Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus, 2011)

Chess like the mathematical and musical fields (and unlike such fields as literature which require an understanding of the world and a mature outlook) periodically produces child prodigies and there is no better example of a chess wunderkind than Bobby Fischer. Today, if asked to name a world famous chess player most people would name Fischer, if any at all. Partly this is down to his epic 1972 championship in Reykjavik as the much as the curious path his life took after 1972. Liz Garbus's documentary film follows many recent narrative documentaries such as Man on Wire or One Day In September in mixing archive footage with recent interviews with the leading players, commentators and ordinary people who witnessed events at the time.

The film follow three acts with his early years leading up to 1972, the 1972 World Championship, and finally Bobby Fischer's decline and fall from grace. It seems inevitable that his odd and eccentric upbringing could produce a chess genius such as Fischer. What is also inevitable is that that same hothouse upbringing sowed the seeds of his downfall. Having no real interests outside chess he would spend hours every day practising chess, reading chess books, playing games against himself at the age of 15 he became the United States Chess Champion. Early interviews show a diffident boy seemingly overwhelmed by the attention but also showing the first glimmers of an ultimately arrogant and difficult man. We also see that even in the early 1960s he was fascinated with the conspiracy theories that later took over his life as he talks about the dangers of radiation from TV sets and fluoridation of drinking water. This delusional behaviour became worse over time culminating in the full-scale paranoia, if not outright madness.

Never an easy man to be around he never was one to do the expected thing or follow the usual career path that those around him wanted for him. When he was readying himself for the 1972 match against the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky it was almost as if the Cold War were being fought by proxy complete with accusations of psychological warfare from both sides. Fischer seemed to resent the responsibility that he was being asked to shoulder and almost never made it to Iceland. Henry Kissinger, the soon-to-be US Secretary of State, personally intervened to try to persuade him to go. Even when he got to Reykjavik it was a moot point whether he'd meet Spassky across the chessboard. He was an hour late for the first game and failed to turn up for the second, thus automatically forfeiting the game. Two games down he pulled back his passive-agressive behaviour a little and began to win his games. This middle section is fascinating: a chess championship that made world headline news, even managing to push Watergate from the top story for a while. Fischer won the championship in typically muted fashion and refused (yet again) the done thing: the fanfare and ticker-tape parades that others may have seen as his right after his apotheosis at Reykjavik. Instead he immediately entered what the headline writers like to call "the wilderness years" where he tried to return to obscurity all the while allying himself with one crakpot idea after another. It was also around this time that the son of a Jewish mother (and probably a Jewish father) started publically spouting the virulent anti-semitism which blighted his legacy.

While watching the film I was reminded of the recent book "Perfect Rigor" by Masha Gessen about the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman, an equally eccentric genius who like Fischer gave it all up when it seemed that he could have capitalised on his recent triumph. (Perelman was awarded the $1 million Clay Millennium Prize after solving the Poincare Conjecture - he refused the prize and turned his back on mathematics.)

The question of whether it was chess that drove him mad is left unanswered. Thankfully the notoriousness of such things as his ridicule of the US at the time of 9/11 and attack on the World Trade Centre is kept at a minimum and is not allowed to overshadow his achievements on the chessboard. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said "there are no second acts in American lives." It is a tragic waste of talent.

Dying from acute renal failure and refusing life-saving medical treatment his last words were reputedly "Nothing is as healing as the human touch." He is buried in Iceland, the country where he saw his greatest triumph and which following his trouble with US immigration granted him citizenship.

It's as if Bobby Fischer's life was Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence as rewritten by Philip Roth: the chess genius who loses his mind and becomes a scabrous self-hating Jew fulminating against the world and all those in it who fail to recognise his genius.

A real American Tragedy indeed.

Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

A former CIA agent trains his daughter to become an assassin as they hide out in a log cabin in the Arctic Circle.

Here's another teenage girl with problems but unlike Fish Tank's Mia the problems are slightly more fantastical than winning a dance competition or falling in love with her mother's boyfriend.

Saoirse Ronan plays assassin Hanna, a ghostly-looking teenage girl, who we first meet killing a moose in the snowy wastes. Eric Bana plays her father Erik Heller, a rogue CIA agent on the most-wanted list since losing his German wife Johanna.

Cate Blanchett plays the villain Marissa Wiegler, an over-the-top CIA agent obsessed with oral hygiene, in a similar vein to her turn as an OTT KGB agent in the last Indiana Jones film. She wants Hanna and her dad terminated with extreme prejudice, as these assassin types always say. Tom Hollander puts in an hilariously camp turn as the sadistic Isaacs, a German nightclub owner with bleached blonde-hair and euro trash clothes, flanked by two skinheads with bomber jackets and DMs.

Is this film a fairy story dressed up as a spy thriller or a spy thriller in the style of a fairy tale? The film’s beginning is straight out of the Brothers Grimm with a fairy-tale cottage in the forest where a huntsman and his daughter live undisturbed by the outside world. Or they did until they turn on the GPS tracker so Cate Blanchett can begin hunting them down.

Like the average Bond film the action travels about a fair bit from Arctic Finland to Morocco to Germany though no Bond film I ever saw had 007 hiding out in a VW camper van with a family of Bowie-singing hippies. (Perhaps Daniel Craig should give it a go in the next one...) There's even time for some half-baked exposition about altered DNA and super assassins along the way too.

If it sounds like the proverbial curate’s egg in many ways it is but remarkably the film works which is in no small way due to Joe Wright's solid confident direction. The Chemical Brothers provide a throbbing kinetic soundtrack and the actors manage to keep straight faces throughout.

Although Hanna has a plot that strains at credibility it is a film that looks great and has style in abundance as befits the director of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement. (Like both those films it features a bravura Steadicam sequence filmed in one take - here Eric Bana enters a Berlin subway station followed closely by a few of Marissa's agents.)

It’s no classic certainly but this brilliant slice of nonsense is worth two hours of anyone’s time.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

A 15 year-old girl, Mia, lives in Essex with her sister and single mother in a council flat when an Irish security guard called Connor comes into their lives.

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank evokes the naturalism of Ken Loach’s classic Kes updated to modern day Essex. Mia, played by Katie Jarvis in her first role, is an angry out-of-control teenager excluded from school and waiting to be moved to a “special school”. The first time we see her she abuses another group of teenage girls practising a dance routine in the street, head-butting one and breaking her nose, for no real reason. But underneath all her bravado and swearing lies a scared and vulnerable child trying too hard to grow up fast.

Mia needs something to cling to in order to transcend her everyday drab surroundings. In Kes Billy Casper finds some redemption through training the kestrel. In Fish Tank Mia doesn’t find redemption although she tries to free an old horse from the gypsy encampment thinking (wrongly) that it’s being abused. Mia’s only possible escape comes from secretly practising hip-hop dancing alone in an empty flat dreaming of stardom. Her mother brings home a new boyfriend, Connor, played by Michael Fassbender who befriends her and encourages her dancing aspirations.

It’s almost hard to believe that Katie Jarvis, discovered by the casting director arguing with her boyfriend at Tilbury Town railway station, hadn’t acted before as she is truly mesmerising as Mia. Michael Fassbender is, in roles like this one and in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, steadily becoming one of the best actors of his generation.

Andrea Arnold, writing and directing, has beautifully illuminated that section of society that you don’t often see on film in anything but the most negative terms. If you took much of the output of British cinema as a barometer of the country you’d imagine it was some vast heritage site full of stately houses and vapid grasping yuppies.

The recent inner-city riots and books such as Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones have pushed the debate back again onto the front pages and the front benches of Parliament. What do we do about the generations of the disenfranchised and marginalised who have never worked for a living? Do they have rich inner lives that the middle classes are unaware of? Or do they just want to get wasted and watch reality TV? Would reading a few books help? Is the breakdown of family the real reason that a whole generation of children and young adults live their lives without hope?

