Steve Jobs (15A)
The six main cast members of Steve Jobs should be given Oscar nominations simply for remembering their lines. The script is by Aaron Sorkin, and as you might expect, Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogan, Jeff Daniels and co. are given great gob-fuls of scorching dialogue to hurl at each other throughout the film’s 122-minute running time.
The Danny Boyle movie, which opens here on Friday, is in no sense a traditional biopic of the personal computer pioneer; it is an impressionistic inner portrait, a Shakespearian character study in three tautly constructed acts in which Jobs’s contradictions, his demons and most searing primal wounds are revealed in constantly pealing layers.
Even though Sorkin still calls himself a playwright, his film scripts never feel theatrical – that’s because his super-literate dialogue drives the pacing of his storytelling, lashing it along at a sometimes startling rate. It makes the movies urgent, vibrant, buoyant, vivid. It is, with doubt, some of the best film dialogue since Paddy Chayefsky.
Some listeners may feel they were let down by the author of A Few Good Men, The West Wing and The Social Network with his scripts for The Newsroom, but I guarantee they will be re-assured after five minutes of Steve Jobs. This is some of the best stuff he has ever written. It is structured in three, 40-minute chapters as Jobs is about to launch one of his signature products and colleagues past and present visit him, front and back stage, to discuss both his performance, and behaviour as an inventor and a human being. He is arrogant, petty, insecure and perpetually enraged, just as he is on the cusp of changing the world.
Sorkin draws from popular culture, history, and fact in a selection of those walk-and-talk sequences that characterised The West Wing, trowelling around in Jobs’ background, without ever resting on tired exposition or traditional biopic tricks. This is one of the films of the year – don’t miss it.
The Lady in the Van (12A)
It is difficult to say whether, at 81, Maggie’s Smith’s career needed a boost or not but it got one anyway with the enormous worldwide success of Downton Abbey (it was shown in over 220 broadcast markets) and the two Marigold Hotel movies all coming on the tail of the Harry Potter franchise.
Now, in The Lady in the Van, she appears in a showcase performance as a homeless bag lady who parks her dingy van in the drive of an upmarket house in Camden in London and is still there fifteen years later. The house is the property of revered playwright Alan Bennett and the script is largely built around their uncertain relationship.
Nicholas Hytner who first directed Smith in The Lady in the Van on the London stage in 1999 has said that he can’t remember why they didn’t do a film version at that time. Maybe it’s because the material doesn’t lend itself so naturally to the big screen but Smith, in eccentric mode, is always a joy to watch. Dominic Cooper, James Corden, Frances De La Tour and Jim Broadbent have cameo roles and the versatile British stage actor Alex Jennings is Bennett.
The British media is already touting two-time winner Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite) as a certain Oscar nominee this year. If she were to be nominated and scoop the award, she would be one of the oldest winners ever. Christopher Plummer is the oldest – he won for Beginners at the age of 82 in 2012; Smith would be next and she would be followed by Jessica Tandy for Driving Miss Daisy (80); George Burns, The Sunshine Boys (80) and Melvyn Douglas, Being There (79). There are several nominees who are still older than this group – Emmanuelle Riva, Amour (85) and Robert Duvall for The Judge last year (84).
The Hallow (16)
The Hallow is a fairly effective horror movie made by the Irish company Fantastic Films, with backing from the Film Board and set in the west of Ireland.
A British conservationist and his wife and child move into a millhouse near a country village with plans to re-do it while carrying out studies on the local woods. They choose to ignore a hysterical neighbour who warns them that his young daughter was kidnapped by the creatures in the forest and soon find themselves targeted by the titular Hallow. These things do tend to happen.
When the conservationist suffers a supernatural fungus infestation, things literally begin to go bump in the night. It is slow to start but the shock content increases in the second half.
Every Wednesday on The Right Hook, Philip joins George to talk movies and TV. Listen back to the podcast below:
