From the moment an Italian journalist had his credentials revoked after shouting "Whore!" as writer/director Jennifer Kent's name appeared in the end credits of its screening at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, it was clear that THE NIGHTINGALE was guaranteed to provoke a reaction. Making her first film since the acclaimed THE BABADOOK, Kent pulls absolutely no punches with this visceral, harrowing, and often horrifying period western set in the 1820s during the Black War and the British Army's genocidal colonization of Van Diemen's Land, which later became Tasmania. Irish-born Clare (Aisling Franciosi) has served several years in prison on a theft charge but has been allowed to finish her sentence as as indentured servant at an Army outpost, where she works during the day and lives in a small shack with her husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) and infant daughter. The outpost's sadistic commander, Hawkins (Sam Claflin), regularly has Clare--"the nightingale"--sing for the leering troops, and when she reminds him that her time served was over three months ago and he still hasn't signed off on her release, he attacks and rapes her in a violent rage. When a visiting commander (Ewen Leslie) is unimpressed with Hawkins' attitude and his drunken regiment, and witnesses Aidan confronting him about his refusal to release Clare, he informs him that he's being turned down for the promotion that he was expecting. Still stuck at the outpost and blaming Aidan, Hawkins and two sycophantic flunkies--Ruse (Damon Herriman) and Jago (Harry Greenwood)--barge into the couple's shack and what transpires is almost too unspeakable to even detail here.
Hawkins decides to override his commander and go to headquarters in Launceston to lobby for the promotion himself. It's a several-day journey, and he takes Ruse, Jago, and three convicts (including a ten-year-old boy, played by ELI's Charlie Shotwell), with elderly aboriginal tracker Charlie (Charlie Jampijimpa Brown) leading the way. Upon hearing they're venturing to Launceston, Clare offers what little she has to Charlie's nephew Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to track the group through the harsh terrain. After an opening half hour that's almost too grueling to endure (this is never exploitative, but be aware--this is rough-going and very upsetting at times), THE NIGHTINGALE settles into somewhat more conventional revenge western mode (as conventional as brutal Australian westerns can get), with Clare and Billy slowly establishing a grudging bond after she initially reveals herself to be just as racist and prejudicial as the British she so strongly professes to despise (she keeps her gun pointed at Billy at all times and even makes a comment about him being a cannibal). The character arcs for Clare and Billy (who also ends up with his own reasons for revenge on Hawkins and his crew) may be a tad predictable, but the strong performances from Franciosi and Ganambarr make up for it, and I really can't recall the last time I encountered villains as thoroughly despicable as Hawkins and Ruse, with Claflin (THE HUNGER GAMES) and Herriman (who played Charles Manson in both Netflix's MINDHUNTERS and briefly in Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD) never going cartoonish and over the top, which makes the actions of their characters even more disturbing. Harsh, ferocious, and absolutely unflinching in its portrayal of the worst that humanity has to offer (and yes, there's a modern allegory at play here involving race, class, and patriarchy that wisely avoids the heavy hand), THE NIGHTINGALE is also a film about redemption in the best UNFORGIVEN sense, with a subversion of expectations and taking to heart that old Confucius quote about digging two graves before embarking on a mission of revenge. As if it needs to be said at this point, THE NIGHTINGALE isn't for everyone, but it's a riveting and exhausting experience that isn't easily shaken. (R, 136 mins) GRAND ISLE (US - 2019)
GRAND ISLE feels like one seriously uneven film that's been made from three wildly different scripts, all of which seem tailored to allow for gratuitous Nic Cage freakouts. Yes, GRAND ISLE is another straight-to-VOD Cage clunker, but for a while, it's actually not bad. It opens as an overbaked Southern gothic that seems to be heading toward a Louisiana noir with a big Tennessee Williams influence. And it ends an overwrought PTSD drama complete with a dedication to "our brave troops." And somehow, in the middle, is a Blumhouse-style horror movie. The script is credited to Iver William Jallah and Rich Ronat, but may have been subjected to rewrites by...anyone who happened to be walking by the set? Set in Grand Isle in 1988, the film opens with a framing device where aimless Buddy (Luke Benward, best known for his days as a child actor, playing Mel Gibson's young son in WE WERE SOLDIERS and starring in HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS) is under arrest and being interrogated by a dogged detective (Kelsey Grammer, chewing on a jambalaya-soaked accent that lands somewhere between Fred Thompson and SNL's "Maine Justice"), who's about to nail his balls to the wall for the murder of a victim to be named later. Buddy is a Navy vet who's married to his high school sweetheart (Emily Marie Palmer) and has an infant daughter. Money's tight and he takes handyman gigs where he can. He's called to fix a picket fence at the remote mansion of unstable, gun-toting, alcoholic Vietnam vet Walter (Cage, with his CON AIR mullet) and his sultry, sex-starved wife Fancy (KaDee Strickland). While Buddy is badgered and harangued by Walter, Fancy barely hides her desire to get in his pants. Things get even more uncomfortable for Buddy when an approaching hurricane picks up intensity and forces him to take refuge with the dysfunctional couple, who spend the night playing passive-aggressive head games with one another and their guest, with Fancy also being deliberately evasive about why there's a bunch of locks on the basement door.
Things happen--Walter drinks until he passes out, Fancy seduces Buddy, Walter wakes up and offers Buddy $20,000 to kill Fancy, and Buddy really wants to know what's in the basement--and to this point, GRAND ISLE is no great shakes, but it's moderately engaging and reasonably entertaining trash with a typically over-the-top Cage matched by the femme fatale histrionics of a game Strickland. Then it takes a sudden turn into straight-up horror once Buddy discovers their secret. Even this abrupt tonal shift is handled relatively well until MOMENTUM director Stephen S. Campanelli (a veteran camera operator and member of Clint Eastwood's Malpaso stock company since THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY), seemingly losing interest in his own movie, wraps up the horror storyline in the most perfunctory fashion with no punch at all, then changes the focus to Walter's PTSD and his guilt over an injury that got him sent home while the rest of his platoon perished in battle. Wait, what? What the fuck does that have to with the previous 80 minutes? What happened to the not-bad Southern gothic/noir/horror mash-up that we were watching? Is this the same movie? And then to cap it off with a dedication to the "brave troops" like the whole movie was about them and bringing awareness to their concerns? (Unrated, 97 mins)
It's overlong, mostly predictable and hampered somewhat by a third act plot development that rivals 47 METERS DOWN in terms of unnecessary cruelty, but THEIR FINEST is an enjoyably old-fashioned "war at home" WWII saga that became a small word-of-mouth art house hit in the spring. In London in 1940, Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) thinks she's getting a secretarial job with the Ministry of Information's film division. With most of the men called up as the war escalates, she's actually been hired as a screenwriter after department head Roger Swain (Richard E. Grant) was impressed with some comics she wrote for a newspaper in the absence of the regular writers who were off fighting. Teaming with in-house scribe Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), Catrin's job is to come up with inspiring scripts for movies to keep the British citizens' spirits lifted amidst constant air raids and concerns, as Swain puts it, "that there won't even be any theaters left to show them." Catrin is drawn to the story of twin sisters Lily and Rose Starling (Lily and Francesca Knight) who have found a certain degree of local fame for taking their father's boat, the Nancy Starling, to rescue soldiers at Dunkirk. The sisters have embellished the story significantly, as the Ministry eventually discovers that they tried to go to Dunkirk, but their engine broke down and they were towed back before they even left British waters. It's got too much crowd-pleasing potential to dismiss, so Catrin and Tom are instructed to fictionalize it, and to also add an authoritative male figure--a drunk uncle played by aging thespian Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy)--because no one will believe that two young women took a boat to Dunkirk.
