Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE< playing
I’ve posted my Best Movies of 2018 – So Far. Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year, adding to it as the year goes on. By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here’s last year’s list.
To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.
This year, as usual, I took advantage of Cinequest in March and the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) in April to preview some films that will be released later in the year.
My top pick so far this year is Leave No Trace. Leave No Trace is Debra Granik’s first narrative feature since her 2010 Winter’s Bone (which I had rated as the best film of that year). Leave No Trace is a brilliant coming of age film that stars Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie as a dad-daughter team who challenge conventional thinking about homelessness and healthy parenting. Winter’s Bone launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence, and Leave No Trace might do the same for newcomer McKenzie. I saw Leave No Trace at the San Francisco International Film Festival. My full review will appear after the film’s release in the Bay Area at the end of June.
You can see other top picks The Rider and The Death of Stalin in theaters right now and Quality Problems and Outside In are now streaming.
Charlize Theron stars in Jason Reitman’s TULLY. Courtesy of SFFILM.
The compelling dark comedy Tully stars Charlize Theron, is written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman. Those three combined on the underrated game-changing comedy Young Adult, and Tully is another very singular film.
Theron plays Marlo, a mom who has just given birth to her third child. Her oldest kid has intense special needs and a newborn brings another level of obligation. Marlo develops a serious case of depression. To ease the burden, she gets a night nurse named Tully; Tully has an otherworldly quality which brings relief and respite to Marlo. And then there’s a major plot twist…
Theron is a fearless actress – not afraid to glam down, She gained fifty pounds for this role (not as big a glam down as for Monster). In Young Adult, she was game to play a thoroughly dislikable character. Here she plays a real Mom, not a Perfect Mom. In real life, caregiving can take its toll, and that’s what we see here.
Mackenzie Davis brings a magical quality to the character of Tully. Ron Livingston is very good as a loving but clueless husband; ill-equipped to recognize, let alone deal with Marlo’s depression.
Tully was featured at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) (although I missed it because I was at the Leave No Trace screening); Theron and Reitman attended the SFFILM screening, and, from all reports, Theron wowed the crowd.
Tully is an excellent and insightful film. It’s a dark comedy and NOT A LIGHT MOVIE – after all, with all its laughs, it’s about postpartum depression.
Min-hee Kim in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Claire’s Camerais the latest nugget from writer-director Hong Sang-soo, that great observer of awkward situations and hard-drinking. Jeon (Min-hee Kim of The Handmaiden) is a film company assistant who ia traveled to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of a Korean film. It turns out that the film company executive has had a long-term relationship with the movie’s director, and she immediately fires Jeon when she learns of Jeon’s fling with the director. With several days sill to go before her return flight, Jeon wanders around Cannes. Jeon meets the French schoolteacher and amateur photographer Claire (Isabelle Huppert) and they hang out. Coincidentally, Claire also meets the director. Most of the dialogue is in English, the common language of the French and Korean characters – and the earnestly imperfect English-speaking supplies some of the film’s humor.
Not only does Claire have a camera, she IS the camera through which we observe the foibles of the other characters. Jeon is breathtakingly clueless (or in denial) about the reason for her dismissal. The director, as many Hong Sang-soo characters, has an enthusiastic relationship with alcohol. It’s all dryly funny, although the director and the executive redefine their relationship in a powerfully realistic scene.
This is an especially fine performance by Min-hee Kim. She pulled off some deadpan humor in The Handmaiden, a film more thought of for its eroticism and mystery. Here, she’s often just wandering around in reflection and making small talk. But Kim is just so watchable, she keeps the audience’s interest keen.
Claire’s Camera is not as surreal as last year’s Hong Sang-soo entry, Yourself and Yours, but just as observational and droll. I saw Claire’s Camera at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where Hong Sang-soo has a cult following and always appreciative audiences. It’s now playing at the 4 Star in San Francisco.
Min-hee Kim and Isabelle Huppert in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Louis Garrel in A scene from Michel Hazanavicious’s GODARD, MON AMOUR, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Godard, Mon Amouris a bitingly funny portrait of flawed genius. Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) pays tribute to the genius of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s early career while satirizing Godard’s personal excesses.
Godard, Mon Amour traces the three pivotal years after Godard married Anne Wiazemsky, the 19-year-old star of his La Chinoise. Godard (Louis Garrel) is age 37. In the preceding seven years he has helped revolutionize cinema as a leader of the French New Wave. He has made three masterpieces: Breathless, Contempt and Band of Outsiders. This is the Godard of “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”
But now Godard has become a doctrinaire Maoist and rejects his past work. He sees himself as a thought leader of revolutionary politics – but that is a delusion. He’s just a political amateur, a poseur, a tourist.
