The Raggedy Rawney (Bob Hoskins, 1988)

Dexter Fletcher in The Raggedy Rawney

Cast: Dexter Fletcher, Zoë Nathensen, Zoë Wanamaker, Bob Hoskins, Dave Hill, Ian McNeice, Gawn Grainger, Jim Carter, Veronica Clifford, Rosemary Martin, J.G. Devlin, Jane Wood, Ian Drury, Timmy Lang, Jenny Platt. Screenplay: Bob Hoskins, Nicole De Wilde. Cinematography: Frank Tidy. Production design: Jiri Matolin. Film editing: Alan Jones. Composer: Michael Kamen. 

The Raggedy Rawney was not well-received by critics when it was released, and it's certainly messy in tone and narrative. But I found it oddly compelling, if only because it's not quite like anything I've seen lately. It's a fable with anti-war overtones about a deserter in the middle of an unspecified war in an unspecified Eastern European country. (It was filmed in the former Czechoslovakia.) Tom (Dexter Fletcher) is a new soldier who is shocked into deserting by the carnage of an attack. Lashing out and partially blinding his commanding officer (Jim Carter), he escapes into the forest where he encounters a little girl (Jenny Platt) whose family has been killed and strung up as a warning to anyone who would hide men deserting from the army. She is playing with her dead mother's makeup, and the traumatized Tom lets her make up his face and dress him in one of her mother's dresses. Scared off by the movement of troops nearby, he runs deeper into the forest, still wearing dress and makeup, where he spots a caravan of Roma. When he comes across Darky (Bob Hoskins), the de facto leader of the caravan, Tom points him toward a spot in the river where the fish are plentiful, which motivates Darky to bring him back to the group and treat him as a "rawney," a madwoman with second sight. Tom remains mute until he strikes up a relationship with Darky's daughter, Jessie (Zoë Nathensen), who discovers that he's not a woman but keeps his secret. It's a setup with Shakespearean overtones that meanders first into comedy and then into tragedy. The Raggedy Rawney marked Hoskins's debut as a director and is the only film for which he wrote the screenplay (in collaboration with Nicole De Wilde), basing it on a tale told him by his Romani grandmother. 

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)

Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday

Cast: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Dave King, Bryan Marshall, Derek Thompson, Eddie Constantine, Paul Freeman, P.H. Moriarty, Stephen Davies, Brian Hall, Alan Hall, Paul Barber, Pauline Melville. Screenplay: Barrie Keeffe. Cinematography: Phil Meheux. Art direction: Vic Symonds. Film editing: Mike Taylor. Music: Francis Monkman. 

The Long Good Friday ends with mobster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) being held at gunpoint by a character listed in the credits only as "1st Irishman." It provides a tour de force moment for Hoskins, as he registers a series of emotions -- fear, disgust, resignation, defiance, hope, and whatever the viewer can find there -- using only his face. Only the fact that the Irishman is played by Pierce Brosnan, making his film debut in a tiny role, distracts today from the moment, the still conclusion to an often explosive performance by Hoskins. He's beautifully supported by Helen Mirren as his mistress, Victoria, and a well-chosen cast. Only the rather too heavily laid on score by Francis Monkman feels like a flaw in this solid and entertaining British noir. 

Beginnings and Endings

Movie: The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980) (Criterion Collection).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix); Station Eleven: A Hawk From a Handsaw (HBO Max). 

Every actor has to start somewhere, so it's fun to see Pierce Brosnan as "1st Irishman" in The Long Good Friday, a role that gives him no lines but a couple of key moments in the unfolding of the plot. It was only his second screen appearance and his first in a theatrical film, but it's clear to see that the camera loves him. He's cast as a killer, seducing and stabbing a gay henchman of London mob boss Harold (Bob Hoskins). The plot of The Long Good Friday is complicated in the manner of such noir thriller writers as Raymond Chandler: Harold wants to go semi-straight with a property development that he bloviates will make London the capital of a new Europe, but he needs funding, so he invites a New Jersey mafioso, Charlie (Eddie Constantine), to attend a big presentation of his plans for the project. Somehow, however, things don't go as he hoped. In addition to the murder of his man Colin (Paul Freeman), Harold's mother narrowly escapes death when her Rolls-Royce is blown up, killing the chauffeur. And when he tries to take Charlie out to dinner at a pub Harold owns, it blows up just before they arrive. There's no Philip Marlowe on hand to figure out who's out to get Harold, so he has to do it on his own, with the help of his mobsters, one of whom, of course, is disloyal. The plot twists eventually involve the IRA, some stolen money, and a corrupt cop, among others. Hoskins is wonderful in the role, and the ending, in which he finds himself hoist with his own petard, is a tour de force: an extended closeup in which Hoskins's face reveals the range of emotions he's experiencing, from fear to frustration to desperation. Helen Mirren is cast as his ... I suppose "mistress" is the word, a role that doesn't give her enough to do, but she does that little bit brilliantly. 

