DVD Reviews: Midnight in Paris | Tyrannosaur

Published on Monday 6 February 2012 00:00

The Scotsman film critic Alistair Harkness reviews the latest offerings on DVD.

Midnight in Paris

Warner Bros, £19.99

Tyrannosaur

StudioCanal, £17.99

WOODY Allen’s Midnight in Paris is almost proof that if you throw enough things at a wall some of them are bound to stick. Revolving around a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter whose ultimate fantasy of being a novelist in 1920s Paris comes true, it’s a rare high point in a relentlessly prolific career that has, of late, been on a fairly steady downward spiral. Though hardly groundbreaking, its surface charms do come tinged with a strain of melancholia as it explores the relationship we have with the past. This comes out via its protagonist Gil (Owen Wilson), whose nightly visits to a literary past allow him to interact with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. As Gil gets to live out his dream, however, he gradually comes to realise that incessantly pining for a bygone era is blinding him the value of what’s going on in the present – something Allen turns into a little meta-commentary on his relationship with his own fans who constantly yearn for a return to the form of whichever era of film-making they deem his best. It’s all held together with a wondrous central turn from Wilson, whose very un-Allen-like loveability makes him a brilliant Allen-substitute.

There’s a great central performance in Tyrannosaur that would almost make it worth checking out too, were Paddy Considine’s debut as a director not so relentlessly unwatchable. That performance is delivered by Olivia Colman, who is best known for her comedy work in Peep Show and Rev, but here showcases a dramatic transformation that’s as startling as the one pulled off by Cathy Burke in Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth. Which is to say, she plays a horribly abused woman with dignity, grace and compassion while another respected actor-turned-director exorcises his demons by speciously piling on misery upon misery. Considine wastes no time setting out his kitchen-sink aspirations, having a drunk kick his pet dog to death. This is Joseph (Peter Mullan), a violent working-class alcoholic whose attitude is quickly challenged when he meets Hannah (Colman), a childless Christian woman whose faith is only just keeping a lid on the horrors of her respectable-seeming homelife. Considine builds the film around their mutual bond of hopelessness, but his overbearing instinct for crude melodrama undercuts anything honest and true in the performances.

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