Jake Gyllenhaal

Life

29/03/17

A spaceship visits a distant planet and discovers an alien life form. At first the crew are delighted, and they bring it aboard to study it in more detail. But as the creature begins to grow in size and cunning, they realise that they have invited something deadly into their midst. Pretty soon, they are involved in a desperate struggle for survival as the alien begins to pick them off, one-by-one…

Okay, who thought I was talking about Alien? There are startling similarities here and with Alien Covenant soon to hit big screens across the country, I can’t help feeling that Daniel Espinosa’s film, Life, has chosen a really unfortunate release date. Handsomely mounted though it is and blessed with considerable star power, it nonetheless can’t help but invite comparisons with its more famous cousin.

Here, the space ship in question is the International Space Station and the extraterrestrial life form (dubbed ‘Calvin’ by some well-meaning kids back on earth), has come via a soil sample from Mars. At first, it’s an innocuous scrap of fluff that responds weakly to heat and light. Science officer Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) quickly falls in love with the thing and starts conducting a few casual experiments on it. Before you can mutter ‘bad idea,’ it’s free from its incubation pod and is growing bigger and more vicious by the second. Captain Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson) is faced with the daunting task of trying to contain it aboard, rather than let it escape to earth where it will wreak untold havoc. She’s aided and abetted by Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sonada and Olga Diovichnaya as the other members of the crew. Clearly no expense has been spared here. The space vistas are  superbly rendered and the constant gravity-free environment is convincingly conveyed – apparently they used wire work rather than the infamous ‘vomit comet.’

I’ll be honest and say that there’s quite a lot to admire here (not least an unexpected switcheroo, that actually has me shouting out loud at the screen), – and Calvin is undoubtedly his own beast, with a particularly revolting method of seeing off his prey – but try as I might, I can’t rid myself of the notion that a salivating xenomorph might lurch out of the shadows at any moment. If the Alien franchise didn’t exist, I’d doubtless be upping the stars on this a couple of notches, but as it stands, this feels like an unfortunate rerun of a good idea. And no matter how polished it is, that’s never quite enough.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Nocturnal Animals

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05/11/16

Nocturnal Animals is a spiteful little film, full of bile and petty score-settling. Beautifully styled and well-acted throughout – with a stellar cast of cameos supporting the leads – this film feels like a tragic waste of talent, a plethora of artistic skill funnelled into a project with a vacuum for a heart. The worldview here is warped. The whole thing – not just the inner story of Sheffield’s novel – feels like a sterile revenge plot, the work of an embittered soul with sadistic tendencies.

Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a successful but miserable art dealer, trapped in an unhappy marriage where her riches mean nothing; her life is a hollow shell. When she was young, in grad school, she was briefly married to a different man, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), and he was the true love of her life. But Susan was too greedy, too bourgeois, too much like her mother, to appreciate the creative sensitivity of a man like Edward: she wanted the trappings of a middle-class life, and didn’t support him in his artistic endeavours.

Nineteen years later, a manuscript arrives on her desk. It’s a proof copy of Edward’s novel, soon to be published. It’s dedicated to her, and it tells the tale of a couple just like them, brought to life for us on screen as Susan reads compulsively. The protagonist, Laura (Isla Fisher, styled to look exactly like Adams), is raped and murdered, along with her daughter. Clearly, Edward is still a long way from getting over Susan’s rejection of him.

It’s an ugly, mean-spirited story from start to finish, with a deep misogyny at its core. From the freak-show fat women of the opening credits to the gratuitous nastiness of Laura’s death, it’s lacking any sense of proportion – or of charm. Nor does it work as a study of the dark side of humanity; it’s all too petty and too personal for that. And it’s boring a lot of the time too, all ponderous shots of people in baths, and endless scenes where Adams gasps, startled by what she’s read, adjusts her glasses, then picks up the book again. The novel’s plot is pretty turgid too: after the initial excitement of the murders, it’s a rather dull procedural, where we know exactly whodunnit, and so do the police.

