An Aaron Sorkin Double: The Trial of the Chicago 7 & The West Wing Special

"The whole world is watching!" So goes the battle cry of the crowds waiting outside the courthouse where seven anti-war protesters and a member of the black panthers were being prosecuted in 1969, in what became one of the most bizarre trials on record. It's just a shame no one's watching the film about it - at least according to Netflix's Top 10 listing. Despite an all star cast (including Sacha Baron Cohen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, Eddie Redmayne, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Rylance), Aaron Sorkin's latest verbal tsunami has gotten little to no fanfare.

The story, which deviates relatively little from what was actually said and done, sees the Chicago 7, plus Black Panther Bobby Seale, in court over whether they attempted to incite protesters to riot during an anti-war protest. Cutting back and forth between the trial and the events that lead-up to the riot, we slowly get to know each of the 7 (well, except for a couple of them, who we're told in passing are only there so that the prosecutors can seem lenient when they let them off without charge) and learn how the protest morphed into a brutal and destructive run-in with the police.

Sorkin the director is still little more than a reliable journeyman, getting the job done with clarity and efficiency, but not with much style or flair. Fortunately, we also get Sorkin the writer, who can still turn what should by rights be a prosaic exchange about a government or law into a lyrical, funny and hypnotic back and forth - one that's loaded with smarts (and a ton of exposition). 

That Sorkin's cast is full of ringers doesn't hurt: Rylance is still an understated powerhouse; Baron Cohen lets his charisma shine through, and proves he's capable of far more than he's been giving us over the last two decades; Keaton, Redmayne and the majority of the rest of the cast comfortably deliver a script that requires them to deliver lines at hyperspeed; and Langella has a grand ol' time as the deeply flawed judge of the case - although he's so sneeringly evil, he sits on the brink of unbelievability. But the real standout is Abdul-Mateen as Bobby Seale. What he goes through, and how he's treated in a court of law, ought to defy belief - but given the times we're living through, it seems all too possible an outcome even 50 years later.

7.5/10 - Despite its lack of flair, it's still worth a look.

And very briefly (well, brief-ish), a shout out for Sorkin's recent re-staging of The West Wing episode "Hartsfield's Landing". Due to the current state of the US of A, it's more exhilarating than ever to briefly live in a beautifully shot and scripted bubble where those voted into public office want to affect positive change. That said, my response to this special may be driven by the fact that I love the show with every fibre of my being, so seeing the actors take up their parts for the first time in 14-years was always going to blow my mind.

With that caveat about my blinkered all-consuming love for West Wing out of the way, it really is stunningly shot. Despite being filmed in a theatre with a relatively spare set, director and co-creator of the series Tommy Schlamme does wonders with the space, managing to cross-cut between different settings with subtle staging, and he frames and shoots much of the episode so that the show feels more cinematic than ever. That the performances aren't an imitation of what the cast did before also helps, as each actor brings the weight of time and experience to bear on their parts. The choice not to imitate is particularly true of Sterling K Brown, who fills in for the much beloved John Spencer, who died during the filming of the last season of West Wing. He has the same gravitas as Spencer, but he finds his own way into the part.

When the special airs in the UK (it's currently only available in the US via HBO Max, but discussions are underway to get it over here relatively soon), it's unclear whether they'll include the straight-to-camera segments (where there were once ad breaks) urging American voters to get out and vote. Although they can be overly earnest - which is pretty much West Wing in its comfort zone - they're also funny; particularly one in which Lin Manuel-Miranda is forced into comparing Hamilton with the glories of The West Wing.

10/10

TV Review - The Haunting of Bly Manor

 

'Tis the season of ambitious horror series swinging big... And mostly missing. There's the fitfully ingenious Lovecraft Country and its soporific central mystery; the stunningly shot The Third Day, successfully riffing on The Wicker Man, and then outstaying its welcome by an hour or three; and now we have The Haunting of Bly Manor, aka The House Where Accents Go To Die.

Loosely adapted from Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, which has been adapted many, many times, including the faultless '61 film version The Innocents, and more recently, the thoroughly mediocre The Turning back in the halcyon days of January. Its title overhaul is to tie it to showrunner Mike Flanagan's brilliantly chilling series from last year, The Haunting of Hill House. A fact that's hard to miss, given how it transplants the majority of the cast from Hill House, and sees Flanagan (and his set designer Patricio Farrell) once again building a creepy home from a scratch. Also present: a fright of ghosts (Fact of the Day: 'fright' is the collective noun for ghosts). Not so present: all that many frights.

Moving The Turn of the Screw's action from 1898 to 1987 - bringing it just close enough to the present to channel a little Stranger Thing's-like nostalgia, but not so up to the present that the story has to contend with mobile phones, which have been poking holes in horror plots from the moment they were invented - the series trundles along quite happily at first. In quick succession, we're introduced to the bright, bubbly and haunted (because of course she is) American abroad Dani, who's made the new governess at Bly; her employer, the scowling and haunted (yes, he's haunted too) Henry Wingrave; his reliable but haunted (it's probably safest to assume everyone's got a haunted vibe, okay?) housekeeper Hannah; a brooding and enigmatic gardener, Jamie; the ex-(very ex) governess at Bly Manor, Rebecca; Henry's raffish, Scottish valet, Peter; amiable chef, driver, and dogsbody Owen (who actually seems pretty chipper and non-haunted); and last but not least, the quirksome, almost irksome, Wingrave siblings, Flora and Miles.

Over the show's nine episodes, most everyone gets a solid hour dedicated to their backstory. Although the scares are rarer than in Hill House, they're no less effective when they come around. Where the torrent of jumps were in the previous series, we instead get a greater focus on slow-burn mysteries and a nicely chilling atmosphere. It's only when we get into Peter and Rebecca's soporifically tedious love story that things start going awry. Partly, because it feels like it'll go on beyond the heat death of the universe, but mostly because of over familiarity. The Turn of the Screw is an old, old tale, and plenty have liberally stolen from James' original story over the last one hundred plus years, so neither Peter and Rebecca's doomed affair, nor most of the other characters' backstories, will surprise anyone. But what really sinks the show is England. More specifically, keeping it set here, rather than shifting it across the pond. Now I should point out that I have a tin ear for accents. I could meet someone with the thickest Glaswegian accent going and I'd still ask bemusedly "So... where you from?". And I'm married to a Glaswegian. And yet even I can tell that the stiff upper lip accents being put on by most of the cast are like nails on a chalkboard, and would be deemed 'a bit much' by the Monty Python boys. But a special mention needs to go out to the worst offender, Oliver Jackson-Cohen's Peter. His supposedly Scottish accent is like listening to your 8-year-old nephew doing a bad Gerard Butler impression - but with a foghorn.

Despite these issues, and they are neither few nor slight, Flanagan still knows how to orchestrate the hell out a scare. Unfortunately, with the scares so rare over the nine-hour stretch, I'm betting many will bail before they get to some of the show's best jumps.

6/10

TV Review - Lovecraft Country - Season 1

 

Who to blame for Lovecraft Country? 

To be clear, the show isn't bad. In fact, at times, its exhilarating how well it blends racial oppression in 50s America with horror stories from the last century. But as a loose anthology, it lives and dies by how well it riffs on each episode's old school horror.

The spine of the show's story, holding its many and varied episodes together, follows war vet Atticus (Jonathan Majors), who returns home to 1950s U.S. of A. after serving in South Korea. Almost immediately, he goes in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams) with the help of his childhood friend, Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), and his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance). Between them, Majors, Smollett, Williams and Vance have more charisma than should be healthy for a person - but it's all in service to a sub-Lost mystery that drags us, again and again, away from each episodes principal horror story. It gets so bad that you end up resenting the core cast as the camera cuts back to them trying to decipher another book, chant or hieroglyph.

