Jackie

Another solo viewing for Cecil, this time in a fairly busy Glasgow Film Theatre

Cecil says: I have to say I thought Natalie Portman was excellent in the role of Jackie Kennedy in Jackie. I haven’t really enjoyed her acting or her parts in other films I’ve seen, but for me she captured the mood perfectly of the former First Lady through her first week or so of grieving after JFK’s death.

This film is all about bereavement, especially when your loved one was in the public eye, so it won’t be a barrel of laughs you’ll get when you see it.

I chose to go to see Jackie on a gloomy afternoon in Glasgow at the exact moment Trump was being inaugurated as the next President of the USA. It seemed a poignant moment to see a film like this, and while the Kennedy Beautiful People were potentially the start of everything (the ‘swamp’) Trumps says he wants to get rid of in Washington, there’s something about the values JFK stood for that feel a million miles away from what we have in America today (and I mean today 20 January 2017, not 19 January and the eight years previous to this day).

It was also an appropriate time to watch Jackie, as the added burden of being the widow of the head of state meant she had to vacate the White House pretty damn quickly, with no period of grace the Obamas have just had. So we watch how the removal guys move in and Jackie lives with fears of being destitute in the future (as, we are told, happened to Lincoln’s wife after he was shot). It’s all very well knowing that she would end up with a multi-millionaire, but at the time, that would have been a major concern for her personally and for her kids.

The film cuts constantly between the journalist who has been sent to write a feature on Jackie and his interview with her, the flashbacks of her memories from the fateful day (plus a rather interesting TV broadcast she did to show the American people the inside of the White House back in 1961), and the practicalities of organising the funeral, what form it should take and how to protect the kids.

Billy Crudup was good as The Journalist (Theodore White, though he is never named), but this film is all about Natalie Portman, and she is surely in line for an Oscar nomination for this performance.

Apart from the horrific moment of JFK being shot in the head, though, this is not a tear-jerker or heartstring puller. Maybe that is the numbness of grief, or maybe it is because the whole story is really the telling of the tale for the journalist, who inevitably takes away the emotion from the copy.

Whichever it is, Portman is good; LBJ comes across as heartless and power-hungry, and Bobby Kennedy as a protective brother-in-law who is all too conscious of how things will look in public. “They’re blaming me for getting LBJ sworn in in Dallas”.

To go home from this to watching Trump getting sworn in, I felt more grief sitting in front of my telly than I had in the cinema. Hats off to Portman, though, for this one.

Oh, and final shout out for John Hurt, who played the Irish priest admirably. So good to see him back on the big screen. Great to see there are roles for him still, and long may that continue.

***.5

Silence

Cecil saw this one solo at the Waterfront Cinema in Greenock

Cecil says: Looking at Martin Scorsese’s filmography, I realise I haven’t been to one of his movies for over 30 years. He’s not a prolific director, but he’s just not my type, usually, so After Hours was the last Scorsese I had seen before Silence.

I have to say Silence is beautifully filmed (in Taiwan, by the way, not Japan, where the story is set) and the storyline reaches epic proportions, with its nod to films like The Mission or The Piano in telling of Europeans heading to far off shores in various spiritual quests.

The film opens in 1633, with young Jesuit zealots wanting to head off from the sanctuary of their friary in Macau to try to find Ferreira, who has gone AWOL over in the Far East, where the Japs are cracking down on Christians.

I suppose we are meant to empathise with the two young protagonists and to share their hopes of saving souls over there and finding their lost brother. But I found it hard to care really what happened to them, and rather hoped that the Japanese would find them out in order to preserve their own local culture. I found myself wondering how the film might have been shot by a Japanese director, looking at how locals felt about these foreign invaders trying to influence their society.

It’s only about an hour into the story when we first hear a little of what the Japanese authorities’ thinking is on the Jesuits. But when Rodrigues finds himself face to face with the Inquisitor, the Japanese head honcho is portrayed more like a sort of mediaeval Joker character out of a Batman film. I guess Scorsese needed to do that for his American audience.

A scene shortly after that, when the Rodrigues is paraded through the town as a prisoner felt like a 21^st century version of a 1950s western, when the Injuns have captured the film’s hero and he is being prepared for the pot or the scalping stake. Made me wonder how American audiences – especially the Trump supporters – would view a scene like this?

Of course, this is Portugal (well Portuguese Macau), not America, but these are Christian heroes trying to spread the Truth to the far east, so surely they are the goodies?

Well, I’m not sure that really was Scorsese’s message.

The character who comes out of Silence the strongest is Ferreira himself – played by Liam Neeson. He is more grounded as the new Buddhist monk he has become; he is a pragmatist, and has bought his survival with a virtually normal life in compensation for sacrificing his ‘faith’.

I had to wonder also if someone forced on Scorsese the very last scene of what lay in Rodrigues’ hand as his body was laid to rest. No spoiler here, either, but it felt trite to me, and not very believable.

I’m not really sure why the film is called Silence. It’s true, there are many scenes with no soundtrack and the protagonists need to stay silent in order not to be found, though the opening and closing scenes sound as if they have a background noise of cicadas or frogs chirping in the undergrowth. And it reminded me that the only place on earth I ever experienced total silence was the North Pole. But that has nothing to do with this film.

It’s a marathon, too, by the way. Be prepared for 2h40m of your life to be spent watching this one.

***