list.co.uk/fi lm ROMCOM LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED (15) 116min ●●●●●
Love, apparently, is all you need, which could be why In a Better World director Susanne Bier has suddenly forgotten about nuance, character, wit and candour. Expectations were high for the Danish director of that 2010 Oscar winner, but she has let herself down with this syrupy, genre-led romcom.
Pierce Brosnan plays Philip, a widowed, irritable British businessman who has agreed to host his son’s wedding at his sprawling Italian villa. En route he meets mother-of-the-bride Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a Danish hairdresser recovering from chemotherapy and just separated from her husband Leif (Kim Bodnia). As they help their children with the nuptials, earthy, straightforward Ida begins to break through grumpy old Philip’s torpor.
Newcomers Molly Blixt Egelind and Sebastian
Jessen offer up performances filled with both energy and doubt, but they’re ultimately forced into minor roles as their parents behave badly. What we’re left
with is a tourist-office fetish of rustic Italian life which, with eternal montages of lapping waves and crying gulls, willfully tries to market itself as delightful and heartwarming, but ends up being neither. (Tom Seymour) ■ Limited release from Fri 19 Apr.
BIOPIC THE LOOK OF LOVE (18) 101min ●●●●●
Despite juicy subject matter and a promising cast, this biopic of the British strip-club and soft-porn tycoon Paul Raymond never quite i nds its tone. In its i rst half, it deploys a weak end-of-the-pier comic mode which might i t its tasselled, trashy, tarts-and-vicars milieu to a tee, but does very little to humanise its characters. All of which means that the emotional investment it gropes for in its latter stages feels unearned, and thus simply doesn’t materialise.
The casting of regular Michael Winterbottom lead Steve Coogan sadly doesn’t help with this. Coogan might know exactly how to construct an endearing sleazebag, given to bad puns and fruity asides, but he is hardly one to disappear into a role and his comic persona simply overwhelms any characterisation he may be attempting here. The great tragedy for Raymond, whose Soho gentlemen’s establishments and glossy jazz mags made him the richest man in Britain for a period, was the loss of his beloved daughter Debbie to drugs and ill health. But Raymond’s familial relationships are thinly and confusingly sketched (an additional adult son shows up and vanishes without being explained), and Debbie’s druggie decline is so awkwardly pitched between pantomime and pathos that the Glasgow Film Festival audience in February sniggered uncertainly through a scene of her demanding a line of coke whilst in the throes of labour.
A clear precursor to this i lm is Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, but the depth and
ambiguity that i lm brought to its amiable monster of a protagonist just doesn’t kick in here. One upside is the female performers – Imogen Poots as Debbie, Anna Friel as her mother Rita, and Tamsin Egerton as the brainy dollybird for whom Rita is forsaken – all of whom are forceful, gorgeous, funny, and generally better than this rather thinly-realised project asks them to be. (Hannah McGill) ■ On general release from Fri 26 Apr.
Reviews | FILM PROFILE
JEFF NICHOLS Born 7 December, 1978, Arkansas
Background After studying filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, writer-director Jeff Nichols announced his arrival with Shotgun Stories, the story of a feud between two brothers set in the cotton-growing region of Arkansas. Drawing comparisons to Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green, Nichols went on to make 2011’s Take Shelter, a fiercely original tale starring Michael Shannon as a blue-collar worker haunted by apocalyptic visions. Winning the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, it earmarked Nichols as one of US independent cinema’s most exciting new talents. What is he up to now? His third feature, Mud – starring Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon – is a mix of Huckleberry Finn and Night of the Hunter, as an escaped convict recruits the help of two teenage boys in his quest to reconnect with the love of his life.
On the theme of Mud ‘If there’s anything I want people to take away from all of this . . . in love, you get banged up and bruised up. For some reason we always put ourselves back together, and we go after it again. And that felt like something worth talking about in the movie.’ On the influence of Mark Twain ‘If you’re going to steal stuff from somebody, you should steal stuff from somebody real intelligent. And I stole things from Mark Twain. The best example is the boot print with the cross in the heel. That’s how Tom and Huck recognise Huck’s father, who is a drunk. They would see his boot prints and know he was around, and I just thought that was awesome. So, that’s stolen!’
On Mud’s hopeful tone ‘It would’ve felt wrong to end this film on a down note. That’s not what the cycle of love is and I didn’t want to put a death-nail in that!’ On his favourite films ‘I have a top five. The majority have Paul Newman in them, but Badlands is always number one. I have a different relationship to Malick’s other films, but Badlands to me is as near-perfect as you can get.’
Interesting fact His brother is Ben Nichols, the lead singer and guitarist for country-punk rock band Lucero. (James Mottram) ■ Mud is on general release from Fri 10 May. See review, page 63.
18 Apr–16 May 2013 THE LIST 59