Tag: Colin Firth

Kursk: The Last Mission

Posted on by victorfraga

Submarine dramas can make good movies. Witness the huge success of Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981), both in Germany, its country of origin, and worldwide. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the submarine, the dangers lurking beyond its walls, attacks from above and the sinking of ships by the successful crew, the tensions of men thrown together in a small space make for good drama.

Yet submarines are also travelling coffins. If all goes well this type of life must be exciting and adventurous. If it does not, death in a submarine is like being buried alive. For the unfortunate crew of the Kursk, a major Russian nuclear submarine, in August 2000 this was their fate. After an onboard explosion, the Kursk was trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea, and after a delay, during which it was believed that some crew members could have been saved, it became apparent that all 118 crew members had died.

Even superficial online research shows that the precise nature of the accident on the Kursk and the possibility of rescuing the crew are very much disputed. This is not to support the Russian government in any way. The Kursk disaster became a byword for the cruelty and inefficiency of Putin’s government, which refused foreign help to rescue crew members. The incident caused a storm even within the Russian media, normally well controlled.

This movie takes up these themes. The obsolescence of so much Russian military equipment after the collapse of the Soviet system is revealed. The clamp on a diving vessel that would have allowed, through a specific hatch, the crew members to escape in decompressed conditions can’t be attached because it is too worn out, due to inadequate maintenance. The desperate families of the sailors are kept in the dark about what is happening to their loved ones are told lies and half-truths. One desperate woman is sedated by agents in a meeting because she is becoming embarrassing to the presiding naval officers. A foreign helping hand is declined and even when the nearest Russian admiral relents and calls on the services of a nearby British naval officer (Commodore David Russell, played by Colin Firth), he is promptly dismissed, and his post taken by a substitute.

The movie attempts to depict the suffering of the men waiting to be rescued. Here is where submarine drama kicks in. Matthias Schoenaerts (Mikhail Averin) does a brave job trying to keep up the morale of his men. He undertakes an incredibly long, underwater dive to release hatches trapping other crew members. Magnus Millang (Oleg Lebedev) tells silly jokes about polar bears and is generally the funny man in the desperate situation. The men bang pipes and walls of the submarine when they think they are going to be rescued. They have one last feast from ship’s rations before they die.

Their women – especially Léa Seydoux (Tanya Averina) – hold meetings, desperately trying to harry the authorities to be open with them. The lives of the crew’s families are depicted which includes a colourful Russian Orthodox wedding with cheerful singing and feasting afterwards, contrasted with the dull, Soviet-style flats in Murmansk where they live.

All this is well done and convincing. We get great performances from big beasts of the cinema such as Max von Sydow (Vladimir Petrenko), acting as a craggy, patriarchal Admiral, a faithful servant of the state, who will not be moved by the distress of the families. He takes little Misha’s (the captain’s son; Artemiy Spiridonov) refusal to shake his hand after his father’s funeral in his stride. Colin Firth (Commodore David Russell) is exactly right as the compassionate, but stiff upper-lipped, British naval officer.

Having said all this, at two hours this movie is a bit long. We know what the fate of the sailors will be. This undermines the tension of the submarine drama. Much of the drama in the submarine is pure speculation. Some think that their rescue was virtually impossible. Others maintain that, harsh though it was, Russia’s refusal to allow foreign powers to access a top-secret nuclear submarine was only to be expected. In similar circumstance the British and American governments might well have taken the same attitude. Nuclear warfare is a zero-sum game for everyone.

Kursk: The Last Mission is in cinemas and digital HD on Friday, July 12th. On Netflix in February.

The Happy Prince

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Opening, closing and running intermittently through this drama detailing Oscar Wilde’s final years is one of his best known children’s stories, The Happy Prince. It’s worth reading the story before seeing the film (it’s easily found online). The prince has died following a sheltered and pampered childhood and has been made into a statue covered in gold leaf and adorned with three precious stones. In the course of his friendship with a sparrow, the statue gives away his gold leaf and precious stones to poor people with the sparrow’s help and the sparrow dies. Statue and sparrow become the two most cherished things in the eyes of God.

An historical note: alongside achieving considerable success as a playwright in late British, Victorian society, Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensbury who was the father of Wilde’s lover Alfred Bosie Douglas. His legal action exposed Wilde as homosexual and led to two years in prison on charges of sodomy and gross indecency. This was how Britain dealt with being gay – or, as it was called, “the love that dare not speak its name” – back then. After his release, he left England in order to travel in Europe but he was a social outcast, his career had been destroyed and he died penniless. Only in 2017 was Wilde pardoned as one of around 50,000 men criminalised in their day for committing homosexual acts which have since been decriminalised.

The film has proved something of an odyssey for actor and star Rupert Everett who was fascinated enough by the man to write a spec script about Wilde’s final, post-prison years. It’s a highly personal affair which has taken some 12 years to bring to the screen and it’s hard to imagine anyone other than its writer and star directing it, no mean feat when you’re playing the lead role at the same time and appearing in 95% of the film.

As an actor, Everett inhabits Wilde’s skin and totally draws you into his character and world. You feel a mixture of empathy and disdain towards him. Yes, he’s badly treated by object of his affections Bosie (Colin Morgan) but manages to almost alienate Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), the one friend who sticks with him and, as we read at the end, paid off all Wilde’s debts after his death.

He completely abandons his wife Constance (Emily Watson) and two sons as well. Constance gets very little screen time, hardly any of it in her husband’s presence, but Watson commands the screen whenever she appears. Wilde himself aside, she’s the only character subjectively portrayed in the narrative. At one point she appears like a spectre in Wilde’s room. Shortly afterwards, he receives a telegram to say that she has died.

Colin Firth is apparently an old friend without whose encouragement Everett doesn’t think he could have made the film. Here he plays Reggie Turner, an old friend of Wilde’s who sticks with him through the bad times.

Elsewhere the film is populated with an amazing array of actors, among them Béatrice Dalle as a music hall type café owner who’ll take no nonsense, Anna Chancellor as a former admirer of Wilde when he was a successful playwright but now forbidden to talk with him by her brutish husband, Ronald Pickup as a judge and, right at the end, Tom Wilkinson as an Irish Catholic priest. All of which might have been terribly embarrassing, but Everett demonstrates a superb casting sense and the various actors fit their roles well.

In addition to Wilde’s own children who are peripheral to the proceedings, the parade of characters also includes a Parisian rent boy and his younger sibling, the latter hooked on hearing the next episode of Wilde’s eponymous, orally communicated children’s tale. That story might be seen as having echoes in the latter part of Wilde’s life with its obvious fall from grace and its protagonist’s move from a cosseted social position to one where he sees the world much more clearly from his new vantage point. However, every time you try to pin the narrative down to such a parallel, it doesn’t really fit: it’s somehow bigger than that.

The whole thing is an arresting portrait of a messy life in its final downhill spiral. While Everett doesn’t shy away from the gay subject matter, he never descends into titillation or showing us flesh for flesh’s sake either. Wilde may well have been a literary and artistic genius, but if this interpretation is correct he could be a pretty difficult human being at the same time. Everett doesn’t whitewash that in this warts-and-all portrait and his film feels all the better for it. If his performance as the man is striking, his abilities as a writer-director impress more in this tour de force.

The Happy Prince was out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 15th. It’s out on VoD on Monday, October 15th.

The Mercy

Posted on by victorfraga

The true story of amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst is indeed fascinating, and the subject of The Mercy. He attempted to complete the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in 1968 to disastrous results. He constructed his very own boat, a 40-foot trimaran named Teignmouth Electron, in reference to the seaside town where he lived with his wife Clare and four children in Devon. Unfortunately, his watercraft wasn’t entirely fit-for-purpose, and Donald didn’t have the amount of experience required for such dangerous endeavour. His motivation was a cash prize, which would aid his ailing business and family.

This is a complex and intriguing film about the duel between human resilience and fallibility, between cowardice and braveness. Donald Crowhurst (played by Colin Firth) never accepted giving up as an option, instead resorting to lying. He departed on the last day allowed by the rules, October 31st, meaning that the preparations were rushed and unfinished. He immediately encountered technical issues with the sailing equipment and his lack of open-ocean sailing skills became too apparent. Crowhurst provided deliberately ambiguous reports of his location, raising false hopes for victory back in England, where Clare (Rachel Weisz) and his children awaited anxiously his return, with a wet hanky in hand et al. The media transformed him in some sort of national hero, unbeknownst to them that the coordinates provided were entirely false.

Crowhurst eventually shut down his communications with the intention of loitering in the South Atlantic for several months while his competitors continued their journey past the Cape of Good Hope and around the world. He planned to falsify his navigation logs in order to pretend that he too had engaged in the ambitious quest of sailing across the globe. He then realised that his mammoth task was unachievable, and so he lost his grip on sanity. Death became inevitable. Crowhurst ended radio transmission on June 29th, and his boat was found adrift and unoccupied two weeks later in the North Atlantic. It’s not clear whether Crowhurst slipped into the sea or committed suicide.

Ultimately, this is a film about masculinity, in a world where men are discouraged from recognising defeat. Firth does a good job is his delivery of the inept sailor and troubled male. But nothing beyond that. He’s neither passionate nor electrifying. And the chemistry with Weisz is lukewarm, at best. The film tries to be a little Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), with a sense of isolation that morphs into self-delusion and hallucinations (Crowhurst even talks to an apparition of his wife, just like in the Russian movie). There’s also a touch of Polanski’s first feature Knife in the Water (1962) – the difference is that Crowhurst grapples with his imaginary demons, while the characters of the Polish film fight with very real people. But The Mercy has neither the hypnotic photography of Solaris and nor the pervasive tension of Knife in the Water.

The Mercy is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 9th. It’s out on DVD, BD and digital download on Monday, June 4th.