Friday new releases: 24 November 2023

Napoleon, Thanksgiving and Freelance are in cinemas and Rustin is on Netflix

Can a three-hour film be too short? Of course it can. Some films provide so much pleas­ure you wish they could go on forever.

But can a three-hour film also be unsat­is­fy­ing in more tra­di­tion­al ways? Some of the story is rushed or elided. There are ques­tions that don’t get answered. Character devel­op­ment feels under cooked.

You emerge blink­ing into the karaōke and spa­cies par­lour that is the mod­ern mul­ti­plex foy­er, feel­ing like there was some­thing miss­ing from what you just watched. That it raced to a con­clu­sion, rather than mov­ing delib­er­ately. That des­pite spend­ing so much time with an import­ant his­tor­ic­al char­ac­ter, you still don’t really know them. Would anoth­er hour have helped?

The spe­cif­ic film I am talk­ing about is Ridley Scott’s new bio­graphy of one of colossal fig­ures of European his­tory, star­ring Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine, the great love of his life.

As excep­tion­ally well made as you would expect from the octa­gen­eri­an Scott, Napoleon at any giv­en moment I was being enter­tained but still detached. The details of the vari­ous battles were absorb­ing but the European polit­ics of the time was mostly baff­ling and I felt that the present­a­tion of the ten­sions and pas­sions in Napoleon and Joséphine’s love life did not always recon­cile with the con­tent of the let­ters that the film relies so much on.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

My very clev­er wife spot­ted that not all of the score is Martin Phipps’ ori­gin­al work. Some of the heavy lift­ing in the romantic scenes between Napoleon and Joséphine is sup­por­ted by Dario Marianelli’s soundtrack to Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice. I can under­stand why dir­ect­ors go Classical when they need to. I can even under­stand why you might choose some Édith Piaf for the early sequence where Marie Antoinette gets what’s com­ing to her. But why go to a pre­vi­ous film, unless you are unhappy with Phipps’ work and don’t have time (or can’t be bothered) to swap out the temp score you’ve been using dur­ing the edit.

My Napoleon will forever be Ian Holm’s petty little gen­er­al in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits but Scott has piqued my curi­os­ity about this opaque (to me) fig­ure and, des­pite fail­ing to move me in any kind of emo­tion­al way I feel like I want to know more. Maybe the extra hour we are prom­ised once the film heads to stream­ing will sat­is­fy that curiosity.

Every week is hor­ror week in cinemas now and the best I have seen since com­ing back to this busi­ness is Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, mainly due to a killer concept and a smartly writ­ten, tightly wound script by Jeff Rendell.

Based on one of those gag trail­ers that formed the inter­mis­sion in Tarantino and Rodriguez’ Grindhouse back in 2007, it has clearly had plenty of time to fer­ment and the res­ult deliv­ers all of those vari­ations on the slash­er movie theme that we have come to know and love with a deli­ciously anti-consumerism (and anti-colonial) sub­text for good measure.

Set in the town of Plymouth, where the Pilgrims first estab­lished their pur­it­an colony in 1620 and where Thanksgiving first took root, the loc­al big box retail­er decides to milk the hol­i­day for a few extra dol­lars and the res­ult­ing Black Friday stam­pede sees the grue­some deaths of sev­er­al patrons.

One year later, a seri­al killer takes on the per­sona of the ori­gin­al found­ing fath­er John Carver – a per­fect name for a hor­ror movie vil­lain if ever there was one but also, you know, an actu­al his­tor­ic­al fig­ure – and from behind the mask takes elab­or­ate revenge on the cit­izens who, he thinks, con­trib­uted to the carnage.

The yucks are suit­ably grue­some and invent­ive, the plot is coher­ent and all of the act­ors com­mit just enough to keep it on the rails.

The Thanksgiving tur­key this year is the John Cena vehicle Freelance in which he plays an ex-special forces solider now unhappy small town law­yer, temp­ted into a per­son­al secur­ity job in the Latin American dic­tat­or­ship of Paldonia.

Former award-winning journ­al­ist Claire Wellington (Alison Brie) has scored an exclus­ive inter­view with the author­it­ari­an strong­man who runs the coun­try (Juan Pablo Rabas) but their arrival is the trig­ger for a coup attempt by South African mer­cen­ar­ies led by Wellington’s own Marton Csokas.

Attempting a kind of Romancing the Stone jungle adven­ture along with the kind of guns n’ ammo viol­ence that Cena is most com­fort­able with, it fails on almost every level.

I ima­gine the con­ver­sa­tion with the writers went some­thing like: “We’ve scored a Colombian film sub­sidy and access to a stu­dio. The bad news is we start shoot­ing in two weeks. What can you give us?”

The sad­dest thing about Freelance ( apart from dir­ect­or Pierre Morel’s fond­ness for objec­ti­fy­ing his female lead act­ors) is that I am quite fond of Cena on screen but we’ve now iden­ti­fied where his lim­it­a­tions lie.

Barack and Michelle Obama’s pro­duc­tion com­pany Higher Ground con­tin­ues to deliv­er worthy and uplift­ing pro­jects through their part­ner­ship with Netflix and Rustin is no exception.

Colman Domingo plays the hitherto little-known act­iv­ist Bayard Rustin who was behind the fam­ous 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in which over 200,000 people came from all over America to gath­er at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial and hear from, among oth­ers, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his now fam­ous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Rustin turns out to be a very inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. He was a Quaker when so many black people of the time were evan­gel­ic­al. He was an intel­lec­tu­al and former com­mun­ist, a paci­fist who was inspired by the non-violence teach­ings of Gandhi-ji. He was an accom­plished sing­er and musi­cian who appeared on Broadway with Paul Robeson and played the lute on an album of medi­ev­al folk songs.

He was also gay and out, with all of the polit­ic­al risks and rami­fic­a­tions that involved.

It’s a funny word to use to describe a film about a gay act­iv­ist but Rustin is straight – a straight up and down telling of the story with the help of a strong cast of famil­i­ar and unfa­mil­i­ar faces. CCH Pounder has too little to do as Anna Hedgeman, try­ing to get women’s voices up on that stage. Chris Rock is restrained as Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP at the time, scep­tic­al at first that a march of that scale could even be pulled off let alone have a pos­it­ive impact on civil rights.

Incidentally, Aml Amgen as King deliv­ers a part of that “Dream” speech, which I had thought was locked up by the rights hold­er, Mr. Steven Spielberg. Ava DuVernay’s Selma wasn’t able to use any of it but I sus­pect that the Obamas might be a bit more per­suas­ive than your aver­age Hollywood producer.

Further reading

The latest instal­ment in my quest to watch all of the 2022 Sight & Sound 50 greatest films of all time has reached #41 – Bicycle Thieves. Here’s my art­icle at RNZ.