Directed by Lone Scherfig (AN EDUCATION) and adapted from Lissa Evans' 2009 novel Their Finest Hour and a Half by veteran British TV writer Gaby Chiappe (HOLBY CITY, EASTENDERS, LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD), THEIR FINEST is definitely a "they don't make 'em like they used to" kind of movie, at times playing like one of Woody Allen's period comedies, mostly pleasant and anchored by an appealing performance from Arterton. THEIR FINEST does a nice job of presenting a woman's struggle in a male-dominated job market (of course, she makes less money than her male colleagues), and her duties inevitably lead to the expected resentment of her artist husband Ellis (Jack Huston), who has no money coming in and can no longer serve because of a leg injury sustained in the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier. There's also some timeless jabs at the eternal struggle between artists and the powers that be, with the filmmakers forced by the Secretary of War (Jeremy Irons) to cast American soldier and Eagle Squadron hero Carl Lundbeck (Jake Lacy) to appeal to the US, even though he can't act and there were no Americans at Dunkirk. It's Arterton's film, but the scene-stealer is the always-outstanding Nighy, whose Hilliard is a pompous, past-his-prime egotist humbled by the sacrifices made by those around him and eager to do his part by helping Lundbeck hone his acting chops, even talking his agent down from demanding more money and better accommodations because the plucky, can-do spirit of those around him have inspired him to such a degree. It's a warm and at times touching performance that again demonstrates why Nighy is one of our great character actors. THEIR FINEST is a film that's impossible to dislike even if it's rather slight when it's all said and done, and that late-film story development is jarring but in a way that somewhat negatively impacts the film as it sets it up for some ham-fisted sentimentality near the end. (R, 117 mins)
DRONE (US/Canada - 2017)
A potentially interesting, politically-driven thriller, DRONE gets derailed when the filmmakers decide to make it overwrought and polemical, with its antagonist basically wearing a light that flashes "MESSAGE!" In Renton, WA, Neil Westin (Sean Bean) claims to be an IT troubleshooter for a software corporation. Unbeknownst to his wife Ellen (Mary McCormack) and 16-year-old son Shane (Maxwell Haynes), he's actually a CIA contractor who's part of a secret program that employs civilian drone pilots to drop bombs on suspected terrorists in the Middle East from the cozy confines of suburban Seattle, but a recent security leak threatens to expose the entire operation. Meanwhile, Imir Shaw (Patrick Sabongui) has arrived from Pakistan and leaves at least one dead body in his wake in his surveillance of the Westin family, including trailing an adulterous Ellen to a motel with a younger co-worker (Bradley Stryker) who wants to take their fling to a more serious level. Neil's also dealing with the recent passing of his Alzheimer's stricken father and can't find the words to write his eulogy when Imir shows up in his driveway under the guise of buying Neil's father's sailboat. Neil invites him in and as they discuss the boat and get to know each other, Ellen arrives home and they ask Imir to stay for dinner. As Imir starts slowly doling out his backstory, culminating in the revelation that it's the one-year anniversary of his wife and daughter being collateral damage in a US drone strike, it finally dawns on Neil that his dinner guest knows his real job and intends to avenge the death of his family by destroying Neil's.
Director/co-writer Jason Bourque, a veteran of numerous Lifetime movies, takes entirely too long to generate any suspense with DRONE. Imir doesn't even make his intent known to the Westins until the last 15 minutes, and the bulk of the film feels like a long dinner sequence in a play. The film shows its cards too soon in establishing Imir as a threat and doesn't really explore the moral complexities of Neil's job. He doesn't seem to feel one way or another about it, though his decidedly non-PC colleague Gary (Joel David Moore) serves as a mouthpiece for intolerance with his labeling drone casualties as "dune coons." Subtlety is a foreign concept to DRONE, and it's not helped by an ineffective, mannered performance by Bean, who's usually a sure thing but here, he's using a forced, overdone American accent that completely undermines anything he might've been able to do with this character. A subplot about Neil's distance from his late father and Shane getting close to his grandfather in his final days adds nothing, due in large part because Haynes is a terrible actor. McCormack and Sabongui do what they can with paper-thin characters, and even when it finally gets going at the very end, Bourque still can't resist tacking on a final scene of clunky political commentary. DRONE isn't nearly as obnoxious in its pontificating as say, THE CRASH, another thriller from earlier this year that got tripped up in political preaching and also featured McCormack, but it's still not really worth anyone's time. (Unrated, 90 mins)
