Film reviews round-up: Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, Mudbound, Ingrid Goes West, Good Time

Gloria Grahame’s final days, a tale of the Mississippi soil, social media under the lens, and a chaotic crime thriller

Bell and Bening are able to convince us of the affection the actress and her lover feel for one another

Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Paul McGuigan, 106 mins, starring: Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters, Kenneth Cranham, Stephen Graham

It is an intriguing and unlikely clash of cultures: on the one hand, the Hollywood of the 1950s and, on the other, the Liverpool of the Boys From The Blackstuff era. Young British actor Peter Turner first met movie star Gloria Grahame, by then in her mid-50s, in a boarding house in north London in the late 1970s.

His book about their relationship together was published in 1987. Now, 30 years on, the story has been adapted for the screen. It’s a very poignant affair with an exceptional performance from Annette Bening as Grahame, who briefly exchanged California for a world of Alan Bleasdale and bacon butties, but it can’t quite get over the hurdles that biopics about movie stars invariably present. Prime among these is the memory of the star herself.

After such searing moments in Grahame’s screen career as having coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, or being menaced by her adored Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place, scenes of her sitting in a Liverpool kitchen making small talk with Turner’s lovable mum (Julie Walters) seem a little banal. That is part of the point of the film. We’re in the city in the early Thatcher era. Houses are boarded up. Everything seems oppressive and grey.

Bening’s performance is subtle and courageous. It gives us a strong sense of Grahame as the femme fatale from classic 1950s film noir. As a movie star in her own right, Bening has the glamour and charisma of the actress she is playing.

Sitting on the top deck of a bus or even seen against the wallpaper of a 1970s British boarding house, she still has a very obvious allure. We can understand just why Turner (Jamie Bell) falls for her even if she is old enough to be his mother.

What is most impressive about Bening is that she doesn’t hide the character’s frailty either. Director Paul McGuigan includes some not very flattering close-ups in which we see the wrinkles on her neck and hands. One is reminded of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s account of his meeting with the great star, Greta Garbo.

In the half-light, her beauty was “imperishable” but then, Bergman wrote, she “leaned over the desk so that the lower half of her face was lit by the desk lamp. Then I saw what I had not seen! Her mouth was ugly, a pale slit surrounded by transverse wrinkles. It was strange and disturbing. All that beauty, and in the middle of the beauty a shrill discord.”

In parts of the film, when she is lying close to death in an upstairs room of the Turner’s house in Liverpool, the glamorous Hollywood star is turned into a sick old lady. In these moments, Turner treats her with the same solicitude that he might an ailing relative.

We forget the sexual attraction initially so evident between them. Grahame is hyper-sensitive about her age. She hates the idea that she is a Blanche DuBois type or, even worse, an old nurse. In her own mind, she is still always the leading lady.

There is one scene in which Grahame takes Turner to California and they meet the movie star’s mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and her very caustic-tongued sister, Joy (Frances Barber). For a few moments, the film begins to resemble Sunset Boulevard or Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

As seen through Joy’s eyes, Grahame is a bit of a monster, an older woman preying on younger men. That is not how she appears for most of the film. Bell and Bening are able to convince us of the affection the actress and her lover feel for one another. There is no question of either exploiting the other.

Bening’s Grahame never forfeits her dignity, even when she is confronted with an angry scouser like Turner’s brother (a mop-haired Stephen Graham) who wants her out of the house, or when she is forced to go to elaborate lengths to hide her cancer from her lover.

Scenes which could easily have seemed grotesque – Grahame at the end of her life reading Juliet on stage opposite Turner’s Romeo as if she is still a young ingenue, or disco dancing as if he is a character in Saturday Night Fever – have an unlikely tenderness about them.

There are moments of mawkishness – for example, Grahame sitting at her mirror doing her make-up, holding a gift inscribed to her many years before by Bogart as Elton John’s lachrymose hit “Song For Guy” plays on the soundtrack – but generally the sentimentality is underplayed.

Many parts of Grahame’s story are glossed over. We see her as Turner saw her. “She needs to be with her own,” Turner is told by his family when Grahame comes to stay in Liverpool very shortly before her death.

The filmmakers don’t explain who her “own” are or offer much context about her life and career other than that “she was in lots of things in the Fifties”; “was a proper film star”; was once married to Nicholas Ray and knew James Dean.

At her frailest, she is still as mysterious as when Turner first spotted her in the boarding house. That’s what makes the film both fascinating and frustrating. We never find out precisely what took her back to Liverpool so close to her death.

