Southpaw ***

The hype surrounding Antoine Fuqua’s boxing movie has been extraordinary ever since publicity shots of Jake Gyllenhaal’s drastic physical transformation were released earlier this year.

The result is somewhat less impressive; it’s an unoriginal redemption story; pumped-up, flashy and overly sentimental.

Gyllenhaal plays Billy Hope, the world light-heavyweight champion – a dedicated boxer and committed husband and father. After attending a charity event with his wife(Rachel McAdams) Billy is taunted by an upstart fighter which leads to a brawl and an accidental shoot-out in the hotel lobby. Things get worse and after turning to drink and drugs, his life spirals out of control until he joins a gym run by Titus Willis (Forest Whitaker) – Billy tries to convince Whitaker’s wise-mentor character to train him and turn his life around.

The narrative arc of a boxing or fighting movie is very well-worn and it’s not just that Fuqua is aware of the genre conventions, he actively doesn’t want to do anything adventurous with them. It's strikingly shot - the frame glimmers with blood,sweat and dazzling floodlights - and occasionally the film approaches an interesting thematic idea - the idea being that Hope is a man without any emotional control, he is full of rage and pathos but the only way he can beat his nemesis is to transcend this pain and loss. But the film always seems to circumvent any depth in favor of a nonsensical 'revenge without vengeance' subtext.

The problem is largely due to the empty melodrama that surrounds the fight sequences. In Raging Bull it seemed as though the drama was in a state of permanent tension and aggression whether Ray LaMotta was in the ring or at home. Southpaw has an unsatisfyingly soft and mawkish centre partly mitigated by its central performances – all of which are strong.

Self/Less(2015)**

Self/Less, or more appropriately, Wit/Less is an identity switching sci-fi drama starring Ben Kingsley as an ailing billionaire property tycoon called Damien Hale. In need of a solution to save his dying body and preserve his brilliant mind, Hale seeks out a futuristic treatment whereby his consciousness is implanted into a younger, fitter body – this being Ryan Reynolds – but is the body just a hollow vessel grown in a lab or does it have memories of its own?

Mistaken identity and conspiracy are well-worn science fiction ideas drawn most notably from Philip K. Dick’s venerable canon of work, but Tarsem Singh’s picture instead seems to be reworking riffs from already rehashed movies such as The Island(2005), The Butterfly Effect(2004) and Unknown(2011) as opposed to something like John Woo’s superior identity thriller Face/Off(1997) or Spielberg's Minority Report(2002). What begins with an enjoyable body-shock premise – which initially sees Hale using his newly acquired health and physical allure to party and attract girls – after the first reel loses any sense of ingenuity in favour of a bland sub-Bourne chase narrative. Ben Kingsley adds presence and gravitas to the surrounding emptiness of the drama and Ryan Reynolds tries hard with the material he is given, but the end result is an unnecessarily long and ludicrous one.

Testament of Youth(2015) ***

Based on the memoirs of writer and feminist Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth was a highly acclaimed, important and tragic account of the impact of The First World War. While much of the war literature at the time was dominated by male voices – such as war poets; Sassoon, Graves, Kipling and Edward Thomas – Vera Brittian’s powerful memoirs, published in 1933, provided a revolutionary female perspective that would become the most essential and radical piece of feminist war literature for years to come.

In James Kent’s film, Alicia Vikander plays Vera Brittain, a young woman determined to pursue education and overcome the social limitations of being female at the time. Studying for her entrance exam, she plans to read English at Somerville College at Oxford – to the reluctance of her father who is troubled by the expense, but ironically, and frivolously, buys her a piano with the intent that she simply stays at home and plays it. Vera has other plans, and her parents perhaps underestimate her drive, intelligence and ability to succeed. 

The drama centres around Brittain, her brother Edward(Taron Egerton), Roland Leighton(Kit Harrington) and Victor, played by Colin Morgan – all giving engrossing and sensitive performances. Vikander in particular is excellent; playing Brittain with fragility but also understated strength and self-belief – it’s a performance that truly draws you in. 

However, her time at Oxford does not go smoothly; after a complicated relationship develops between Vera and Roland, war breaks out and all three men are called up to serve on the front lines in France. Vera subsequently becomes more and more exposed to the horrors of war and subsequently abandons her education to volunteer as a nurse.

James Kent’s film is emotionally charged, but the most nuanced moments are the most affecting. There’s a scene in which Vera’s father, played well if used only peripherally within in the drama by Dominic West, sees his son Edward off on the train as he leaves for the western front. Vera thinks she sees her father looking at a train timetable, but realises that he’s trying to mask the fact that he is overwhelmed with emotion – it’s an incidental scene that illustrates more about the tragedy, torment and loss in war than many of the more obviously overwrought sections of the film try to accomplish.

In many ways it’s hard to fault Testament of Youth because it is so clearly made with good intentions – it’s directed with consideration and precision, detail and care – but it’s all too well-mannered; a little too respectful, a little too polite and safe. Kent knows how to compose a striking image on-screen and gets strong performances from his actors, but it’s all too polished, too refined and occasionally, too sanitised.  

Gone Girl(2014)

****

In the late eighties and nighties, Michael Douglas was the go-to star for portraying the victimised man.  Both Fatal Attraction(1987) and Disclosure(1994) explored a subversion of traditional gender roles – the central male characters at the mercy of powerful, intelligent and manipulative women; masculine impulses, both sexual and professional, are punished by the cunning femme-fatal antagonists.  

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a thriller of mind games and manipulation. Drawing interestingly from his own canon of work, there are echoes of the procedural style of Zodiac(2007) and the twisted game-playing narrative of Se7en(1995), but his trademark acuity and attention to detail seems more precise and glacial than ever before. Rosmand Pike plays Amy, the inspiration for “Amazing Amy” – the central character in her parent’s successful line of children’s books; married to Nick Dunne,(Ben Affleck) a generic, if sleazy, American husband who runs a bar with significant financial support from his wife. Then Amy goes missing from the family home under strange circumstances – furniture knocked over, traces of blood in the kitchen – police speculation points to homicide. At the same time another narrative thread plays out involving Amy’s diary entries which run parallel with the central story.

The film proceeds to set up an investigation plot into what actually happened to “Amazing Amy” but what initially appears to be a dark, hard-edged thriller becomes increasingly bizarre and satirical.

Gone Girl explores the distinction between fiction and reality, but more importantly, the fear of marriage; the pressure of expectation and the pursuit for the appearance of perfection.  Flynn’s screenplay meticulously presents these ideas but the significant focus is upon the roles played in married life - it is this idea which is most interesting. Amy is initially perceived as the victim and Nick the perpetrator but these roles are constantly reversed and transformed throughout the drama, and running through it, is an intelligent satire on TV news that sets up Nick as a symbol for man-hate and abusive husbands. Rosmand Pike gives her strongest performance to date; capturing Amy’s complexly mercurial, calculating, deranged character with an icy execution. 

The film then takes an unusual generic shift from serious crime thriller into overcooked, erotic thriller-cum-exploitation potboiler. In one scene Fincher not only nods towards Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas and recreates an explosively violent moment that could have been drawn almost directly from Basic Instinct(1992). In the end Gone Girl becomes less of an intense thematic exploration into marital dysfunction and dishonesty and instead lurches into the realms of enjoyable exploitation film-making – it is an intensely riveting and atmospheric drama.