"Grace Of My Heart" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Dublin
One of the most agreeable surprises on the international festival circuit last year, Grace Of My Heart is much the most satisfying movie to date from writer director Allison Anders, who followed her promising debut, Gas Food Lodging, with the mess that was Mi Vida Loca and even worse, her episode in Four Rooms. Her pleasurable new film oozes affection for American popular music in one of its most richly productive periods in the 1960s.
It is set substantially in and around the celebrated Brill Building on Broadway, a hit factory which turned out a succession of memorable three minute symphonies on the themes of teenage angst and romance, and many of them were composed by the formidable husband and wife teams of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', On Broadway), Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich (Be My Baby, Then He Kissed Me) and Gerry Goffin and Carole King (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow Soldier Boy).
The film is loosely based on the experiences of the gifted singer songwriter, Carole King, who was born Carole Klein in 1942, wrote songs with Paul Simon while at college and worked at the Brill Building, collaborating with Gerry Goffin whom she later married. Despite her early success in 1962 with the single, It Might As Well Rain Until September, King did not make an enduring impact as a singer in her own right until the release of her hugely popular Tapestry album in 1971.
Grace Of My Heart features Illeana Douglas, who was so impressive in To Die For, as Edna Buxton, a Philadelphia steel heiress and aspirant pop singer who moves to New York in the late 1950s. At the Brill Building, she is taken on by a manager (John Turturro in an outrageous wig and goatee) who changes her name to Denise Waverly. There is no such thing as a singer songwriter, he tells her - "You're either one or the other". Male groups are eroding the position of girl singers, he says, and she should concentrate on her songwriting.
She turns out a string of hits while suffering several disappointments in love - with the obsessive socialist (Eric Stoltz) who becomes her co writer, a married disc jockey (Bruce Davison) and the musically ambitious lead singer (Matt Dillon) of a Californian surfing group. Dillon's character is clearly based on Brian Wilson, and while the movie credibly recreates those crazy, stoned west coast days, it flounders when it moves into A Star Is Born territory and brings the two of them together. Only at the end of the 1960s does Denise, like Carole King, make the big breakthrough as both a singer and a songwriter, and here the movie rebounds.
Grace of My Heart, however flawed its narrative, is much more substantial and engaging than the recent Tom Hanks movie on the US 1960s pop scene, That Thing You Do!, which was sweet but slight and essentially a cheery exercise in nostalgia. Crucially, where Hanks's film featured its catchy title song over and over again, Anders has assembled a superb soundtrack which pays elaborate tribute to the pop music scene of the time, as replicated in some gorgeous pastiches written by, among others, Gerry Goffin, Lesley Gore, Joni Mitchell, Dave Stewart, and best of all, Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello who collaborate on the big ballad, God Give Me Strength.
"A Self Made Hero" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Having won the best director award at Cannes for La Haine in 1995, the remarkably versatile Mathieu Kassovitz was a contender again last year, this time in the Cannes best actor category for Jacques Audiard's Un Heros Tris Discret (A Self Made Hero). The film went on to win the festival's best screenplay award for Audiard and Alain Le Henry, who based it on the 1989 novel by Jean Francois Deniau, a former ambassador, minister and member of the European Commission.
Kassovitz gives a charming, wonderfully expressive performance as Albert, the sly central character of Audiard's film which recalls Being There and The Front in its account of an impostor who becomes a hero in a war in which he has not fought. "The best lives are invented," declares the ageing present day Albert, played by Jean Louis Trintignant speaking directly to camera, at the outset before the movie begins to explore the character's chequered history.
Albert learns all about lying from his mother, who tells him that his late father died a war hero in Verdun; the boy is 12 before he learns the truth, that his father was a drunkard who dropped dead in a nearby cafe. In flashbacks we observe Albert's childhood fantasies in which he plays the hero; growing ups introverted and self centred, he persists with those fantasies in adulthood and goes to inordinate lengths meticulously to create an heroic persona for himself in the winter of 1944/45.
In his first, awkward relationship with a woman, he tells Yvette (Sandrine Kiberlain) that he is writing a novel; to this end he reads her extracts from what he claims is his work in progress but is in fact another author's work which Albert has copied down in a notebook. When it comes to his most ambitious ruse, to re-invent himself as a war hero, he goes to extraordinary lengths to research the role. After he succeeds in entering the Resistance movement, he is called upon to hold an important post in the French occupation zone in Germany.
Mirroring the grand illusions perpetuated in France at the time, Albert finds it surprisingly easy to carry out and get away with his deceptions in Audiard's clever, caustic and immensely entertaining parable which is elegantly devised as a pseudo documentary. The fine cast also notably features Anouk Grinberg as a true Resistance fighter with whom Albert becomes involved, and Albert Dupontel as the gay captain who fancies him and assists him on his journey of deception.
"Fever Pitch" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
From Escape To Victory to last year's When Saturday Comes, the history of football movies is not a happy one, and the record is not much improved by David Evans's deeply disappointing version of Nick Hornby's bestselling book. A tepid romantic comedy which bears only a passing resemblance to its source material, Fever Pitch is set over the course of the 1988/89 football season, when Arsenal won their first League Championship in 18 years. Colin Firth plays an Arsenal mad English teacher in his mid30s who becomes romantically involved with fellow teacher Ruth Gemmell, a soccerphobe who can't understand his obsession.
Firth is unconvincing in the central role, but it's hardly his fault - the part is terribly underwritten, as is Gemmill's. Hornby delivers a formulaic and not very funny screenplay, drably executed by Evans, a former TV director making his cinema debut here. Indeed, the whole enterprise is reminiscent of the sort of forgettable middle brow drama churned out regularly on British television. One of the little triumphs of Hornby's book was that it made suburban middle class angst a valid subject for entertaining writing, but this sorry effort returns it to the realm of soap and sitcom. It has also got the worst ending of any film so far this year.
"Swann", IFC, Members and Guests only
A bibliophile's treat and a perceptive character study, this literary drama, directed by Anna Benson Gyles, is based on a novel by Carol Shields. The murder of a semi reclusive poet called Mary Swann has brought the attentions of the wider book world to the small town in Ontario where she lived with her violent husband and wrote Emily Dickinson-esque poems on scraps of paper.
While her memory and work is carefully protected by the town librarian, Rose Hinmarsh (Brenda Fricker) there is an unseemly scramble to publish critical biographies of Swann one by a feminist novelist Sarah Maloney (Miranda Richardson) and the other by a comically unctuous academic, Morton Jimroy (Sean Hewitt). Each of the characters has different versions of the dead woman, and our perception of her deepens through these shifting perspectives.
Anna Benson Gyles's previous films have been biographical studies of writers and artists, and her feature debut is preoccupied with the shape of an individual life, its posthumous reconstruction by both biographers and friends - and their various motivations for doing so.
Although Maloney and Hindmarsh initially approach the life and work of Mary Swann from very different starting points and are wary of each other, they are drawn together through their appreciation of the painful circumstances of Swann's life, and the need to ward off the more vulturish interest of the professor. The strength of these performances gives depth to their (very) slowly developing friendship, with Fricker, in particular, giving a moving portrayal of the proud, sensitive Hindmarsh.
Their sympathetically observed friendship and the loving details of hand printing, paper and typography are some of the pleasures of the film; along with Gerard Packer's photography, they help compensate for the plot, which goes more than a little awry. Reinforced by Richard Rodney Bennett's heavy handed score, it all takes a melodramatic turn, with an excess of burglary and book shredding.
