I'D love to be able to tell you what kind of start the Edinburgh International Film Festival will get off to tonight, but the powers that be have decided against screening the opening film, Sam Mendes's Away We Go, in time to run a review in today's paper (which is the first time that's ever happened at the festival).
That's never usually a great sign (and certainly, the film's American reviews have been a little tepid), but there will be full coverage in tomorrow's paper, so either check back then, or try The Scotsman's arts blog later this afternoon (
www.scotsman.com/artsblog). In the meantime there's much to get excited about at this year's festival, starting with Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq war thriller
The Hurt Locker (****).
Having carved out an impressive career making clever, high-octane genre films such as Near Dark, Strange Days and, especially, Point Break, Bigelow has been pretty much missing in action since 2002's disappointing Harrison Ford submarine thriller K19: The Widowmaker, so it's good to report that The Hurt Locker sees her return not only with one of her strongest films to date, but with a movie about Iraq that's actually worth watching.
Tightly wound and stripped-down, it's a film that eschews the usual hand-wringing political discussions, war movie clichés and reductive character-types that have accompanied previous cinematic attempts to deal with Iraq (In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss, Redacted), embedding us instead in the day-to-day grind of a bomb disposal unit nearing the end of a year-long rotation patrolling the streets of Baghdad. With these streets booby-trapped with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), it's a high- tension situation and Bigelow gets the most out of it without resorting to standard action movie theatrics. When bombs are tripped, she finds new ways to put us in the middle of such heart-sickening moments with sparing use of slow motion and smart use of sound effects. When troops come under attack from enemy soldiers, Bigelow doesn't treat it as an excuse to deliver amped-up, hardware-heavy gun battles, but chooses to show us precisely calibrated scenes of deadly, palm-sweating sniper shoot-outs in which every bullet counts. The attention to detail here is sometimes astonishing and it succeeds in making the whole film an even more visceral experience than it would have been had Bigelow resorted to the kind of gut-spilling combat porn that found favour with filmmakers after Saving Private Ryan.
Complementing her approach is a brilliantly nuanced central performance from Jeremy Renner as the newly drafted Staff Sergeant whose job it is to suit-up and snip the wires. The film kicks off with a quote about war being a drug suggesting that, like Point Break, it's going to be another film about adrenaline junkies (only this time in the most high-pressure job there is), and that's exactly what the film turns out to be, except that Renner internalises that addiction. He's set up perfectly to be the loner, the maverick, the cowboy character who breaks the rules but always gets the job done, but he never plays to those types, conveying instead the darker psychological aspects of that character, something beautifully illustrated in the film's coda.
He's ably backed up by Brian Gherty as a soldier trying to come to terms with whether he could have saved a colleague, and Anthony Mackie, as the unit's intel officer, who can't quite get a handle on his new staff sergeant's MO. It's a meaty, impressive film, one that is mercifully free from that particular brand wishy-washy oppose-the-war/support-the-troops rhetoric that Hollywood loves. It feels like an honest attempt to get to the heart of how soldiers function in an impossible situation.
Men under great duress also happen to be the focus of
Van Diemen's Land (****), a hugely impressive debut for Australian filmmaker Jonathan Auf Der Heide. It's based on the true story of Alexander Pearce (played by the film's co-writer Oscar Redding), Australia's most notorious convict who escaped from Macquarie Harbour along with seven other prisoners in 1822 only to discover the wilderness was much less forgiving captor. Stunningly shot in a lush, atmospheric style that favourably recalls both Peter Weir and Terrence Malick, Auf Der Heide is great at capturing the desperation of his protagonists as hunger sets in and thoughts of cannibalism come to the fore. That detail could have been the film's cue to descend into the realms of exploitation horror, but as with The Hurt Locker, Auf Der Heide is more interested in taking a more artful, psychological approach to potentially schlocky material and he presents us with a serious and gripping exploration of man's capacity for savagery.
It's too bad Auf Der Heide's fellow countryman Jamie Blanks didn't take a similarly intellectual approach to
Long Weekend (**). A largely pointless remake of the 1978 low-budget "Ozploitation" cult classic of the same name, this casts Jim Caviezel (almost as bad here as he was in the recent Outlander) and Claudia Karvan as a bickering yuppie couple whose misguided decision to spend a relationship-saving long weekend in the Australian wilderness backfires when they find themselves under attack from Mother Nature. Though that theme is not without potential, given its resonance in an age of impending environmental catastrophe, Blanks fails to do anything interesting with it. In the end, shorn of the freaky 1970s trappings that gave the original some magic, this just seems as silly (if not quite as laughably bad) as M Knight Shyamalan's eco horror The Happening.
