Sunset Song (16)
Sunset Song is a splendid coming-of-age drama directed by the Liverpool filmmaker Terence Davies, and set in rural Scotland in the years prior to and during WWI. Told in a third-person narrative, it focuses on Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) the big-eyed, pixie-haired and academically-minded daughter of a farm family outside Aberdeen who is essentially caught between two men, both brutal and unreasonably demanding in their relationships with her.
Death and illness bring change to Chris’ life, she is forced to sacrifice her ambition to be a school teacher and ultimately we realise that, for her, there is only one constant, her intense love of the land.
Visually stunning and emotionally resonant, Sunset Song – it was done as a miniseries on the BBC in the early 1970s – revisits many of Davies’ regular preoccupations, most especially his interest in the theme of the strength and generosity of women in a male world.
The movie’s pacing is grand and meditative, the script is expertly shaped and at the centre of it all there is Deyn’s glorious performance. The model turned actress, who auditioned for this role, is truly a revelation. She is in practically every scene, carrying the movie with a vivid, human, sometimes understated sense of cinema, plotting Chris’ growth and emotional progress without ever seeming calling attention to it. This is a terrific performance in a very fine movie.
Christmas with the Coopers (12A)
Christmas with the Coopers, which opened on Tuesday, is known as Love The Coopers in the United States. Why did they change it.? Well, maybe they didn’t want to tempt fate because there’s very little to love in this dour, overstuffed Christmas turkey.
Diane Keaton and John Goodman play Charlotte and Sam, a long-married Pittsburgh couple whose relationship has lost its sparkle and they are planning to use a Christmas Eve dinner to inform their family that they intend to divorce. Charlotte and Sam’s young daughter died some years before and have never really recovered. But that’s not the only thing that’s wrong with them as we soon learn.
There’s enough acting talent in Christmas with the Coopers – Keaton and Goodman, Alan Arkin, Olivia Wilde, Ed Helms, Amanda Seyfried, Marisa Tomei, even the voice of Steve Martin as narrator – to make four decent comedies but director Jesse Nelson hasn’t a clue what to do with either them or the lame script.
Every Wednesday on The Right Hook, Philip joins George to talk movies and TV. Listen back to the podcast below:
