Le Samourai

I want a trench coat and I want one now.  They’re stylish and they have big pockets and they come in a range of colours (beige, et al).  But no matter how many trench coats I buy, I will never look as cool as Jef Costello, the lead character in Jean-Pierre Melville’s slick-as-mercury masterpiece, played with an unnerving microcosm of emotions by Alain Delon.  This film could not be any cooler if it died heroically while saving the planet from a coterie of evil asteroids, even if it had to endure the sub-zero temperatures of Saturn’s moons in order to meet said asteroids and ward them off. 

The plot concerns Costello, a perfectionist hit-man in 1960s Paris, who almost gets caught on the job and, having angered his employers, has to evade them along with the police.  It’s a minimalist film; shots abound of Costello standing, sitting, walking, and walking with purpose (well, this is a character who never does anything without purpose… let’s just say, ‘walking with more purpose’) but when Melville punches, he punches hard.  And all of the walking and sitting and standing around is really essential both to packing the punches, when they do come, and to creating the atmosphere of the piece, which stays with you for days after watching it.  That atmosphere has to do with what one of my lecturers would call the ‘moral centre of gravity’ of the character.  Every rain-drop, every cigarette, every neon light reflected against the pavement (and one notices such things much more when little else is happening on screen) serves the purpose of telling us that Costello is a man apart, almost an island: a samurai.  His story is compelling; his ending is remarkable. 

Three supporting characters, the Police Chief hunting Costello, and the two women who (maybe) love him, are brilliantly drawn, and highlight his sense of loneliness. 

Perhaps his trench coat will keep him warm at night.

See this movie by yourself, if possible.  It will help you get in the right mood.   

Up In The Air

Welcome to Phil's All-Positive Movie Reviews.  If there's something I don't like in a movie, you won't hear about it.  I am, by nature, a pessimist, making this blog something of an exercise against character.  I had considered starting a blog of reviews in which I rubbish the rubbish as much as I laud the laudable, but then I remembered that I want to work as a screenwriter and I'll really be shooting myself in the foot if I start picking holes in the work of people I want to work with in the future.  So I figure, if I don't say any negative stuff, no one can be offended.

For my first all-positive movie review, I'd like to turn my attention to that Jason Reitman classic, Up in the Air.  George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a travelling salesman of sorts, except what he's selling is redundancy.  He works for a company that fires people on behalf of bosses who don't have the guts to do it themselves.  And he flies cross-country over three hundred days every year to do it.  His job is, he says, "to ferry wounded souls across the river of dread and doubt and humiliation and self-doubt to the point at which hope's bright shore is dimly visible". That's from the August 2008 version of a script replete with firings and mass lay-offs; you might remember a certain GFC shaking things up in the USA around that time.  Topical doesn't even begin to describe this movie.  It's so on-the-minute, on-the-moment, so fulsome in its truths, that one could almost call it the movie about the long-term effects of financial deregulation and the flow-on consequences of the Wall Street collapse, of 2009.

Clooney puts in a magnificent performance, as do the other leads, Vera Farmiga as Alex, the possible love of Bingham's rather loveless life, and Anna Kendrick as Natalie Keener, Bingham's all-too-keen (aha, Reitman, I see what you did there.  Tip of the hat!) protege.

Up in the Air is more than a film about losing your job.  Bingham is a kind of Faust, cool and arrogant, having  sold his soul in exchange for complete freedom.  The film asks, can he get it back?  Can the high-flyer return and survive on the rich, thick oxygen of the ground?  Can anyone who chooses work over relationships remain intact?  The obvious answer is "no", and Reitman's thesis seems to be that our relationships are vital not just for keeping society intact, but for keeping our very selves intact.  The further Bingham moves into total isolation, the more his soul crumbles.  Ironically, it is his discovery of true love in Alex that causes him (and us) to realise that.  But I don't want to give too much away because you should see this movie!

Reitman is a major writer-director.  He has proven, with three excellent films thus far, that being the son of the director of Ghostbusters doesn't mean you're automatically going to become a genius, just that you're more likely to become one.