A film like Fish Tank certainly forms part of this debate, though it’s not some heart-warming didactic tract about hugging a hoodie. It’s an enjoyable and sometimes heartbreaking film about a young girl trying to make sense of her world which luckily for a lot of people is a world they never have to see unless it’s in a film like this or exploding onto the evening news.

UPCOMING

Upcoming reviews include:

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010, Woody Allen)
Source Code (2011, Duncan Jones)
Of Gods And Men (2010, Xavier Beauvois)

I am also planning an article about "paranoid" cinema in the 1970s and the influence on today's cinema. Expect a lot about The Conversation, The Parallax View and Chinatown. Probably a bit about Zodiac and the TV series Rubicon.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

A Thai widower dying of kidney failure spends his final days on his farm conversing with his relatives, alive and dead, while considering his past lives.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul , was last year voted winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is based on the true story of a man named Boonmee who told a Buddhist monk that when meditating he could recall his past lives in great detail.

The long (and dialogue-free) opening sequence has a water buffalo wandering off into the forest before cutting to a long scene in a car travelling to Uncle Boonmee’s farm. Mostly filmed in medium to long shots with little or no close-ups the film has the title character’s reflecting on his past, and eager to make peace with it. As such the film is spiritual without being overly religious. Certainly Buddhist concepts such as Karma and reincarnation are discussed by the characters as are the folk beliefs of Thailand but neither is given precedence over the other. Apparent supernatural phenomenon such as the appearance of Boonmee’s dead wife as a transparent ghost are treated as normal by the characters as is the reappearance of his long missing son who returns in non-human form as a monkey spirit.

The acting by the mainly amateur cast is very naturalistic with standout performances by Thanapat Saisaymar as Uncle Boonmee (the calm point around which the other characters orbit) and Jenjira Pongpas as his playful sister-in-law Auntie Jen. The cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Charin Pengpanich is almost painterly with beautifully composed shots of the natural world.

David Bordwell, author of The Way Hollywood Tells It, has shown how the likes of Paul Greengrass in the Bourne films and others have reduced the average length of shots in the modern Hollywood film from roughly 10 seconds pre-1960 to an average range of 4-6 seconds with the average shot length (ASL) of the Bourne Ultimatum a dizzying 2 seconds. For the viewer this means a film is edited into a rapid succession of images which are constantly changing thus giving a forward momentum to the film. The detractors of this style say this reflects a culture where concentration is at an all-time low and an audience impatient with anything requiring our full attention.

In contrast to the Bourne Ultimatum’s queasy 2 seconds per shot the ASL of Uncle Boonmee is a stately 34.1. (That’s slow although not quite as slow as Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies which has an ASL of 219 seconds.) For some people the pace of Uncle Boonmee is so slow that we might feel that time has stopped dead in its tracks. There seems to have been a resurgence recently for things like slow cooking as a reaction to the way things are getting ever faster and more frenetic so perhaps a film like Uncle Boonmee is one step in the direction of slow cinema.

The film has little in the way of incident, but you find yourself adapting to its rhythms and getting drawn into its hypnotic pace. It’s refreshing to see this side of a society such as Thailand that we somehow seldom see in the cinema unless it’s used as a touch of “local colour” in a Western blockbuster. It’s sobering to think that had it not won the Palme d’Or what sort of release it would have had in Britain and the United States. We can only wonder what other hidden gems are unseen by the cinema-going public at large because they haven’t won an award or accolade.

Limitless (2011, Neil Burger)

A wannabe writer known more for his drinking than his prose enters into a Faustian pact when he becomes hooked on an experimental smart drug called NZT which increases his intellect.

Limitless is a great thriller with a wry sense of humour. When we first see Eddie Morra (played by Bradley Cooper, of The Hangover fame) he’s dressed like a roadie for Pearl Jam with long straggly hair and is immediately dumped by his go-getting editor girlfriend (Abbie Cornish). What was she doing with this loser anyway? The Inciting Incident (as Robert McKee would have it) is a meeting with his ex-wife’s brother who we infer used to be a small-time drug dealer (and might still be). He gives Eddie a clear pill called NZT which when taken increases his intellect exponentially. A few scenes later Eddie is dressed in a smart suit, with a fashionable short haircut, looking more like the suave Bradley Cooper we’ve seen in the A Team and the Hangover films. Imagine if we could all take a pill just to iron out our sartorial crimes (let alone allowing us to learn Italian in a weekend) I think the drug companies might be onto a winner...

But into each life some rain must fall... The rain in Eddie’s case comes in the form of Gennady, a crazy Russian gangster he’s borrowed some money from with which to invest on the stock market. Silly boy. (Gennady is played by Andrew Howard, an actor surprisingly from Port Talbot in Wales and not St Petersburg.) Robert De Niro has a few scenes as a tycoon called Carl Van Loon (think Donald Trump minus the comb-over) who is impressed enough by Eddie’s new-found intellect that he asks him to broker a major corporate merger. Anna Friel, playing Eddie’s ex-wife and Abbie Cornish, so good as Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about John Keats, take on the other main roles.

Leslie Dixon’s screenplay sticks (for the most part) closely to the plot of The Dark Fields, the source novel by Alan Glynn. It’s always tense when one of your favourite novels is adapted by Hollywood but this is one rare occasion where the author needn’t disown the film. (Incidentally, I still think the Great Gatsby-inspired title The Dark Fields is better than Limitless but that’s a minor quibble.) Style-wise it owes something to David Fincher’s Fight Club, as well as some visual touches from Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (I’m thinking particularly of the representation of cascading stock market figures via some clever CGI effects).

Neil Burger, previously best known for enjoyable magician romp The Illusionist with Edward Norton, has made an extremely enjoyable and stylish film with solid performances and hyper-kinetic cinematography. One of the most purely enjoyable films of the year so far, Limitless is a thriller that I can unreservedly recommend to anyone.

Vincere (2009, Marco Bellocchio)

Vincere (Italian for "Win", a popular Fascist song) is the story of the future Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's relationship with Ida Dalser, a woman who may or may not have been his first wife. They had a son together but once Mussolini returned from the battlefields of the First World War he married someone else, cut himself off from Ida and set about erasing both her and their son (also called Benito) from history.

We first meet Mussolini, played by the excellent Filippo Timi, as a moustached Marxist on the up challenging God to strike him down. When God fails to oblige he declares that God does not exist. In the aftermath of a rally he meets shop-owner Ida, played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who soon in the throes of amour fou sells both her business and home to fund his newspaper venture. We sense immediately that this will end badly. Once WWI comes along young Benito is swept up by nationalistic fervour into joining the fight and loses touch with Ida. On his return the former socialist has become a committed fascist, soon to become Il Duce. Though the emotional world of the characters, mainly Ida, is easy to follow the same cannot be said for the political and historical background which is often either muddled or simplified with too much jumping around in time at the start of the film. And why exactly does Mussolini change from the left to the far-right - was it simply political opportunism? Alas we never find out here.

The two main actors are excellent but the direction frustrates their efforts with unnecessary stylistic tics such as the "March of Time" style newspaper headlines which flash up on screen accompanied by newsreel footage of rallies, marching goosestepping Fascists and most curious of all, a line of breastfeeding lady Fascists. The disappearance of Timi halfway through the film is only explained when Timi returns towards the end sans moustache playing Benito Junior for a few scenes. Once he becomes Il Duce, Mussolini is only represented in the film through marble busts, paintings and newsreel footage, his chin jutting out arrogantly, arms tightly-folded like Les Dawson, delivering his Fascistic slogans.

The acting is never boring but it's a film more to be admired than enjoyed.

If you want to see a film about Fascist Italy I'd recommend you watch Bertolucci's masterpiece The Conformist instead.