But when the show works, good God does it work. In its ingenious third episode, it subverts the traditional haunted house story by having the inhabitants in greater danger from those made of flesh and blood, harassing them from without, than by the tortured souls haunting them from within. In its darkly funny fifth episode, it takes a queasily graphic approach to body horror, whilst wryly detailing a strange kind of code switching. But to get to these episodes, you have to wade through a shambolic story about magicians - played by the Ku Klux Klan, but with sparkly magic - and a tonally jarring Indiana Jones adventure. 

So who's to blame for Lovecraft Country's ramshackle nature? It'd be easy to put it all on wunderkind producer JJ Abrams, who knows how to set up a show, but is less able to see a story through to the end (see: Lost, Alias, Westworld, Fringe, and the list goes on). But given that there are more than twenty producers on LC, it's hard not to imagine that that's an awful lot of people, of which more than a few must have been pulling in a different direction to everyone else...

6.5/10

Tenet (AKA How We All Tried to Stop Worrying and Went Back to the Cinema)

72-hours after seeing Tenet, I'm approximately 72% of the way to pinning down each of its temporal gear shifts, and making sense of how they fit into the story's labyrinthine whole. If you're keen to see Christopher Nolan's latest brain teaser with zero knowledge of what's coming your way, then you may want to skip this write-up, but if there's ever been a film where it's worth having a slight toehold on what's coming your way, it's this one, and there isn't anything below that isn't already in the trailers.

After passing a brutal test, our protagonist (literally styled in the credits as The Protagonist, and played with buckets of suave by John David Washington) is semi-inducted into the titular organisation. What's Tenet's role? To trace back (/forward?) inverted objects that have come from our (potential?) future, and which may herald the end of the world (and universe?) as we know it.

The introduction of inverted objects, which you can only affect if you can envision altering them in the future, rather than in the present, is head scrambling all on its own. So when the film starts throwing inverted people into the mix, you have two choices, go with it, and feel your way through the time shifts with your gut, or give up. This is neatly summed up by Clémence Poésy (offering up some Basil Exposition), who stops just short of staring down the barrel of the camera when she tells Washington: "Don't try to understand it, feel it." 

From here the film dives head long into a world of espionage, picking up characters and complicated histories left, right and centre: we learn about the villain of the piece, Andrei Sator (a very OTT Kenneth Branagh), and his wife (an archly vulnerable Elizabeth Debicki); Washington's team gains a member or two (including the eminently watchable Robert Pattinson); and Michael Caine pops up to steal the film with a single scene. Complicating matters, there are plenty of characters that are referred to but that we never meet, and yet we still have to place them and everyone else's relationships to one another within a complex chronology of past, present, future, second present inverted/reverted, and more. If all of that sounds hard to grasp, then I've done my job, because in the moment its like trying to keep a hold of a David Lynch fever dream.

Inexplicably, Nolan and his sound design team clearly came to the conclusion that all of the above was much too easy to track, so large tracts of dialogue are lost to the blast of jet engines, crashing waves, explosions, or (a la Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises) good ol' face mask garbling, as one person or another shout-blusters through their face mask, allowing us to grasp three out of every 10 words. 

Despite all of the hurdles the film places in our way - in an apparent attempt to reduce our enjoyment and appreciate it only on a coldly practical level - it's somehow still enthralling. As an action film its almost unique, with Inception being its only closest relative, and that film now feels breezily straightforward in comparison. When Tenet's temporal complexities click into place and make a degree of sense (at least on a gut level), like during a forwards/backwards car chase, it's genuinely a marvel. But just as you start to get a feel for its dizzying plotting, it throws another barrel load of names, MacGuffins and spy shenanigans your way, and doesn't wait to see whether you'll drown in them or not.

I will be rewatching it, but I suspect the revisit will highlight just how lacking the film is on a human and emotional level. Ultimately, I suspect it will be remembered as a summation of Nolan's lifelong predilection with timey-wimey-ness, and which can be summed up with Michael Caine like-fashion: 'Time. It's a funny old thing, ain't it?' 

It's either a 7 out of 10 thanks to its structural brilliance or a 4 out of 10 because the whole damn thing may be meaningless. Right now, I'm honestly not sure which...