Mudbound (15)

★★★★☆

Dir. Dee Rees, 134 mins, starring: Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Jonathan Banks, Jason Mitchell, Rob Morgan, Mary J Blige

Mudbound is a stirring drama with an old-fashioned feel. It’s the kind of film you could imagine King Vidor or William Wyler making in the 1940s (the period in which it is set) but director Dee Rees deals far more directly with racism and post-traumatic stress than they would have done.

She is telling the stories of two families, one white and one black, whose existences become intertwined. They’re both working on the same soggy Mississippi land. (It rains incessantly in the Deep South if this film is the measure.) They both have loved ones away at war. They’re both struggling to eke out a living.

In the grim world that Rees depicts, even an impoverished white man like the small-time farmer Henry (Jason Clarke) considers himself far higher in social standing than his black neighbours.

Henry is married to Laura (Carey Mulligan), saving her from becoming an old maid. She has reserves of kindness and empathy that he lacks. He is a dour and unimaginative man, decent enough but incapable of rising above the prejudice of his community.

His plight is contrasted with that of Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan) and his wife Florence (Mary J Blige), the black sharecroppers who are living in almost identical circumstances.

The film carries echoes of William Faulkner novels and of movies like The Best Years Of Our Lives, in which returning soldiers struggle to adjust to civilian life. It is set in a transitional period in post-war American society.

Hap’s son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) has fought in the war and come back to the Deep South with money and an independent spirit that his relatives lack. Henry’s brother Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund), has also fought and is traumatised by what he has witnessed. With shared wartime bonds, Jamie and Ronsel become fast friends, something that the Ku Klux Klan types find intolerable.

One device that Rees uses to clever effect is to have the characters express their innermost thoughts in brief voiceovers. We see the best and worst in human behaviour. There is an utterly chilling performance from Jonathan Banks (from Breaking Bad) as Henry’s racist father – a cold and brutal man who thinks of little but his own comfort and is ready to lynch any black man who steps out of line. In a very strong ensemble cast, Blige and Mulligan excel as the Mother Courage types, continually making sacrifices for their families.

There is an obvious attraction between Mulligan’s character and her brother-in-law (played in dashing but despairing fashion by Hedlund).

Mudbound is evocatively shot in a way that rekindles memories of Depression-era photography from the Deep South. Starting and ending with a burial, it is not a film with much in the way of levity or humour. Its main protagonists endure misfortune and humiliation.

The elements are against them. Their mules die. They’re swindled. Their children fall sick. They break their limbs. The short sequences set in the Second World War are brutal in the extreme. All in all, this is a film about suffering on a biblical scale.

In its own earnest way, it is very moving. Acts of decency and heroism register all the more strongly here because they take place against such a grim backcloth.

Ingrid Goes West (15)

★★★★☆

Dir. Matt Spicer, 98 mins, starring: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jnr, Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen, Pom Klementieff

Ingrid Goes West plays like a cross between Single White Female and All About Eve, re-imagined for the Instagram generation. Aubrey Plaza, who also produced, plays the heroine Ingrid, a mentally unstable, social media-obsessed narcissist. She is fresh out of the asylum.

Her recently deceased mother has left her over $60,000 and she has decided to head to Los Angeles to build a new life. Her strategy is to follow the seemingly perfect Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) on Instagram and then to befriend her in real life.

Ingrid’s behaviour is monstrous but we often end up rooting for her anyway. She lies, she cheats, she copies Taylor slavishly.

The film straddles the lines between dark comedy, psychological thriller and general portrait of a nutcase. It also has unexpected levels of complexity. If Ingrid is a sociopath with a deeply superficial approach to life, so are many of those whose world she wants to gatecrash.

In the final reel, the film becomes surprisingly grim. Writer-director Matt Spicer never simply goes for the easy laugh at the expense of either “influencers” like Taylor and her boyfriend or their slavish followers like Ingrid.

As he reveals, they are dependent on one another and the lines between them and their followers are surprisingly thin. The satire here works so well precisely because it is so accurately observed. Counterpointing the self-obsessed vanity of Ingrid and Taylor, the film features a very likeable performance from O’Shea Jackson Jnr as Ingrid’s sweet-natured, Batman-obsessed landlord, Dan Pinto, and benefits from a memorably obnoxious one from Billy Magnusson as Taylor’s sleazy monster of a brother, Nicky.

It also points in highly ironic fashion to the healing power of celebrity. If you are desperate, suicidal, sick or impoverished, all you need to cure yourself is for your latest post to go viral.

