"The Horse Whisperer" (12) Nationwide
Just as Clint Eastwood turned mushy soap into a touching love story in The Bridges Of Madison County, his fellow sexagenarian actor and director, Robert Redford cuts through the contrived melodrama of Nicholas Evans's best-selling novel, The Horse Whisperer, and fashions a visually breathtaking and emotionally involving drama. Significantly, Richard LaGravenese, who adapted Madison County for the screen, was hired as Redford's screenwriter after Eric Roth (who shares the screenplay credit) worked on the first drafts of the screenplay. The drama of The Horse Whisperer, a story of physical and emotional healing, is triggered by a shocking accident involving a truck and two 14-year-old girls on horseback. One of the girls dies; the other, her closest friend, Grace, is utterly distraught by the loss of her friend, the amputation of her own leg and the severe injuries suffered by her beloved horse, Pilgrim.
Grace's mother Annie, a high-powered and work-obsessed New York magazine editor, believes that the only way Grace will recover emotionally will be if Pilgrim somehow can be healed. Ignoring the advice of their vet, who believes Pilgrim is beyond help should be put down, Annie approaches Tom Booker, a Montana farmer renowned for his skill with horses. He gruffly advises her that he helps horses with people problems, not people with horse problems.
Working on both sides of the camera for the first time in his career, Robert Redford is aptly low-key as Booker, the eponymous horse whisperer who believes in forging a relationship between a human and a horse, to be with horses in a way that sends a message of understanding and compassion. A leisurely movie which unfolds over the course of two hours and 45 minutes, The Horse Whisperer joyfully celebrates the dignity, grace and beauty of horses - and it recalls Phil Alden Robinson's wonderful Field Of Dreams in its sincere and glowing eulogising of the simple ways and natural warmth of rural life. Redford could even be forgiven had he included the query, "Is this Heaven?" and the reply, "No, it's Montana".
Reflecting the sharp contrast between the uptight world of Manhattan and the idyllic tranquillity of Montana is the inevitable culture clash between the laid-back farmer and the uptight city editor. But it is never overplayed and the chemistry between Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas (as the editor) builds palpably. More radiant than ever before, Scott Thomas is quite superb, and the fine cast also features Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Chris Cooper and, as young Grace, the very promising Scarlett Johansson.
After years of nervy shooting for Oliver Stone, the brilliant lighting cameraman Robert Richardson delivers the most subdued work of his career in a succession of striking images, and never more so than in the changing landscape so beautifully captured as mother and daughter drive west from Manhattan to Montana.
"Metroland" (Members and Guests) IFC, Dublin The second film based on a Julian Barnes novel to be released this year, Metroland is a more interesting affair than the formulaic triangular romance Love, Etc, although it does share similar concerns - male friendships and their capacity for destructiveness, infidelity and its consequences. But Philip Saville's film, from a screenplay by Adrian Hodges, has a quirky charm and style which helps to paper over some of the cracks in its construction.
Set mostly over the course of a few weeks in 1977, with occasional flashbacks to the early Sixties and to Paris in 1968, Metroland tells the story of Chris (Christian Bale), in his early thirties, married to Marion (Emily Watson) and comfortably settled, it would seem, in suburbia. The unexpected arrival of Chris's old friend Toni (Lee Ross), proudly proclaiming that he hasn't sold out on his anti-establishment views, precipitates a crisis in the marriage, as Chris reflects on his own past and his altered horizons.
