Film reviews: Making Marie Antoinette | Children of the Wicker Man | Ghosts: The Possession of Button House
Making Marie Antoinette offers an insightful look at a much-misunderstood movie, writes Alistair Harkness
Making Marie Antoinette (12A) ★★★★
Children of the Wicker Man (N/A) ★★★
Ghosts: The Possession of Button House (PG) ★★★
“It’s counter to my personality to shoot a documentary,” confesses the late Eleanor Coppola in Making Marie Antoinette. “I’m basically a shy person and I hate to intrude.” That may be so, but it didn’t stop her making arguably the greatest behind-the-scenes film about filmmaking when she chronicled her husband Francis Coppola directing Apocalypse Now in Hearts of Darkness. Her quiet disposition is also partly why this posthumously finished documentary following her daughter Sofia Coppola on the set of her much-misunderstood/soon-to-be re-issued 2006 film Marie Antoinette proves so insightful.
Unguarded and unvarnished, the film deftly transforms what could have been a tender home-movie-style peak behind the curtain of a big production into a deceptively candid meditation on creativity and gender expectations in the film industry. Time and again Coppola’s roving camera catches the exasperating way her daughter has to politely push back against well-meaning male collaborators to protect her vision for the film, yet her diary entries also reveal resentments and frustrations of her own regarding her place in this talented clan. It’s a fascinating film in this way, with a sweet coda: in 2016, aged 80, Eleanor Coppola became the oldest woman in history to write and direct her first feature film.
Though it sounds like a cash-grab sequel to Robin Hardy’s folk horror cult classic, Children of the Wicker Man is actually a slyly titled documentary by two of Hardy’s seven children as they try to make peace with the fact that the initial failure of 1973’s The Wicker Man destroyed their family. A recently unearthed cache of documents charting the film’s production is the catalyst for half-brothers Justin (who died unexpectedly in August) and Dominic (who grew up in Canada) to retrace their father’s footsteps through the film’s legendarily chaotic shoot and beyond. Granted, what emerges may feel a little amateurish in places, but their still-raw personal perspective on the fall-out from its initial failure – Hardy subsequently abandoned his family – makes for a rare glimpse into the terrible cost filmmaking sometimes incurs.
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Based on the beloved BBC sitcom, Ghosts: The Possession of Button House re-unites the cast for a family-friendly supernatural adventure just in time for Halloween. Revolving around a group of disparate spirits who’ve grown bored with being stuck in the dilapidated stately home of the title with no humans to haunt, the film – which works well enough without any prior knowledge of the show – kicks off with a group of teens breaking into the soon-to-be-redeveloped Button House for some spooky kicks with a ouija board, only for the ghosts to realise that the ouija board actually works and they can temporarily take possession of the living.
As a nefarious plot to raze Button House comes to light, most of the subsequent laughs come from co-writer Simon Farnaby’s deceased and trouser-less MP trying to navigate 21st century life in the guise of a troubled foster kid (Scott Ellis Watson). But the rest of the returning cast get goofy moments of their own in a gentle movie that delights in its own daftness.
All films are in cinemas from 23 October; Making Marie Antoinette is on selected release from 23 October and available to stream exclusively on Mubi from 6 November
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