Hey folks, Harry here... Anton Sirius is back with another look at a pair of Toronton International Film Festival releases. I've been quite curious to see Tom Hardy in Brian Helgeland's LEGEND about the Kray Brothers. Anton tends to be a bit down on the film, but I've dug more of Helgeland's work than I've disliked... how about you? You'll also find a review for CHEVALIER, but let's get to Anton!!!
Legend (2015, directed by Brian Helgeland)
Tom Hardy has been on one heck of a roll the last few years. LOCKE, THE DROP, MAD MAD: FURY ROAD... in all of them, he's delivered outstanding and varied performances. It's no wonder that when someone wanted to make a Kray brothers biopic they turned to Hardy to portray not one of the twins but both of them.
Unfortunately, that someone ended up being Brian Helgeland.
If you don't know the back story, the Krays were London's preeminent gangsters during the '50s and on into the swinging '60s. Reggie was the charming sociopath while Ronnie was the stone psychopath, but between their natty threads and the famous elbows they rubbed against at the various clubs they owned, they became celebrities in their own right. It's an ideal framework for a biopic: violence, glamour (British spelling, if you please), political scandal, their story covers a lot of territory and provides a wide canvas on which to work. I mean really, this should have been a slam dunk.
You can't pin the film's failings on Hardy. His Reggie is smooth, smiling and confident, even when he's bashing in someone's face with brass knuckles. He moves like a panther, and while he loves the spotlight and respect he gets from the thin veneer of civility he wears like another suit, he loves the blood and the filth of the street even more. He knows who and what he is, even as he tries to hide it from the world. It's astonishingly good work in a career that rapidly filling up with astonishingly good work.
His Ronnie though... good God. If you told me they shot Ronnie's parts months before Reggie's so that Hardy could lose weight in between, I'd believe it. Ronnie seems bigger and blunter than his brother, a kick to the ribs instead of a knife sliding between them. It's in some ways the less showy role, as Reggie is the 'talker' of the two, but Hardy clearly didn't see it that way. When Ronnie is on his meds, he's vicious but also a bit of a goofball. When he's off them though, rage and paranoia consume him and turn him into a true monster. In essence, Hardy isn't just playing two people, he's playing three. Partway through the movie, I realized that I could tell which version of Ronnie was on screen simply through his body language, or the particular inflection of a word. There was no “Oh crikey, Ronnie's stopped taking his meds again” dialogue telegraphing his mental state to the audience with all the subtlety of a hammer to the back of the skull. It's all on Hardy to communicate, and he does it with a look and the tightness of his jaw. Frankly, it's genius.
Which is why it's so damn frustrating to watch Hardy just killing it in service to a soggy, cliched, formulaic, weak-ass film. Do you like unnecessary voice-over exposition and wafer-thin secondary characters that would be a better fit for Monty Python's Piranha Brothers sketch? Do you enjoy seeing the talents of people like Christopher Eccleston, David Thewlis and Paul Bettany wasted? Then LEGEND is absolutely the film for you, and you can have it.
Perhaps the person most ill-done-by is Emily Browning. As Reggie's wife Frances, she gets to go from stereotypically doe-eyed teenager to stereotypically faded pill-popping housewife and does it as well as anyone probably could, managing to sneak in a bit of depth with an occasional wry smile or flashes of surprising backbone, but the narration she's saddled with is just impossible to salvage. Let me put it to you this way: Frances' narration, on multiple occasions, works in the title of a Rolling Stones song, just in case you couldn't otherwise figure out where and when the film was set. There's nothing like a film telling you inside the first minute that it thinks you're an idiot to really get you to invest in it.
Hardy's performances make LEGEND worth checking out, because they're really that good, but otherwise keep your expectations very, very low.
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Chevalier (2015, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari)
Sometimes a film will trick you. It starts rolling and you anticipate it going in one direction, but instead it just wanders off somewhere else. That's neither good nor bad, mind you, assuming you can shake off that anticipation and just take the movie for what it is. Human brains are always looking for patterns, whether in numbers or in narratives, even when they're not actually there. It's just a thing that happens sometimes if you watch enough movies.
That was CHEVALIER in a nutshell for me. I thought it was going to zig when it was zagged, and in the end it was a thing that happened.
Six men – middle-aged, well-off, related by blood and business and marriage and friendship – are finishing up a diving holiday aboard a luxury yacht. Stuck on the boat together for days now and starting to get on each others nerves, they begin playing a game intended to take them to the end of their voyage, the “Best At Everything” game. Each will judge the other, based on whatever criteria and in whatever categories they see fit, and whoever has the most points by the time they return to Athens wins a signet ring, a “chevalier”, for their pinkie finger.
Now, with that set-up and especially considering that they spend the first part of the film anchored near what appears to be an abandoned, desolate resort hotel, I found myself expecting some sort of toned-down SALO or perhaps a modernized DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGOISIE, a scathing metaphorical indictment of the Greek upper classes who play mad games while the country goes to hell. Nope. Instead, CHEVALIER is a fairly sedate comedy of manners whose target is the ever-fragile male ego. As the game gets underway, they dive into the minutiae of each others lives and personalities. They scrutinize what they eat and how they eat it. They criticize clothing, hair, health and singing voices. Each of them gets eyeballed while they sleep, with attention paid to posture, undergarments (if any) and snoring. They hold contests to see who can skip rocks the best or perform domestic tasks around the ship the fastest (not, of course, the most efficiently or precisely, just who can blow through their chore the quickest. Men. Whaddaya gonna do, right, ladies?) They even judge the size and endurance of their erections. By the time they've returned to Athens, they are so in the throes of the game that leaving it without a decisive winner would be unthinkable. They remain on board the docked yacht, calling and making excuses to their families (before analyzing someone's poor choice of ring tone) and preparing to see things through to the bitter end.
There are certainly a few funny moments in CHEVALIER, as well as a liberal sprinkling of homoerotic teases, and it's not like middle-aged, self-important masculinity isn't a rich vein to mine when it comes to comedy. The intrusions of the yacht's crew, who get sucked into the game too as they try to guess who will win and even play favorites, provide a solid counter-point to the shenanigans of the six contestants for the ring while also highlighting the class distinctions between them, as any comedy of manners worth its salt will do. But the film never goes for the jugular. Its main characters are, for the most part, amiable and sympathetic rather than being worthy recipients of a humbling that never arrives anyway. By the time they disembark and head home, one of them triumphantly wearing his chevalier, I was left wondering what the point of it all was.
Rather than the echoes of Pasolini or Bunuel I briefly hoped for, what I got instead was the European arthouse version of WILD HOGS, only with spear-fishing instead of motorcycles and no Tim Allen or John Travolta. Oh well. I guess that's better than a European arthouse version of it STARRING Travolta and Allen...
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