Reviews: War Horse | Margin Call | Magic Trip | Tatsumi

Our film critic takes a look at some of this week’s new releases...

War Horse (12A)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily WAtson, Tom Hiddleston

Rating: **

THE National Theatre production of Michael Morpurgo’s young adult novel about a boy whose beloved horse Joey is enlisted for service in the First World War is, by most accounts, a technical wonder that dazzles audiences with sheer how-did-they-do-that? chutzpah. The everything-is-achievable nature of modern big-budget filmmaking, however, ensures that Steven Spielberg’s film version is already at a disadvantage: in choosing to tell the story straight, there’s really no way to disguise its silliness on the big screen – except, that is, by cranking up the melodrama, layering on the sentimentality, exploiting its epic sweep and hoping that the resulting false sense of they-don’t-make-them-like-that-anymore nostalgia will act like blinkers. That it will for many people is down to Spielberg’s ability to deploy his considerable craft in the service of plucking our heartstrings rather than finding a genuine way to make us cry (as he did with E.T.). The emotions he elicits here certainly feel cheap; having made his horror-of-war movies, he literally serves up the Disney version here with an animal-on-a-perilous journey tale that uses the blank-faced nobility of its titular star to underscore the futility of war and remind us that, deep down, we’re all really the same. Thanks Joey!

Margin Call (15)

Directed by: JC Chandor

Starring: Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany

Rating: ****

WITH investment bankers generally caricatured these days as braces-snapping moustache twirlers, Margin Call takes the brave step of trying to humanise the men and women most directly culpable for the financial crisis. The debut effort of writer/director JC Chandor, it revolves around a Lehman Brothers-style investment bank and the handful of employees who are frantically trying to figure out a skin-saving plan of action in the full knowledge that the bubble is about to pop in a very public way. Zachary Quinto is our way in: a super-bright junior risk analyst who, acting on a tip from of his just-fired boss (Stanley Tucci), figures out that the bank’s toxic assets are about to destroy the company. It’s set over a fraught 36 hours, and Chandor uses the ticking-time-bomb structure to crank up the tension, but his non-judgmental approach also does a good job of tapping into the psychological pressures and skewed morality of the brokers and analysts, with his cast – Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany in particular – providing the requisite delicate shading. It’s certainly a far more trenchant treatise on the culture of greed, arrogance and head-in-the-sand complicity than Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Magic Trip (15)

Directed by: Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood

Rating: ***

LIKE his 2008 Hunter S Thompson documentary, Gonzo, Alex Gibney’s latest film explores a drug-guzzling 1960s literary radical: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey. Unlike the wide-ranging Thompson film, however, Magic Trip smartly narrows its focus, exploring Kesey’s life through the prism of his 1964 road trip across the US with the Merry Pranksters in a multicoloured school bus. That trip was mythologised in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test in 1968, but Gibney’s film offers a fascinating corrective to Wolfe’s legend-enhancing tome by reconstructing the journey from the hours of film footage and audio recordings made by Kesey and his fellow Pranksters en route to the World’s Fair in New York. Their aim was to see what the future would look like, though the irony that this film does a good job of underscoring – particularly as the Pranksters are greeted like visitors from outer space – is that Kesey and co were the future, albeit briefly: within a few short years their tie-dye fashions (the casual invention of which is caught on film here), use of hallucinogens and open antiauthoritarianism helped give birth to the counterculture.

Tatsumi (15)

Directed by: Erik Khoo

Voices: Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Tetsuya Bessho, Motoko Gollent

Rating: ***

AS BIOPICS go, this film about pioneering Manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi deserves some credit for originality.

A sort of animated portrait of the artist as a young man, it is adapted from Tatsumi’s manga memoir A Drifting Life and combines biographical details with adaptations of five of his short stories to give a sense of how the former infused the latter – and vice versa.

Growing up in post-Hiroshima Japan, Tatsumi idolized Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka and worked hard to emulate him, but after starting to have some success of his own, he tried to develop a darker, more adult style that would allow him to tell stories reflecting the everyday horrors and disappointments of real life.

Known as gekiga, the subsequent movement was responsible for bringing mature themes and images, and a more realistic drawing style to manga – something the film reflects in both its sparse, downbeat animation style and provocative, twisted story-lines, which veer from bleak, graphic tales about nuclear holocaust, to misogynistic, sexually explicit vignettes about incest and beaten-down men.

Understandably, this limits the film’s appeal, but the Tatsumi-narrated autobiographical scenes are quite moving.