This is classic male angst territory, and those looking for three-dimensional characterisation from the female roles will be disappointed. Both Watson and Elsa Zylberstein, who plays Bale's first love in the Parisian scenes, are there largely to reflect the neuroses, libidos and self-deceptions of the male protagonists. Once you accept this perspective, though, Metroland has certain pleasures to offer. In the film's core narrative, Saville recreates the 1970s milieu with an acutely judged and sometimes witty eye for period detail - all Ritz crackers, kipper ties and awful haircuts - successfully integrated into the narrative. Bale's sense of the passing away of his youth, for example, is effectively depicted by his unsuccessful attempts to empathise with punk rock: these Sixties kids are beginning to feel their age. Metroland's use of costume and setting as an undercurrent of pathos sometimes recalls Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, although this is a much lighter and more sentimental movie, and at its best in evoking a certain kind of Englishness. But it suffers from Hodges's insubstantial script, especially his dialogue, which reduces the characters too often to predictable ciphers, and one feels that there's a better, more sardonic film trying unsuccessfully to get out.
"The Nephew" (12s) Nationwide
The Nephew employs a device familiar from several Irish-set films since The Quiet Man - the American who returns to the land of his forebears - but it's closer in spirit to forgotten turkeys like The Purple Taxi and Taffin than to John Ford's much-loved classic. The "twist" in this particular tale is that the newcomer (Hill Harper) is black, the son of a woman who left a small Irish island in scandalous circumstances years before.
Now returning to fulfil his mother's dying wishes and scatter her ashes, Harper comes into conflict with his new-found uncle, Donal McCann, a taciturn, bitter farmer who refuses to talk about the past, and encounters his mother's first love, the implausibly well-groomed Pierce Brosnan (who was also one of the film's producers). There's a bit of romance with Brosnan's daughter, Aislin McGuckin and more conflict with young hothead Luke Griffin, but it's all about as believable as Darby O'Gill And The Little People, and considerably less fun.
It's unlikely that director Eugene Brady could have done much to rescue this uninspiring material, although you can almost feel the actors losing faith as the film goes on - McCann in particular looks as if he can't wait to escape. Jack Conroy's cinematography veers alarmingly between cheesy Bord Failte-type landscape shots and gloomy, under-lit interiors which add to the overall fug of depression, and Stephen McKeon, who has done some good work on recent Irish films, contributes a score of some banality, interspersed with the worst kind of breathy Celtic pop.
"Le Bossu", IFC, members and guests onlyThe French take costume dramas very seriously indeed, but they only really work when that seriousness is not apparent on screen. Philippe de Broca's gloriously ebullient version of Paul Feval's Le Bossu (The Hunchback) recalls the light touch of Cyrano De Bergerac rather than Jean-Paul Rappaneau's subsequent, impeccable-but-ponderous Horseman On The Roof.Although Feval's name has since been overshadowed by that of Dumas and Victor Hugo, his twisting tale of chivalry, valour, hidden love and revenge was originally published in instalments in the popular press and devoured by readers in mid-19th-century France. Set at the turn of the 17th century, it has been adapted for the cinema three times already. It's not hard to see why. There's plot by the yard, of course, but the main thread concerns the humbly-born Lagardere (Daniel Auteuil) who is taken under the wing of the dashing young Duke Of Nevers (Vincent Perez) and taught the fatal fencing thrust that is named after him. When Nevers is killed by his cousin, Count Gonzague (Fabrice Luchini) Lagardere promises to avenge him and brings up his child, Aurore, (Marie Gillain) as his own daughter, believing that her mother has also been killed. The action hurtles from the alleys and palaces of Paris to the open countryside, taking in huge set-piece scenes involving balletic fencing, horseback chases and the peregrinations of an Italian theatre troupe. The constant movement and the panoramic, flamboyant cinematography counterbalance the meticulous attention to period detail evident in Bernard Vezat's sets and costumes - ensuring that the static pictorialism of so many heritage movies is avoided. There's a lot of comedy too, both in the script and the direction, with Daniel Auteuil as Lagardere proving his versatility by doubling up as an unctuous hunchback in order to penetrate Gonzague's lair, in a disguise which allows him shyly to declare his love for his, er, adopted daughter, Aurore. (No point in thinking about that too much.)Since the humour and unabashed romanticism remain rooted in period, the narrative spell is not broken by any late-20th century irony or distancing effects. A curious sense of innocence is sustained throughout. Next instalment, please.
