Monday new releases: 12 August 2024

Bookworm, It Ends With Us, National Theatre Live: Dear England and The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan are in cinemas

An inter­est­ing array of beards above. It’s been a quiet week at the stream­ers so all of this week’s new releases are in theatres.

One of many pleas­ures to be found in Ant Timpson’s Bookworm is that the South Island land­scape gets the kind of glor­i­ous treat­ment that is nor­mally reserved for cer­tain big fantasy films. New Zealand plays itself, for a change, and Timpson’s eye (with cine­ma­to­graph­er Daniel Katz) for those wide expanses is a know­ing riff on how we are nor­mally shown those vis­tas, and the gag about going up to the rocks “where Liam Neeson played that talk­ing Lion” is a decent one at star Elijah Wood’s expense.

(From memory, though, Frodo’s jour­ney was to a very North Island Mount Doom and it was the rest of the fel­low­ship that got to traipse around Canterbury and Otago. I stand to be corrected.)

Wood plays Strawn, a down-on-his-luck Magician (or “illu­sion­ist”) who travels half way across the world to look after an eleven-year-old daugh­ter he has nev­er met, after her moth­er has an acci­dent with a toaster.

Mildred (Nell Fisher) has been prom­ised an exped­i­tion into the wil­der­ness to find evid­ence of the myth­ic­al Canterbury Panther, a big black cat that loc­als have been sight­ing for years without con­clus­ive proof.

Against his urb­an, soft-centred instincts, Strawn agrees to chap­er­one Mildred on this trip but it is her know­ledge of obscure bush­craft – gleaned from the books that gives the film its title – that gets them both into and out of trouble as the trip takes a much more adven­tur­ous turn than either was expecting.

The rela­tion­ship between Strawn and Mildred is nicely grown, helped by the fact the her pre­co­city stays just this side of being really annoy­ing and that Wood – as he often does – leaves his own ego at the door and is con­tent to look pretty ridicu­lous almost all of the time.

In the final cli­mactic chase both char­ac­ters are wear­ing their pyja­mas – very fetch­ing designs from Jaindra Watson but quite silly nonetheless.

And one final pleas­ure to cite: Northern Irish act­or Michael Smiley can still be pretty ter­ri­fy­ing even when he is ostens­ibly being funny, adding some grit to a very like­able fam­ily adven­ture film.

I worked in the book busi­ness for a few years and nev­er heard any­one have a good word to say about Colleen Hoover’s oeuvre apart from an incred­u­lous grat­it­ude for how much money it made. Her books – ini­tially self-published –have been driv­en to quite extraordin­ary levels of suc­cess thanks the BookTok social media phe­nomen­on. Essentially, word-of-mouth on steroids.

The new film adapt­a­tion of her biggest hit so far, It Ends With Us, gives us an idea of why her work speaks so effect­ively to so many people. It’s essen­tially a romance with all of the fantasy details that adds so much escap­ist appeal to that genre. The cent­ral char­ac­ter is called Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) and she’s a flor­ist. Actually every­one has an incred­ible name: her first love is called Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), her new beau is a neurosur­geon called Ryle (dir­ect­or Justin Baldoni).

And the coin­cid­ences are stun­ning. After a meet-cute with Ryle on the roof of an apart­ment build­ing she aspires to but doesn’t live in, Lily becomes best friends with his sis­ter Allysa (Jenny Slate) – not know­ing that they are related to each oth­er, of course – and when she goes out for din­ner with her moth­er (Amy Morton) to intro­duce her to Ryle, the res­taur­ant they choose belongs to long-lost Atlas.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

It’s like there are only ten people who live in Boston, but that’s ok. It’s how this par­tic­u­lar game gets played.

Where this gets inter­est­ing is that Lily is recov­er­ing from some very real (and for many readers/viewers) very recog­nis­able trauma. Her fath­er (Kevin McKidd) was a domest­ic abuser, but a pil­lar of their small-town com­munity, and des­pite the fact she is determ­ined not to fall into the same situ­ation as her moth­er, her rela­tion­ship with Ryle even­tu­ally bears far too close a resemblance.

So, the dra­mat­ic situ­ation becomes pain­fully real and its res­ol­u­tion fant­ast­ic­ally sat­is­fy­ing. On the way, the film makes quite a few not-terrible choices and we get to see – at length – how much the cam­era loves Lively. It helps that she’s more than just a pretty face – she does a good job of car­ry­ing the emo­tion­al weight and pre­vent­ing it from becom­ing too maudlin.