Stacy Martin (center) in a scene from Michel Hazanavicious’s GODARD, MON AMOUR, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
“Godard is dead”, Godard declaims. But young Anne (Stacy Martin) has hitched her star to the old Godard, the master of cinematic innovation and rock star, not this new dogmatic Godard.
This is also a snapshot of 1967, when many on the French Left believed that revolution in France was around the corner. By 1969, it was apparent to virtually everyone that this had been a mirage, that revolution was not going to happen. To everyone but Godard, who stubbornly stuck with his dogma.
Louis Garrel, his dreamboat looks glammed down with Godard’s bald spot, is often very funny as he deadpans his way through Godard’s pretensions. In Godard, Mon Amour, Godard’s thinking has become so devoid of humor, nuance, texture and ambiguity that his art has become one-dimensional and boring. Indeed, I have found all of the Godard films since 1967’s Weekend to range from disappointing to completely unwatchable. Godard is alive at age 87 and still making movies today – and they all suck.
In his very biting send-up of Godard’s personal failings, Michel Hazanavicius pays tribute to Godard’s groundbreaking cinematic techniques. We see jump cuts, breaking the fourth wall, shifting between color and negative imagery,
subtitling the characters’ interior thoughts over their spoken dialogue and references to earlier movies. It’s all very witty.
There’s even a motif of repeatedly broken spectacles as an jomage to Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run. In one of the more obvious jokes, Godard and Anne debate whether either would choose to appear nude in a movie while they walk around their room in complete, full-frontal nudity.
The more of Godard’s films you have seen, the more enjoyable you will find Godard, Mon Amour. If you don’t get the allusions to Godard’s filmmaking, you may find the protagonist of Godard, Mon Amour to be miserably tedious. I saw Godard, Mon Amour at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It opens this Friday in the Bay Area.
Another dark comedy, this one about two teen girl sociopaths, Thoroughbreds.
Outside In: Now on Netflix, this fine Lynn Shelton drama about a man returning to his community after 20 years in prison is an acting showcase for Kaitlin Dever (Justified), Jay Duplass (Transparent) and, especially, Edie Falco. Falco’s performance is stunning.
I liked Al Pacino’s portrayal of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno as his storied career was killed by scandal in HBO’s Paterno.
ON VIDEO
This week’s video pick salutes the San Francisco International Film Festival, now underway. From last year’s SFFILMFestival, the topical French drama The Stopover explores the after-effects of combat in contemporary warfare. We also get a female lens on the acceptance of women in combat roles and on sexual assault in the military from the co-writer and co-directors, the sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin. The Stopover is available to stream on iTunes.
ON TV
This week, Turner Classic Movies brings us a couple of curiosities. First, on April 14, is arguable the first on-screen CSI in Mystery Street (1950). In an era where police detective work seemed to be mostly sweating out confessions under bright lights, the investigator in Mystery Street uses the methods of forensic science. And he’s played by Ricardo Montalban, no less. The Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller will supply the intro and outro on this week’s Noir Alley.
And on April 15, TCM will air the sci-fi classic Solaris (1972), the masterpiece of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. A psychologist, with that common Russian name of Kris Kelvin, is sent to check out a space mission orbiting the oceanic planet Solaris. He finds things ominously awry, with a suicide and suspiciously furtive behavior by the surviving crew. Then he is face-to-face with his own dead wife from Earth; and after he dispatches her into space, she reappears on the spacecraft. Things are seriously messed up.
Much of Solaris’ two hours and 47 minutes – watching this movie is a commitment – is trippy shots of the ocean planet, with waves breaking across its colored surface. Solaris is not so much an enjoyable art movie as it is a fascinating one. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is firmly placed in the sci-fi canon. Solaris is a must see for sci-fi fans [Note: This is NOT the inferior 2002 Steven Soderbergh remake.]
Ariane Labed and Soko in THE STOPOVER photo courtesy of SFFILM
This week’s video pick salutes the San Francisco International Film Festival, now underway. From last year’s SFFILMFestival, the topical French drama The Stopover explores the after-effects of combat in contemporary warfare. We also get a female lens on the acceptance of women in combat roles and on sexual assault in the military from the co-writer and co-directors, the sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin.
The Stopover’s title refers to a French combat unit’s three-day stay in a luxurious Cypriot seaside resort. The unit, heading back to France after a tour in Afghanistan, is supposed to decompress at the resort. They are required to engage in group therapy, enhanced by virtual reality goggles. As with any group of gung-ho and mostly macho twenty-somethings, talk therapy is not their thing. But they sure need decompression, because their service included a terrifying engagement in which they lost three comrades.
