A Different Man, Venom: The Last Dance and Lee are in cinemas and Brothers is streaming on Prime Video
A day later than usual thanks to the Labour Day public holiday in Wellington, here is a quick rundown of what has appeared in the last week or so. I ran out of time to watch Kneecap but will try and squeeze it in next week.
I’m still puzzled about why I haven’t reacted more positively to A Different Man, A24’s latest arthouse darling. It features strong work from everyone involved, and is a star-making vehicle for the charismatic Adam Pearson, but I felt like the more I thought about it, the less I found there.
Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a New Yorker with rapidly growing tumours on his face caused by neurofibromatosis. He is also a struggling actor and his opportunities are limited to portrayals of his disfigurement or disability. Even a heartfelt audition for Cyrano de Bergerac can’t move a weary casting director.
Ingrid, a young and pretty European playwright (played by Renate Reinsve), moves in to the next door apartment and – like so many young men – Edward mistakes friendliness for flirtation. At the same time, he is offered a place in a testing programme for an experimental new drug, one which has the potential to heal his affliction and ‘repair’ his face.
The treatment is painfully successful – sensitive audiences may choose to look away during these sequences – and he emerges as a handsome young man. Instead of choosing to tell the truth about his transformation, he freaks out and chooses to take on a new identity and consign the old Edward to a story of self-destruction.
Lost without the face that defined him, “Guy” stumbles into an audition for Ingrid’s new play which just happens to be based on his old life and their friendship. With the help of a mask of his old face (a souvenir) he persuades Ingrid to cast him as “Edward” but his instability and his anger at being exploited – even though he ended that life himself – cause tensions. Those tensions are exacerbated by the arrival of Oswald (Adam Pearson), a gregarious and loveable Englishman with the same condition.
A Different Man reminded me of another “high concept” A24 production, Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage. That film – with a similar aesthetic – also had a strong premise that didn’t really know what to do with itself in the final third, losing its way. As the plot gets more ridiculous, the central thesis – that our character is our character, it isn’t the result of how we look or the misfortunes that befall us – seems even more banal. Like, what do you really want me to take away from all this?
On the bus to Queensgate on Saturday afternoon to watch Venom: The Last Dance, I saw a guy with a large “Venom” logo tattooed on his forearm. “I know where you’re going,” I thought, but I was wrong. I couldn’t see him in my session but, of course, any fan big enough for a tattoo like that would have seen the film on the first day, not the third.
The Venom fandom is a strong and loyal one but it is one that has found its champion in Tom Hardy and it has supported all three of the films in which he plays investigative reporter Eddie Brock and the symbiote, Venom, who shares his body.
Hardy has successfully navigated the treacherous world of comic book movies by keeping a relative independence – he produces and storylines the films and chooses who he collaborates with – and audiences including your correspondent have responded positively to his often eccentric performance choices. There’s an unpredictability about Hardy/Venom that’s rare in the rest of the comic book movie oeuvre.
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This is a road movie as bickering best mates Brock and Venom are chased across the American South West by a symbiote-hunting monster until they all converge on Area 51 in Nevada for a final reckoning.
The Last Dance, as you might expect, suggests some kind of closure to the trilogy but even here we see the gravy train rolling on. The purpose of this film is largely to introduce yet another villain who will become important in future films, all of which undercuts the sentimental good work done by Hardy throughout.
In Lee, Kate Winslet plays the World War II photographer (and former New York model and artist’s muse) Lee Miller and it’s a shame that such an unconventional woman should receive such a conventional portrait.
The script – by Liz Hannah (The Post), John Collee (Master and Commander) and former fashion magazine editor and Miller expert Marion Hume – does a good job of showing-not-telling when it comes to the story. Miller’s life before wartime is alluded to but never turned into exposition, her post-war retreat into semi-obscurity is shown to us through an interview framing device, but in a few too many scenes the characters spend time explaining themselves – their contexts, their motivations – rather than ‘being’ themselves.
But Winslet is staunch throughout and the focus on the work – you realise that some of her most influential photographs are consciously being recreated as she makes her way across Europe to Berlin – is admirable.
A Different Man was shot on Kodak film and it looks like it. It has the texture of something from the 1970s and that texture suggests a depth that the finished film doesn’t quite deliver on.
But that’s a much better outcome than the straight-to-streaming comedy-thriller Brothers, which looks like nothing at all. In fact, a credit at the end for the post-production software company LiveGrain – a product that purports to reintroduce the kind of visual texture that digital photography doesn’t have to begin with – betrays the utter ersatz-ness of the whole exercise.
One of those films that was clearly more fun to make than it is to watch, Brothers stars fine character actors Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin as twins. After an eventful life of petty-criminality Brolin’s Moke is determined to go sober and go straight. Fresh out of the hoosegow, Jady (Dinklage) reunites with a plan to find the emeralds their mother (Glenn Close) stole and then hid before disappearing thirty years earlier.
Also leaving no scenery unchewed, Brendan Fraser as a corrupt corrections officer and the late M. Emmet Walsh as his scheming father, the local judge.
I quite liked Dinklage and Brolin playing against type, but the relentless shrieking high energy to no purpose wore me out well before the end.