Good Time (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 102 mins, starring: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Taliah Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi, Necro

The Safdie brothers’ crime thriller Good Time is a chaotic, wildly inventive but increasingly self-indulgent affair. It takes its tone from its wayward main character, Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson). He’s a low-life criminal whose attempts to improve his situation invariably make it worse. Pattinson plays him in a febrile fashion which rekindles memories of Robert De Niro as the delinquent Johnny Boy in Mean Streets.

As he has already shown in films like Maps To The Stars and Childhood Of A Leader, Pattinson has always been a far more quirky and interesting actor than his past as teen heartthrob star of Twilight might suggest. This is his most distinctive performance yet, one which combines comic elements with desperation and low cunning.

Connie has a mentally handicapped brother, Nick (Ben Safdie) to whom he is utterly devoted but whose life he continually manages to sabotage. Nick is like Lennie in Of Mice And Men, dim-witted but strangely lovable.

When Nick is arrested and then hospitalised after a bungled bank robbery, Connie goes to extreme lengths to rescue him. There is a superb scene with Connie and his girlfriend Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh) trying to get the bondsman to post the bail so that Nick can get out of jail. They don’t have the money.

They don’t have a credit card that works. It’s late in the evening. That doesn’t put off Connie in the slightest. As ever, the more he digs, the bigger the hole he creates for himself.

The narrative becomes increasingly improbable and the film risks becoming a glorified shaggy dog story along the lines of one of the McDonagh brothers’ films. Dark humour and extreme violence are thrown into the mix willy nilly.

Connie ends up breaking into an abandoned amusement park with a teenage girl and another petty gangster in tow. You can’t fault the energy of Josh and Benny Safdie (who co-directed), their visual ingenuity or their humour, but Good Time is random and haphazard in its plotting.

You have the sense that the filmmakers, like Pattinson’s ne’er-do-well anti-hero, are winging it, making it all up as they go along.

Kenny (12A)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Stewart Sugg, 86 mins, featuring: Kenny Dalglish

This documentary about Celtic, Liverpool and Scotland football legend Kenny Dalglish doesn’t just deal with the Glaswegian’s glittering football career. It also looks in depth at the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters and how profoundly they affected Dalglish.

An intensely private figure, fiercely suspicious of the media during his time as Liverpool manager, Dalglish speaks here more openly than in previous interviews. He reveals that the then Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie rang him after The Sun had published its notorious front cover, with its banner headline “The Truth”, alleging Liverpool fans picked pockets of victims at Hillsborough and “urinated on the brave cops”.

MacKenzie told him The Sun “had made a mess of it” and asked what could be done to help. Dalglish responded that the newspaper should start by acknowledging that the paper had lied. MacKenzie said he couldn’t do that – one reason why The Sun was shunned in Liverpool.

The Scot’s wife Marina (ever the romantic, he took her out for fish and chips on their first date) features prominently in the film, as do his children. In the documentary, Dalglish is still guarded but emerges as a reflective, perceptive and dryly humorous figure with an intensely competitive streak.

The film also makes it clear why Dalglish is so respected in Liverpool. It is as much for his courageous and sympathetic behaviour in the wake of Hillsborough as for what he achieved on the pitch.

89 (PG)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Dave Stewart, 87 mins, featuring: George Graham, Tony Adams, Amy Lawrence

The second football-themed documentary released this month is a rousing account of how Arsenal won the league title in the final game of the season in 1989, defeating the all-conquering Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield. It was a wildly improbable victory.

As Amy Lawrence, the journalist and fan who produced the film, makes clear more than once, the moment that Michael Thomas scored the winner stood for defying seemingly impossible odds in any circumstances in your life.

The players involved, as well as celebrity fans like writer Nicky Hornby and comedian Alan Davies, appear on camera. Manager George Graham emerges as a dapper and astute figure. Graham may have been a taskmaster on the training ground but was very clever both in his man-management and his recruitment.

One of the most emotional responses here comes from future Arsenal striker Ian Wright, who watched the game on TV on the south London estate where he grew up. The late David Rocastle (who played that night) had also grown up there and the entire estate treated the victory as if it was their own.

89 strikes a nice line between sporting bombast and self-deprecating humour. It evokes the period in witty fashion, making frequent references to video, music and fashion from the era. The film also puts the Arsenal victory in context, pointing out that the match took place barely more than a month after the Hillsborough tragedy.

This may have been one of Arsenal’s greatest moments but it was still only a football match.