This combat unit includes women, and The Stopover focuses on Aurore (Ariane Labed) and Marine (Soko). The strong and purposeful Aurore has physically recovered from an emotionally (and literally) scarring experience in Afghanistan. The more impulsive Marine, on the other hand, is not a deep thinker, but has a serious chip on her shoulder.
Everyone in the unit wound very, very tightly. Some are fighting to keep psychotic outbursts from bubbling over. Plopping these guys amidst tourists and locals in such an absurdly and artificially tranquil setting creates a powder keg. From start to finish in The Stopover, we’re waiting for any and every character to snap or erupt.
Ariane Labed in THE STOPOVER photo courtesy of SFFILM
Labed is excellent as Ariane, who feels need to suppress her PTSD, to mask it with rowdy fun and, finally, to confront it. Labed won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for a completely different kind of movie in 2010, the absurdly goofy Attenberg, which I also watched at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
I just can’t take my eyes of Soko, who is a French pop music star. Here, as Marine, she has a feral fierceness. Soko is also a force of nature in the excellent period drama Augustine. She brings a simmering intensity to the screen, in contrast to her offbeat, ironic pop music.
The rest of the cast is excellent, too, particularly Karim Leklou as a sergeant with an unresolved issue or two.
The Stopover is available to stream on iTunes. It’s an engrossing and powerful film.
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
This week I’m diving deep into the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). Here’s my festival preview.
Another dark comedy, this one about two teen girl sociopaths, Thoroughbreds.
Outside In: Now on Netflix, this fine Lynn Shelton drama about a man returning to his community after 20 years in prison is an acting showcase for Kaitlin Dever (Justified), Jay Duplass (Transparent) and, especially, Edie Falco. Falco’s performance is stunning.
The Last Movie Star: An aged action movies star (Burt Reynolds playing someone very similar to Burt Reynolds) examines his life choices. Funny and sentimental (in a good way).
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Storyis the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.
The Leisure Seeker is an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Mirren and Sutherland are excellent, possibly enough to see this in a theater.
VIDEO
In tribute to SFFILM, my Stream of the Week is from last year’s SFFILM Festival: NUTS! is the persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans. NUTS! is available to stream from Amazon (free with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
TV
Tonight, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler, with its brilliant and eccentric performance by Victor Buono.
And on April 8, TCM will air Stalag 17 (1960), adapted and directed by the great Billy Wilder. This is a taut WW II POW drama from a play written by two former POWs. If it’s not bad enough being held in a Nazi prison camp, there is a German mole informing on the prisoners. The POWs blame the wrong guy – the cynic played by William Holden – and he must uncover and expose the real traitor and help a POW in peril to escape.
This is a thriller, not a comedy, but you can’t tell from this trailer, which oversells the humor; it makes you expect Hogan’s Heroes.
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) opens on April 4 and runs through April 17. As always, it’s a Can’t Miss for Bay Area movie fans. This year’s program is especially loaded. Here are some enticing festival highlights:
Leave No Trace is Debra Granik’s first narrative feature since her 2010 Winter’s Bone (which I had rated as the best film of that year). Leave No Trace stars Ben Foster and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie as a dad-daughter team and co-stars Dale Dickey (so unforgettable in Winter’s Bone and Hell or High Water). Winter’s Bone launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence, and buzz from Sundance indicates that Leave No Trace might do the same for McKenzie.
Tully stars Charlize Theron, is written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman. Those three combined on the underrated game-changing comedy Young Adult, so my expectations are high. Theron and Reitman will attend the SFFILM screening.
Sorry to Bother You, described as a “taboo-breaker”, is an offbeat comedy about an African_American telemarketer whose career climbs when he discovers his “white voice”. Stars Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson and Armie Hammer. Written and directed by Bay Area artist Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You shook up both the Sundance and SXSW fests. Will release into theaters on July 8.
Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson in a scene from Boots Riley’s SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
First Reformed is a dark drama from director Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ. Ethan Hawke stars. Schrader will appear at SFFILM.
Godard, Mon Amour is, at the same time, a tribute to the genius of Jean-Luc Godard’s early cinema and a satire on the insufferable tedium of the political dilettantism that squandered the rest of Godard’s filmmaking career. This is a very inventive film, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist). I’ve seen it, and the more Godard films that you’ve seen, the more you will enjoy the wit of Godard, Mon Amour.
Claire’s Camerais the latest nugget from writer-director Hong Sang-soo, that great observer of awkward situations and hard-drinking. Claire’s Camera is set at the Cannes Film Festival, and the great Isabelle Huppert drops into the story. There’s an especially fine performance by Min-hee Kim (The Handmaiden). It’s not as surreal as last year’s Hong Sang-soo entry, Yourself and Yours, but just as observational and droll. Hong Sang-soo has a cult following at SFFILM, so there is certain to be an appreciative audience.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties: This is the North American premiere of the latest from writer-director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rabbit Hole). Mitchell will attend the screening. Premiered at Cannes.
