Film reviews round-up: Final Portrait, The Hitman's Bodyguard, The Odyssey, An Inconvenient Sequel

Films about artist Alberto Giacometti and Jacques Cousteau, a raunchy buddy comedy, and Al Gore's new documentary

Final Portrait (15)

★★★☆☆

Stanley Tucci, 90 mins, starring: Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer, Clémence Poésy, Tony Shalhoub, James Faulkner, Philippe Spall

Final Portrait is a slither of a film, an account of how, late in his life, Swiss sculptor and artist Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) painted a picture of American writer, James Lord (Armie Hammer.) This isn’t a biopic as such. It unfolds over a period of only a fortnight or so in Paris in 1964. Almost the entire story takes place in the artist’s studio.

Actor turned director Stanley Tucci doesn’t indulge in flashbacks to Giacometti’s childhood. Nor does he explain how or why Giacometti started sculpting those haunting, skeletal figures. Instead, Tucci concentrates on Giacometti’s relationship with the American.

It quickly becomes apparent that Giacometti has no real intention of actually finishing the portrait. Like Penelope fending off suitors in The Odyssey, he continually undoes the work he has spent days completing…and then he starts it all over again.

Geoffrey Rush has always excelled at playing highly strung visionaries. Here, with his tweed jacket, a cigarette hanging on his lip and his great shock of hair, he captures his character’s restlessness, drive and extreme insecurity.

During the film’s more bathetic moments, when he is throwing out priceless lithographs or acting up as the tortured genius, he resembles Tony Hancock as the hapless artist in the Paris garret in debunking British comedy, The Rebel.

At other times, he is closer to one of those despairing figures trying to make sense of the metaphysical meaninglessness of existence in plays by Samuel Beckett (who was Giacometti’s friend and collaborator.) Money means nothing to the artist.

He’ll throw wads of notes under the bed. He has a very devoted and long suffering wife, Annette (Sylvie Testud) but is far more interested in his lover Caroline (Clémence Poésy), a prostitute who swans into his studio whenever she likes and seems to entrance him.

He flaunts his relationship with Caroline in front of Annette. She puts up with his infidelity and untidy domestic habits. That (it is implied) is the price for living with genius.

Hammer’s American man about town is as suave as Giacometti is unkempt. The artist, though, can see beyond the young American’s outer poise and polish. As he scrutinises his sitter’s face, he tells Lord he has the face of a brute. “Side on, you look like a degenerate.”

Lord gives as good as he gets, which is one reason why Giacometti tolerates him and welcomes his company, even if he remains suspicious of his motives.

Tucci recreates the mid 1960s by shooting the film in a very grainy, desaturated fashion. He makes sure we’re aware that we are in bohemian Paris by including swirling accordion music on the soundtrack as well as one or two scenes of the artist quaffing wine at his favourite bistro.

“Oh, fuck!” Giacometti groans again and again throughout the film as he realises the work is not living up to his expectations. The sittings, which he said would last for a day or two, are extended and Lord has to keep on re-arranging his flight to America.

We catch occasional glimpses of characters close to Giacometti, his brother and his dealer among them. There are fleeting references to other artists, Picasso among them. “The man’s a thief,” Giacometti complains.

As a chamber piece about Giacometti in the act of creation, Final Portrait is intriguing enough.The paradox here is that the artist is only happy when he is working but is never happy with his work. What the film lacks is any sense of drama. Lord sits, Giacometti paints…and that’s about it.

There’s a jaunt around Paris in a sports car very badly driven by Caroline, and one or two walks in the cemetery. The artist has the occasional temper tantrum and Lord worries that he will never get home. We learn even less about Lord than we do about Giacometti. There are no new love affairs, no murders, no conspiracy. As a result, the film risks seeming as undernourished as Giacometti’s own spindly, sculpted figurines.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (15)

★★☆☆☆

Patrick Hughes, 118 mins, starring: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Elodie Yung, Richard E. Grant

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is an infantile and very violent buddy movie that rehashes ideas and serves up characters encountered in countless other action flicks. It is so crude in its plotting that it makes earlier efforts by some of the same producers like The Expendables and London Has Fallen look sophisticated by comparison.

What redeems it partially is the comic interplay between the two stars, Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, who behave as if they’re making a tongue in cheek comedy and always seem to be tipping us the wink that they know the premise here is utterly ridiculous.

Director Patrick Hughes clearly feels the same way, filling the film with bluesy rock music and love songs that both undercut any potential dramatic tension and distract us from noticing the holes in the screenplay.

Reynolds is in the same joshing form as in last year’s Deadpool. This time round, he’s not a superhero but an “executive protection agent,” which is a pompous way of saying a bodyguard. He has had his triple A rating taken away for failing to protect a Japanese client from an unseen assassin.

Jackson plays Darius Kincaid, the “hitman” of the title, a hired killer so notorious that he has been locked up in Manchester of all places. Darius is required to give evidence in the International Court In The Hague against Belarusian dictator Dukhovich (Gary Oldman), who has been slaughtering his own people and plenty of foreigners too. The question is whether Darius can reach the court alive when half of eastern Europe is out to kill him.

The hitman and the bodyguard heartily loathe each other. Both have complicated romantic lives. The hitman’s girlfriend, the glamorous but borderline psychotic Latin American spitfire and barmaid Sonia (Salma Hayek) is behind bars in Amsterdam. The bodyguard, meanwhile, blames his former beloved, Interpol agent Amelie (Elodie Yung), for the collapse of his career.

Jackson and Reynolds are like two flashy jazz performers riffing off each other, seeing who can come up with the most profanities and trying shamelessly to upstage one another. Inevitably, the more they bicker, the more they resemble an old married couple.

Also good value, Gary Oldman plays the thuggish eastern European villain as if he is a more gnarled version of his vampire aristocrat in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That film may have been shot 25 years ago but Oldman’s accent is still the same.

It’s revealing to read the end credits. After the actors’ names come those of the stunt artists - and there are hundreds of them, working in the UK, the Netherlands and Bulgaria. The CGI is variable, An early explosion, when the bodyguard is ushering a coked up financier (Richard E. Grant in a very hyper groove) to safety, isn’t at all convincing.

The chases, especially those in Amsterdam and the Hague, down canals and along Dutch motorways, are staged with enormous relish. They involve speedboats, cars and motorbikes. Plot-wise, the film makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a mystery why actors of the calibre of Jackson, Reynolds and Oldman wanted to appear in such low grade exploitation fare it but at least they give the impression of enjoying themselves.

The Odyssey (PG)

★★★☆☆

Jérôme Salle, 120 mins, starring: Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney, Audrey Tautou, Laurent Lucas, Benjamin Lavernhe, Vincent Heneine

The real journey in this biopic of French scientist, sailor, explorer and global TV personality Jacques Cousteau is into the character of a thoroughly contradictory man. This is a frustrating film because it never seems certain what story it is trying to tell.

Is it a Jules Verne like maritime adventure? Is it a family drama about a father and his estranged son? Is it an essay about the environment? Is it a portrait of a womanising narcissist who looked good with a snorkel in his mouth and flippers on his feet? The title, The Odyssey, suggests an epic voyage but the storytelling is very choppy.

What the film does convince us of is the purity of Cousteau’s original vision. Underwater diving for him is akin to flying, a transcendent and magical experience. It also shows us him as a Quixotic visionary, ready to set to sea in this boat The Calypso even if he is leaving a comfortable life behind him and never really has the financing to keep up with his dreams.

Lambert Wilson’s clever performance doesn’t just show Cousteau the explorer. It reveals him as a bit of a slick operator. Unlike his fellow pioneering divers in the so-called “Sea Musketeers” in the 1940s, he is glib and personable in public. He can sell his vision.

What may surprise British viewers who have distant memories of watching The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau on TV is how he funded his voyages. He took money from an oil company that predicted (correctly) he and his divers would help them find new underwater oil fields.

Once US TV companies started investing in his films, he risked becoming a performing seal. The serious study of marine flora and fauna, it is suggested here, was strictly secondary to providing dramatic documentaries that featured plenty of footage of sharks and exotic underwater life (and that attracted the advertisers.)

Wilson, who was once in the running to play James Bond, is better looking than the real Cousteau who used to appear on our TV screens. He portrays the explorer as a promiscuous figure who had endless extra-marital dalliances as his wife Simone (Audrey Tautou) was left to fester and drink too much on the Calypso.

She had hawked off her jewellery to equip the ship in the first place. He was dependent on her but not very loyal. Nor was Cousteau much of a businessman. As his celebrity grew, he ended up with 150 salaries to pay as well as the upkeep of the Calypso. His expenses began to outstrip his earnings.

Just as vexed as his marriage was Cousteau’s relationship with his two sons. The youngest, Philippe (Pierre Niney), is shown here as being as contradictory as he is himself. Philippe is reckless, brattish, drives a sports car and has deep-rooted abandonment issues. (He can’t forgive his father for bundling him off to boarding school when he was a boy.)

Cousteau’s acolytes are very suspicious of Philippe. In particular, lorry driver turned diver “Bebert” (Vincent Heneine) resents him. Philippe, though, is a talented filmmaker who has a streak of idealism his father seems to lack. He begins the film as a delinquent but evolves into its most admirable and heroic figure.

The Odyssey tacks off in surprising directions. Late on, when Cousteau confesses he sometimes feels he has spent his entire life “chasing after money,” the film finally begins to show off its eco credentials.

Cousteau and his followers rail against the “dictatorship of materialism;” they raise awareness about pollution and begin to sound like Al Gore and his followers in An Inconvenient Sequel (also released this week.)

For all its digressions and inconsistencies, the film succeeds on one key level. In its best moments, it induces the same sense of wonder as Cousteau’s TV documentaries. There is stirring footage here of storms at sea and divers surrounded by sharks.

Director Jérôme Salle also throws in some awe-inspiring scenery of Antarctica in all its “immensity, silence and pureness.” (Penguins put in an inevitable appearance too.) Cousteau and his son’s enthusiasm for exploring is shown as being rooted in their child-like love for such stories as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and for star gazing.

When they’re actually underwater or on the ice or gliding through the air like pilots in an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry story, all their petty feuding is quickly forgotten and The Odyssey takes on, at least briefly, a magical quality.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power (PG)

★★★☆☆

Jon Shenk, Bonni Cohe, 98 mins, featuring: Al Gore

The message hasn’t changed in the decade since former US Vice President Al Gore’s first, Oscar winning documentary about climate change. Big Al remains an impassioned and impressive campaigner. It’s hard to say how much freedom directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk had in shaping the film.

Whether it is their doing or Gore’s, the film’s structure feels artificial. It builds up to a dramatic finale at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris in late 2015. Gore is shown working heroically behind the scenes to ensure the Paris agreement on climate change is signed and that India is kept on board.

This should be the pay-off but other vexing elements keep on getting in the way. There’s the looming figure of Donald Trump, soon to become President himself and ready to pour scorn on Gore’s environmental efforts and on President Obama for taking them so seriously. (Toward the end of the film, we see Gore making a visit to Trump Tower but, sadly, the actual meeting with the man at the top isn’t caught on camera.)

COP 21 itself happens in the wake of devastating 2015 Paris terrorism attacks. Even as new climate treaties are announced, there’s a dispiriting sense that they won’t last.

Early in the documentary, Gore acknowledges that he “got really discouraged” by what happened after 2006. His first film was widely shown and sparked considerable debate - but it also provoked his opponents into trying to trash his reputation and taking to the airwaves to dismiss his “hysterical global warming theories.”

He talks darkly of democracy being “hacked by big business.” The graphs now show that the “number of extremely hot days” are becoming much more numerous. Extreme weather occurrences are described as making typical episodes of the daily news seem like a nature “ride through the Book of Revelations.”

An Inconvenient Sequel is skilfully put together. As in An Inconvenient Truth (2006), lecture material is combined with Gore’s reflections on his own private and political life. There’s footage of him out and about in Miami Beach as the water levels rise or of him meeting Republican mayors in Texas who share his passion for renewable energy.

We see him making calls to political leaders, lobbying industrialists from Silicon Valley and telling jokes at his own expense. At times, as he holds forth here about the “environment crisis” and the “democracy crisis,” he reminds us of Burt Lancaster as the preacher/mountebank in Elmer Gantry. We know exactly what he is going to say but that doesn’t stop his words from resonating.