The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

Cast: Scott Glenn, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen, William Morgan Sheppard, Royston Tickner, Michael Carter. Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on a novel by F. Paul Wilson. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: John Box. Film editing: Dov Hoenig. Music: Tangerine Dream.

Could the 210-minute cut of The Keep that Michael Mann originally submitted to Paramount really have been a better film – or even a good one? Because the 96-minute version now available on the Criterion Channel is a hopeless mess, incoherent and only mildly provocative in what ideas it seems to contain about good and evil. The story of its muddled production, the result of studio interference and the death of a key member of the crew, visual effects supervisor Wally Veever, has been widely told. Even its fine cast, which includes Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McKellen, can’t save it. Glenn, who is one of those actors who make almost any film they’re in better, is oddly cast as some kind of superhero named Glaeken Trismegistus, who instead of setting to work immediately dealing with the monster called Radu Molasar (Michael Carter), spends time bedding Eva Cuza (Alberta Watson), the daughter of the professor (McKellen) brought in to solve the mystery of the keep, the fortress constructed to contain Molasar. Moreover, the professor and his daughter are Jewish, but the SS commandant (Byrne) who has taken charge of the keep doesn’t mind pulling them out of the crowd waiting to be sent to a concentration camp: He’s losing too many Nazi soldiers to the monster. Yes, there’s the makings of a good horror thriller in the film, and there are those who claim to find it in what exists, by filling in its many blanks. But I can only dismiss this as a rare failure by the director who gave us such exceptional films as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), and the first movie (and one of the best) to feature Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter (1986). Talk about bouncing back!

 

All Is True (Kenneth Branagh, 2018)

Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in All Is True

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Kathryn Wilder, Lydia Wilson, Hadley Fraser, Jack Colgrave Hirst, Sam Ellis, Clara Duczmal, Alex Macqueen, Gerard Horan, Nonso Anozie. Screenplay: Ben Elton. Cinematography: Zac Nicholson. Production design: James Merifield. Film editing: Úna Ní Donghaíle. Music: Patrick Doyle.

Not much of All Is True is true; most of it is extrapolated from the scraps of documentation we possess about the life of William Shakespeare and turned by screenwriter Ben Elton into a domestic drama about the playwright's last years. It might have been called Shakespeare in Retirement. In Elton's imagining, Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh hidden beneath a prosthetic nose and forehead) has left London after the Globe burns down during a performance of Henry VIII, which was also known as All Is True. He goes home to Stratford to mourn his son Hamnet, who had died many years earlier, and to plant a garden in his memory. Reunited with his wife, Anne (Judi Dench) and his daughters Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and Judith (Kathryn Wilder), he is plunged into various family difficulties. Susanna's husband, John Hall (Hadley Fraser), is a stern Puritan who, as Shakespeare says, would like to close the theaters from which the poet made his fortune. In fact, Susanna may be cheating on her husband and have contracted syphilis, as a scene in which she orders mercury -- then a treatment for the disease -- implies. Judith is a sulky 28-year-old self-declared "spinster," who resents her father for his preference for her dead brother. Eventually she marries Thomas Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), only to find out that he has impregnated another woman, whereupon Shakespeare strikes Quiney from the will in which he has also left Anne the "second-best bed." (A real Shakespeare conundrum that gets a sly explication in the film.) It turns out that Shakespeare thought Hamnet to have inherited his gifts on the basis of some poems the boy supposedly wrote, when in fact Judith was the author of the poems. And though Hamnet was said to have died of the plague, the truth comes out that he committed suicide when Judith threatened to expose her authorship. The preposterous melodramatics of the screenplay and the plodding direction by Branagh fatally undermine the film, which has occasional good moments. There's a scene in which Shakespeare meets the Earl of Southampton, the beautiful youth of the sonnets now grown old, that's mostly a showpiece for Branagh and Ian McKellen as Southampton. Branagh/Shakespeare recites Sonnet No. 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes") and McKellen/Southampton repeats it. I think the scene was intended to introduce a frisson of homoeroticism, but it's not strong enough. Still, there's pleasure to be had in hearing two great actors speak Shakespeare's words. 

The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003)

The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001

The Two Towers, 2002

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood in The Two Towers

The Return of the King, 2003

Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and Ian McKellen in The Return of the King

Frodo: Elijah Wood
Gandalf: Ian McKellen
Aragorn: Viggo Mortensen
Sam: Sean Astin
Pippin: Billy Boyd
Merry: Dominic Monaghan
Legolas: Orlando Bloom
Gimli/Treebeard (voice): John Rhys-Davies
Arwyn: Liv Tyler
Elrond: Hugo Weaving
Gollum (voice and motion capture)/Smeagol: Andy Serkis
Bilbo: Ian Holm
Saruman: Christopher Lee
Galadriel: Cate Blanchett
Boromir: Sean Bean
Eowyn: Miranda Otto
Theoden: Bernard Hill
Denethor: John Noble
Eomer: Karl Urban
Faramir: David Wenham
Haldir: Craig Parker
Wormtongue: Brad Dourif

Director: Peter Jackson
Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair
Based on a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cinematography: Andrew Lesnie
Production design: Grant Major
Film editing: John Gilbert (The Fellowship of the Ring), Michael Horton (The Two Towers), Jamie Selkirk (The Return of the King)
Music: Howard Shore

There is a clarity of narrative and action in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings that seems to me to be lacking in the blockbusters that have followed in its sizable wake, even those that have been scaled down for serialization on television, like Game of Thrones. (And even, I might add, in Jackson's own attempt to expand J.R.R. Tolkien's much more modest novel The Hobbit into a similarly epic film trilogy.) Some of this clarity lies in the source, in Tolkien's vividly characterized and shrewdly plotted novel. But Jackson and his team also display an ability to stage action sequences like the Helm's Deep scenes in The Two Towers and the assault on Minas Tirith in The Return of the King while both keeping things exciting and making sure we know where the characters we most care about are in the thick of things. Too often, especially in recent superhero films, the big battles of action movies seem to be either taking place in the dark or are simply a blur of quick cuts, with the revelation of who's up and who's down taking place after the dust clears. In The Lord of the Rings, there's a logic to what's taking place, and an awareness of peril and triumph that threads through the action. This is the more to the good because Jackson makes us care about Tolkien's characters, even the ones who seem less vulnerable or lovable than the small beings who bear the burden of the Ring. I think the special effects have begun to show their age: The group shot of the fellowship, for example, in the first film in the trilogy, feels awkwardly tricksy, with the hobbits and the dwarf obviously "pasted in" along with the human-sized characters. But the great vast project of bringing Tolkien's book to the screen remains a landmark and a stunning success.