Bad Reputation: Biodoc of Joan Jett – and Joan is attending!
Pick of the Litter: This doc by Bay Area filmmakers Dana Nachtman and Don Hardy was the feel-good hit at Cinequest. Adorable puppies strive to help the blind.
Tre Maison Dasan: This unwavering and emotionally powerful doc is my top pick from the World Premieres at SFFILM. In her feature debut as writer-director, Denali Tiller follows three kids with incarcerated parents. Unfettered by talking heads, Tre Maison Dasan invites us along with these kids as they interact with their families – both on the outside and the inside. Tiller will attend all screenings.
Along with Theron, Reitman, Schrader, Hazanavicius, Mitchell and Jett, there will be personal appearances by storied directors Gus Van Sant and Wayne Wang, actors Bill Hader, Tom Everett Scott, Jason Sudeikis and Henry Winkler, composer Danny Elfman and film historian David Thomson.
The 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) opens this Wednesday. Here’s SFFILMFestival’s information on the program, the schedule and tickets and passes.
Throughout SFFILMFestival, you can follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.
A scene from Denali Tiller’s TRE MAISON DASAN, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.
The Lost City of Z opens tomorrow in Bay Area theaters. I saw The Lost City of Z at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray. I’ll be sharing some snippets from Gray’s Q & A on Sunday.
The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military, he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.
That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits – and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole) and Howard Carter (King Tut).
In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme.
That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.
No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z, Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.
Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness. Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.
As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough, performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.
Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.
Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller 2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.
Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z, a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji. Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers, there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep in the jungle.
There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the indigenous people.
Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.
The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Also see my notes from the director James Gray’s Q & A at the San Francisco International Film Festival.[And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. The closing credits recognize the “animal weath coordinator” and the “data wrangler”.]
Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney in THE JOURNEY photo courtesy of SFFILM
The Journey imagines the pivotal personal interactions between the long-warring leaders of Northern Ireland’s The Troubles resulting in the 2006 St. Andrews Accords, which set up the current power-sharing government of Northern Ireland. Ian Paisley had lit the original fuse of the Troubles in the mid-1960s by igniting Protestant backlash to Catholic pleas for civil rights. Paisley then obstructed every attempted peace settlement for over thirty years. Martin McGuinness had transitioned to political leadership from chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army, resisting the violent repression of the british Army with a campaign of terror. Paisley and McGuinness led the two sides in what was essentially a decades-long civil war, although Paisley would dispute that term. You could fairly say that both had blood on their hands, McGuinness literally and Paisley morally. Yet they did agree to share power in 2006.
The Journey uses an entirely fictional plot device to isolate the two of them on a road trip. (The set-up is unlikely, but you have to go with it.) Then The Journey relies on the delightful work of two great actors, Timothy Spall, who plays Paisley, and Colm Meaney, who plays McGuinness.
Beyond the political differences and the blood grudge, the two make a classic Odd Couple. Spall’s Paisley seems completely impregnable to charm. The Journey is very funny as McGuinesss’ considerable charm and wit keeps falling flat. In fact, there are plenty of LOL moments from the awkward situations, McGuinness’ quips and their seemingly clueless driver (Freddy Highmore). Paisley seems utterly devoid of humor until an unexpected moment.
While The Journey is completely fictionalized, it is certainly true that the two had hated each other for decades, did reach agreement in 2006 and thereafter held posts in the same government and personally got along well, evolving an even affectionate personal relationship. We also see Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, Gerry Adams and an imagined MI5 character played by John Hurt.
Spall and Meaney took on a considerable challenge: Paisley and McGuinness dominated the political news in Ireland for decades and are well-known to audiences in the UK and Ireland. Paisley died in 2014, and McGuinness died just last month. The Journey’s screenwriter Colin Bateman, was born in Northern Ireland, and The Journey was financed by Northern Ireland Screen.
Achieving a sustainable agreement with a longtime blood enemy requires deciding which of your positions are sacrosanct principles and which have more flexibility. It requires risking the loyalty of your political base, which will revolt against leaders perceived as selling them out. It requires gauging the likelihood that your opponent will stick to his side of the deal. And, you have to focus on your outcome – the long-term goal, not just on defeating your enemy in the moment. “Young men fight for the helluvit. Old men care about their legacy”, says Hurt’s character in The Journey.
I watched The Journey in April at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival). To further explore this topic, here is my list of Best Movies About The Troubles.
