger and Carin Besser (lyrics).  They don’t fall into the trap of being over-written and instead, keep things simple and offer insight into these characters and their deepest feelings.  They may not be as memorable as a West Side Story but they suit the film’s tone.

Musicals have found it tough going at the box-office over the past year and, while Cyrano may meet the same fate, it’s still worth your time and attention.

You can read my interview with star Kelvin Harrison Jr by clicking here.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 10 February 2022

It was released more than 20 years ago but Notting Hill remains one of my all-time favourite romantic comedies.  A world-famous American film star played by Julia Roberts fell in love with a nerdish British bookstore owner played by Hugh Grant.  Yes, it was formulaic and yes, it was a fanciful storyline… but the actions of the characters and the dialogue between them still felt believable. There were also humorous, memorable set pieces such as the sequence where she attends his sister’s birthday party and is introduced to friends and family.

Marry Me takes the same idea and tells it today’s social-media-loving world.  One of the world’s biggest music stars, Kat Valdez (Lopez), enters into a relationship with a softly spoken school math teacher, Charlie Gilbert (Wilson).  How they meet is borderline farcical.  Kat was set to marry a famous musician but after learning of his infidelity just minutes before the wedding (he’d hooked up with her assistant), she randomly/impulsively picks Charlie from the crowd at the concert-turned-wedding and away they go (part of a clumsy theme about being impuslive).

While Notting Hill made it look so effortless, Marry Me is mishmash of scenes that lack credibility and coherency.  I don’t mind the pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson.  The best scenes in the film are during the middle act when they finally start talking like normal people about normal things – such as their past relationships and the troubles Charlie has connecting with his tween daughter (Coleman).  These moments are fleeting though.  Everything else is so over-the-top and contrived with an emphasis on the plot points used to create tension between the pair.

The film’s biggest issue is the characterisation of Kat.  It’s clearly trying to paint her as some feel-sorry-for-me victim who, despite singing about it non-stop for her whole career, is only now discovering what love is all about.  It’s hard to feel that much sympathy for someone who lives in a luxurious New York apartment and whose major grievances are being overlooked for a Grammy nomination and being joked about on late night talk shows.  She may have convinced “hard hitting” journalists at a press conference (another unrealistic scene) but I couldn’t buy into it.

Further, it’s not like she’s being led astray by villainous assistants and executives.  They’re all portrayed as likeable, reasonable people.  Kat created her own empire, complete with adoring fans and 80 million Instagram followers, but because of this weird midlife crisis, she now isn’t sure she wants to sit on the throne.

Attempts to create humour fall flat.  There’s a brief interlude where, on Charlie’s suggestion, Kat tries to “fend for herself” for a brief period and not rely on her small army of support staff.  So how does it pan out?  She goes to her multi-million-dollar waterfront holiday home and doesn’t have the keys for the front door.  Oh no!  When she tries to make a fruit juice in the kitchen, it ends in a large mess after she forgets to put the lid on the blender.  Really?  That’s the best joke the writers could come up with?  Don’t get me started on the rushed finale (did stuff get left on the cutting room floor?) and the poorly conceived school math team competition.

With a release coinciding with Valentine’s Day, Marry Me may entertain rom-com loving audiences (‘tis the season) but for everyone else, it’s another forgettable, formulaic entrant in a tired genre.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 13 February 2022

Flee is the first film to be nominated at the Academy Awards for best animated feature and best documentary feature.  If that strange combination hasn’t tweaked your curiosity, the fact it’s also nominated for best international feature should put it on the radar for any discerning filmgoer looking for a slice of quality, original cinema.  My opinion is equally rapturous.  It’s one of the best releases of the past year.

Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen first met the film’s subject, Amin Nawabi (not his real name), when they were teenagers living in Denmark.  They’ve been friends for 25 years but it’s only now that Amin has had the confidence to cathartically open up and speak of his traumatic upbringing.  Using the medium of animation allows Rasmussen to keep Amin’s identity hidden while also illustrating key events from his past in rich, articulate detail.

Amin was born in the 1970s and grew up with his two parents and three other siblings in Afghanistan.  His father disappeared in 1979 after being arrested by the communist government and then when war broke out in the early 1990s, he and the rest of the family fled to Russia as refugees.  It was tough going.  They had next-to-no money and they lived in constant fear of being “discovered” and sent back home to Afghanistan to face persecution.

Today, Amin is a successful academic but the film skilfully articulates the impact of events 30 years ago and how they still shape his life today.  Even with the people closest to him, Amin keeps this story hidden – worried that someone will use it against him one day.  Keeping such secrets for so long, coupled with the fact he’s been a closeted gay man, has had a huge impact on his personality and his relationships.  You can’t help but wonder what he’d be like now if not for the trauma in his life.