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday (John Mackendrick, 1980)

Maid's conclusion was as much of a happy ending as the series could properly allow: Thanks to a somewhat unconvincing change of heart on Sean's part, Alex and Maddy are able to leave for Montana and their new life. For a bit it looks like Mama is going to join them, but as usual nothing she decides is set in stone. I liked the series -- it kept me coming back for more. But it needed a little more grit to offset the sentiment. Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet in earlier episodes, Angelina Pepper in the last three) is a little too winsomely precocious to be entirely credible as a child tossed around in a dysfunctional marriage. 

Station Eleven jumps 20 years ahead in its second episode, with Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) grown up and touring the pandemic-blighted landscape with a touring group of Shakespeare players. But the series keeps jumping back to the days of the outbreak, with young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) living in the high-rise apartment of Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother, Frank (Nabhan Rizwan). There's a stunning sequence in which Kirsten plays Hamlet with the company, her lines triggering flashbacks to the moment when she learned of the death of her family. This is shaping up to be a rich and often weird series. 

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Jack Conway, 1987)

Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Cast: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller, Marie Kean, Ian McNeice, Alan Devlin, Rudi Davies, Prunella Scales, Áine Ní Mhuiri, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Peter Nelson, based on a book by Brian Moore. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Terry Rawlings. Music: Georges Delerue.

The Dublin of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a nest of vipers, full of people with stunted lives, blinkered vision, and downright meanness. The effect of this is to make Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) look good by comparison, even though her life has been stunted and her vision is none too wide either. Perhaps she has had enough of the meanness exhibited by her late Aunt D'Arcy (Wendy Hiller) and by her spiky landlady (Marie Kean) and the other denizens of the boarding house into which she has recently moved, that she seems almost sunny and pleasant as if to defy them. She carries with her two icons of her past: a dour portrait of her aunt and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These images represent her efforts to control her alcoholism through self-discipline and religion, but the truth is that both only serve to make the problem worse, exacerbating her guilt when she fails at the task. In late middle age, with a small annuity and a clump of savings, she has little to look forward to, so she grasps at anything that represents hope -- or at least a surcease from loneliness -- which manifests itself as her landlady's brother, James Madden (Bob Hoskins), a stubby middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed mustache who has recently returned from the United States. He's a phony, of course, a man full of schemes like opening a hamburger restaurant in Dublin that will never turn out, and whose American career in the New York hotel business amounted to being a doorman. He latches on to Judith because he thinks she has money stashed away. She gravitates to him because he represents a wider world than she has known in her years taking care of her aunt and earning a little money by giving piano lessons. It's a bleak and unforgiving tale, spiked with a little unsavory sex -- the rivalry between Madden and his nephew (Ian McNeice), a corpulent would-be poet who sponges off of his mother, for the attentions of the housemaid Mary (Rudi Davies), whom Madden rapes when she spurns him. No one comes off well in this movie, but I couldn't help being drawn in by the performances of Smith, Hoskins, Hiller, and the others, even when their characters were at their most unlikable.

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Jonathan Pryce in Brazil

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Production design: Norman Garwood. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Michael Kamen.

I have to admit reluctantly that I'm not a fan of the kind of dystopian social satire epitomized by Terry Gilliam's Brazil and echoed in such films as Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) and the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). They seem to me too scattered to be effective as satire, too dependent on production design and special effects to connect with the realities they're supposedly lampooning. I find myself forgetting them almost once they end. That said, Brazil is always worth watching just for the performances of a cast filled with specialists in a kind of British-style muddling through even the weirdest of situations.

Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986)

Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa

George: Bob Hoskins
Simone: Cathy Tyson
Mortwell: Michael Caine
Thomas: Robbie Coltrane
Anderson: Clarke Peters
Cathy: Kate Hardie
Jeannie: Zoë Nathenson
May: Sammi Davis

Director: Neil Jordan
Screenplay: Neil Jordan, David Leland
Cinematography: Roger Pratt
Production design: Jamie Leonard
Film editing: Lesley Walker
Music: Michael Kamen

If prostitution didn't exist, the movies would have had to invent it. What profession, other than doctors and lawyers, has generated more film footage? Mona Lisa is one of the worthier films about the life of a sex worker, never sinking into prurience or glossiness, even though occasionally it did bring to mind one of the worst movies in the genre, Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), in which an LA streetwalker undergoes an Eliza Doolittle transformation from tawdry to chic in the hands of a high-class john. Here, writer-director Neil Jordan reverses the process: It's the glamorous high-class London call girl Simone who turns schlubby George, her mob-appointed chauffeur, into a fashion plate, making him a better man and unintentionally causing him to fall in love with her. We're in the realm of romantic fantasy in both films, but Mona Lisa at least creates a plausibly cruel and dangerous milieu for its story, and Simone's fate after murdering the mob boss and her former pimp is ambiguous at best. Mona Lisa is distinguished by its cast, especially a star-making performance by Bob Hoskins, who won as best actor at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. But it's Jordan's screenplay, co-written with David Leland, that gives the cast so many interesting things to say and do, especially Robbie Coltrane as George's quirky chum and Michael Caine as the sinister Mortwell.