Seriously, this is a disappointing film. It looks fantastic and the cast is a dream-team by anyone’s standards (Adams and Gyllenhaal are joined by Michael Shannon, Laura Linney, Michael Sheen and Andrea Riseborough, among others) but, ultimately, this just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

2.5 stars

Susan Singfield

Southpaw

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06/08/15

Jake Gyllenhaal is always an interesting actor and, in Southpaw, he’s pulled off yet another transformation, piling on the muscle and jettisoning his good looks to play light heavyweight boxer Billy Hope; indeed, it’s hard to believe this is the same actor who gave us the creepy, emaciated ambulance-chaser he portrayed so brilliantly in Nightcrawler. We first meet Billy as he grimly holds on to his title belt in a bruising, bloody confrontation with a much younger fighter. The boxing sequences don’t really compare with the mesmerising, almost dreamlike sequences in Scorcese’s Raging Bull, but they’re nonetheless realistic enough to make the more sensitive viewers wince. But fate is waiting in the wings for Billy. When his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams) is accidentally shot dead in a fracas at a charity event, Billy finds himself on a slippery slope downhill as, in quick succession, he loses his licence to fight, his home is repossessed and his daughter, Leila (a winning performance from Oona Lawrence) is taken by child protective services. This is all harrowing stuff and director Antoine Fuqua mines it expertly for maximum distress; at several points I find myself tearing up. Can Billy ever find redemption and rebuild his career? Hey, is the Pope a Catholic?

It has to be said that from this bleak first third, the film enters a very familiar trajectory as Billy teams up with washed-up-boxer- turned-trainer, Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), who quietly guides his protégée back to the top of his game. (Anyone who’s seen Rocky, will know the form. In that film, Burgess Meredith did pretty much the same with Rocky Balboa.) Whitaker manages the role with his customary skill and there’s a surprisingly decent turn from 50 Cents as a mercenary boxing promoter (who ironically declared his own ‘strategic’ bankruptcy recently – is this where he got the idea?).

Maybe Billy’s fall from grace is a little over the top – could anybody as successful as Hope fall quite so fast and quite so hard? And maybe his path back to championship fitness in just six weeks is a little too easy, encapsulated as it is in a perfunctory training montage. But nevertheless, the final confrontation is compelling enough to keep you on the edge of your seat till the final count.

All in all, this is decent entertainment with a distinctly gloomy edge.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Nightcrawler

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2/11/14

A nightcrawler is not, as you might suppose, a lower form of verminous insect that comes creeping up through the cracks in the floorboards after you turn the light out. It’s a term for those members of the paparazzi who drive around LA in the small hours of the morning, listening intently to police band radio in the hope of finding some horrible disaster that they can film and then sell the footage to one of the many independent TV news stations that flourish in the area. So, the two things are pretty much in the same arena as far as appeal goes.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a mildly-spoken loner who spends his time trolling the streets, stealing scrap to sell to unscrupulous dealers, someone who thinks nothing of clubbing a security guard unconscious in order to avail himself of the man’s watch. When he chances upon a car crash, he sees Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) a dedicated nightcrawler, filming the carnage. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ announced Loder, gleefully. When Lou subsequently overhears him making a deal to sell the resulting footage to a TV station, he thinks he’s found a new career, so much so that he hires a down-and-out called Rick (Riz Ahmed) to be his ‘assistant.’ He then locates a willing buyer for his ‘art’ in the form of Nina (Rene Russo) a TV news producer who is happy to accommodate his grisly footage and doesn’t ask too many questions about how he came by it. Then Lou becomes obsessed with getting to accident scenes before the police arrive…

Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut is a mesmerising tale of darkness and dismay, in which the only honourable characters are sidelined in favour of the kind of grotesque, venal scum that seem to be completely unhindered by any degree of humanity. Gyllenhaal, in what must rank as a career best performance (and I’m including Donny Darko and Brokeback Mountain here) somehow manages to transform himself from handsome young lead to malevolent creep, simply by losing a few pounds and slicking down his hair. Bloom is a magnificently repellant character, someone who talks in self-help video cliches, somebody who smiles sweetly but harbours, beneath his calm exterior the cold reserve of a true sociopath. Gyllenhaal manages to achieve the impossible here; you will find yourself rooting for Lou even as he makes your skin crawl.

While we’re handing out the accolades, it’s great to see Rene Russo eschewing her usual lightweight persona and firing on all cylinders as the (almost) equally repellant Nina. When she defines her ideal film clip as ‘a white woman running down the street screaming with her throat cut’ you realise that she and Lou are simply made for each other.

Gilroy handles it all effortlessly. There’s not an ounce of dead weight here and in the last fifteen minutes, when he takes us into a lengthy car chase, I very nearly forgot to breathe. The amoral conclusion is as shocking as it is inevitable, but given the kind of characters on display here, it was never going to have a Mary Poppins conclusion. Don’t miss Nightcrawler. It’s unlikely you’ll see a better film this year.

5 stars

Philip Caveney