I love Rasmussen’s use of animation.  The current day interviews still look and feel like a documentary.  We see two men sitting in front a camera with one asking questions of the other. The lens occasionally loses focus too!  There are also moments where “off the record” conversations have seemingly been captured via a camera kept at a distance.  Different styles of animation are adopted for the film’s flashback scenes.  This is best articulated by sequences involving people traffickers where the simplest, barest of sketches is used.

Flee is an incredibly moving film that highlights the emotional scars forever carried by refugees.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 08 February 2022

Drive My Car has been slowly building its support base since it premiered last July in competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.  The jury, headed by Spike Lee, gave it the award for best screenplay.  In the months that followed, it won the top prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and was named best movie of the year by critics’ associations in Los Angeles, New York and Boston.  It’s now a short-priced favourite to win the Oscar for best international feature in late March.

I love the irony that a movie which such a simple, innocuous title could offer up such complexity.  It’s a Japanese drama about an acclaimed theatre actor, Oto (Gorô), staging an unorthodox production of Anton Chekhov’s acclaimed play, Uncle Vanya.  Across the film’s epic three-hour run-time, he interacts with a curious assortment of people including his wife, fellow actors, and a person employed to be his driver.  Oto cannot drive himself due to having a damaged optic nerve in one eye.

There’s some strange, head-scratching stuff in this.  You couldn’t accuse of it having stale, cliched characters.  You’re unlikely to forget the unusual “creative process” employed by Oto and his wife when coming up with new ideas.  Equally memorable is a young, attractive male actor who becomes part of Oto’s latest production but carries both secrets and baggage.

So what’s the point of it all?  If the finale is anything to go by, Drive My Car may be a tale of grief above all else.  Oto is like a character is one of his stage shows – a tortured artist who has made mistakes and is stuck in an endless search for redemption.  His work serves as both a help and a hindrance.  He cathartically opens up to those around him (that’s good) but his mental scars limit the flexibility and creativity he brings to the rehearsal room (that’s bad).

Drive My Car is adapted from a 2014 short story authored by Haruki Murakami.  That itself wasn’t enough material for a full-length feature film and so writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi pulled from other Murakami works to create a more substantial drama.  Audiences with knowledge of Chekhov’s work will also pick up on the intermingling of themes between the characters in Drive My Car and the characters they play on stage in Uncle Vanya.

Parts feel unnecessarily long and drawn out (I wished there was a fast-forward button) but there’s much to digest and much to like here.  An interesting offering.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 13 February 2022

55-year-old writer-director Mike Mills has always had a love for artists who were honest, open and revealing, and it’s a major reason why he’s drawn heavily from personal experiences in crafting his last three movies.  Beginners, which won Christopher Plummer a long overdue Academy Award, was inspired by his father who came out as gay at the age of 75.  His follow up, the brilliant 20^th Century Women, featured a lead character based on his late mother (star Annette Bening wore her actual jewellery).

Mills became a father himself in early 2012 and C’mon C’mon was born from his learnings as a dad and the “powerful intimacy” that develops between a parent and their child.  The central protagonist here is Johnny (Phoenix), a radio journalist working on a major project where he interviews tweens across the United States and asks them about their thoughts on the world and where it’s heading.  This too is drawn from Mills’ life since he completed a similar project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013 and was surprised by the “dark” answers provided by some of the interviewees.

The unmarried Johnny spends a lot of time speaking to children but has none of his own.  It’s not something that bothers him.  He seems content living alone in his New York City apartment and pouring time and energy into his work.  That changes when Johnny gets a call from his not-so-close sister (Hoffmann) asking if he can look after her 8-year-old son, Jesse (Norman), for a few days in Los Angeles while she deals with issues relating to her separated husband (McNairy).

The bulk of the film is spent watching the pair interact.  Jesse is sharp and inquisitive but also a little weird and rebellious.  He’s at that loss-of-innocence age where he’s starting to understand his own emotions and the impact he can have on others.  Johnny finds the “babysitting” experiment to be both rewarding and exhausting.  It’s the first time in his life he’s been responsible for a child’s wellbeing and he soon relishes the chance to shape his nephew’s future by passing on his own wisdom and values.  Sometimes it's as simple as treating Jesse to great local pizza.  Sometimes it’s as complex as answering Jesse’s probing questions about his knotty relationship with his sister.

The performances are all outstanding.  British (you wouldn’t know it from his accent) newcomer Woody Norman was just 10 years of age when the film was shot in late 2019 and is a revelation.  The banter between he and Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) is so natural and effortless that it’ll make you wonder if it was all improvised (it wasn’t).  Gaby Hoffmann (Now and Then) is also terrific as the anxious mother.  The frank back-and-forth between Hoffmann and Phoenix where they open up about parenting is both humorous and insightful.

Shot in black-and-white to help give the film an “iconic, fable-like quality”, the memorably titled C’mon C’mon is another high point in the career of Mike Mills.  The way he can make audiences care so deeply about characters in the space of two hours is a skill many other filmmakers struggle to master.