When I read the fly­er for the cur­rent run of National Theatre Live present­a­tions and saw that there was a play about Gareth Southgate, my first response was that they really will make theatre about any­thing these days. But on reflec­tion, I real­ised that an insti­tu­tion like the NT has an oblig­a­tion to reflect all of the soci­ety in which it exists, not just Shakespeare luv­vies (although there’s a fair amount of that still to come).

But the story of Southgate’s lead­er­ship of the England foot­ball team, from yet anoth­er low­est ebb to the brink of immor­tal­ity, really does tran­scend sport.

Southgate revolu­tion­ised élite level sport in the UK by bring­ing in psy­cho­lo­gists and coun­sel­lors to sup­port young mil­lion­aires who were strug­gling to see them­selves as a team, and then by encour­aging them to see each oth­er as whole people who could con­trib­ute their voices to a soci­ety that was frac­tur­ing in front of their eyes.

And to recog­nise that des­pite all their power off the pitch, what was defin­ing their per­form­ances on it was fear – that most per­ni­cious of emo­tions – a fear that Southgate him­self had unwit­tingly con­trib­uted to when he fam­ously missed that pen­alty against Germany in the 96 Euros.

That pen­alty haunts him as well as the con­tem­por­ary play­ers. The play opens with the cur­rent Southgate (excel­lent Joseph Fiennes) watch­ing the young­er one fail and team psy­cho­lo­gist Pippa Grange (Gina McKee) can see how hard Southgate tries to assure every­one how he has put it behind him until a dev­ast­at­ing speech near the end of the first act.

The play is also about England – Dear England was how Southgate addressed his occa­sion­al open let­ters to the fans – and how a coun­try strug­gling to handle both Brexit and Covid needed some­thing to rally behind but how that ral­ly­ing ended up just increas­ing the pres­sure Southgate was try­ing to avoid. England, it could be say­ing, you’re your own worst enemy.

It’s epis­od­ic theatre, need­ing to hit all the story beats so that well-known moments of tri­umph and defeat are all there, and for all the talk of see­ing the play­ers as com­plete people it does often reduce them to the single thing we all know about them – Maguire’s head, Rashford’s grandma, Dele Alli’s men­tal health. Will Close’s per­fect imit­a­tion of Harry Kane’s inar­tic­u­late sin­cer­ity nev­er fails to raise a laugh, until he, too, finds heart­break in a pen­alty kick.

But often, James Graham’s play hits a per­fect note. In the scene where Eric Dier (Ryan Whittle) is dropped from the squad for Euro 2020, he says, “If it’s the best thing for the team that I’m not in it, then it’s my duty isn’t it?” And then trudges off through the audi­ence like Captain Oates going out for some time in Antarctica.

Here’s a bit of recyc­ling, in case you didn’t get to read my review of The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan from RNZ when it was play­ing in the French Film Festival:

The first cine­mat­ic adapt­a­tion of The Three Musketeers appeared back in 1903, barely 60 years after the pub­lic­a­tion of Alexandre Dumas’ nov­el and it has been a staple of the big screen ever since. There have been dozens of films inspired by the story – faith­ful, unfaith­ful, fanci­ful – but as long as France still has plenty of chat­eaux and chapeaux the Musketeers will con­tin­ue to buckle their swashes on to our screens.

The latest ver­sion is a two-part, star-studded affair that was the second most expens­ive pro­duc­tion in France last year.

Ambitious young D’Artagnan (François Civil) travels from Gascony to Paris to join the roy­al Musketeers, Louis XIII’s per­son­al army. The cap­it­al is a city con­sumed by intrigue. Catholic France is under threat from Protestant insur­gents, but King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) wishes to avoid war.

There are spies every­where and no one can be trus­ted, least of all the King’s top advisor, the fiendishly manip­u­lat­ive Cardinal Richelieu (Éric Ruf).

In a fam­ous scene, D’Artagnan inad­vert­ently finds him­self fight­ing a duel with three dif­fer­ent mus­ket­eers: Athos (Vincent Cassel), Porthos (Pio Marmaï) and Aramis (Romain Duris) until they are inter­rup­ted by a big­ger enemy – Richelieu’s men.

This ver­sion of the story does a good job of hon­our­ing the fic­tion­al adven­tures of these (mostly) real people while ground­ing them in a gritty, his­tor­ic­ally accur­ate con­text. Although, allow­ances are made for mod­ern gender expect­a­tions and the women char­ac­ters (Vicky Krieps as Anne of Austria, wife of the King, Lyna Khoudri as Contance, her maid, and Eva Green as Milady, the mys­ter­i­ous super spy) all get more agency than they have in the past.

D’Artagnan is thor­oughly enjoy­able up until the end when – if you don’t already have tick­ets to the second film – you will be frus­trated by the cliff­hanger ending.