AS THE Ed Norton-starring The Illusionist proved, it takes a lot more than chocolate box period details and CGI trickery to capture the appeal magic had during the vaudeville era.
Unfortunately, that's something that Charlotte Gray director Gillian Armstrong has also failed to appreciate with the luscious but limp Death Defying Acts (**).
Set in Edinburgh in the 1920s, this fictional film about Harry Houdini comes nowhere c
lose to matching Christopher Nolan's The Prestige for inventiveness and entertainment value. Instead it offers up dreary romance and underpowered attempts to interrogate the existence of the spirit world.
Tied together with an intrusive, irritating and unnecessary explain-all voiceover, the film tells the story of a mother/daughter double act who attempt to scam Houdini when he visits the Scottish capital. Having developed an elaborate cabaret show as a psychic that involves picking marks and researching their family histories through the obituaries, poverty-row beauty Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her Artful Dodger-esque daughter Benji (Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan) reckon they can pull the wool over Houdini's eyes when he lays down a $10,000 challenge to anyone who can channel his dear mother's dying words.
Since her death, the famous escapologist (played by Guy Pearce) has become an obsessive debunker of psychics, a course fuelled by his own frustration at being unable to scientifically conquer the spirit realm.
The challenge is intended as part of a controlled experiment to help him in his quest, but when Mary walks into his life bearing a striking resemblance to his mother, all such inquiry is relegated to the back burner. Alas, any intrigue the film has also disappears as the chemistry-free pairing of Zeta-Jones and Pearce starts to dominate. There's no real purpose to this relationship and the film – despite interesting use of its Edinburgh locations – is one long, slow anticlimax, with some hazily defined guff about cynicism destroying the ability to see magic in the world – something this film ironically manages to accomplish quite well by itself.
The documentary Obscene (***) ends with a list of authors who owe their first publication in the USA to the film's subject, Barney Rosset, the pioneering editor whose Grove Press publishing house risked financial ruin to challenge America's strict censorship laws.
It's quite an astonishing list too: Samuel Beckett, DH Lawrence, Henry Miller, William S Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr and Allan Ginsberg are just some of the many who benefited from Rosset's willingness to put art before profit and engage in lengthy and expensive court battles that gradually cracked the door open wide enough to allow previously banned and controversial works of literature to reach a mass audience. Through choice archive footage, contributions from the usual slew of counter-culture icons as well as interviews with the now-octogenarian Rosset himself, Daniel O'Connor and Neil Ortenberg's film is a lively portrait of a complex, often contradictory individual.
The son of a wealthy banker, Rosset's anti-establishment attitudes came to the fore at school when he teamed up with classmate and future Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler to publish a revolutionary magazine entitled anti-everything. But it was his post-war immersion into the art world via his first wife, the abstract painter Joan Mitchell (they hung around with the likes of Jackson Pollock), that led to him purchase the ailing Grove Press publishing house and turn it into a cornerstone of countercultural thinking. The film explores the way he sacrificed large chunks of his family fortune to see him through his precedent-setting court battles and while it's mostly celebratory in tone, it doesn't shy away from examining how his more artistic endeavours also enabled him to indulge his own peccadilloes by publishing low-brow erotica.
Controversy-courting sick flick Mum and Dad (*), a British take on the dubious Hostel movies, revolves around Lena, a young Polish toilet cleaner at Heathrow whose perky colleague Birdie lures her back to her house and into the bosom of her twisted family. Drugged, gagged and chained up, she's subjected to horrific abuse at the hands of Birdie's demented "parents", who turn out to be extreme sexual deviants. In the wake of the Josef Fritzl case, some will doubtless defend this as a timely satirical reflection on the hideous mutation of the nuclear family, but that still doesn't get round the fact that it's a rubbish, tension-free sensory overload that tests our endurance for extreme images to hide the fact that it just ain't scary.
After watching this, Wellness (***) almost seems like a relief, even though it's the sort of well-observed but relentlessly downbeat tragicomic character study that just leaves you feeling sorry for its protagonist, a sad-sack salesman (Jeff Clark) who, in a last-ditch effort to make a success of his life, has just signed away his life savings to get in on the ground floor with the launch of a new cure-all pill known as "Wellness". That it's such an obvious pyramid scheme just makes his obliviousness to the scam all the more heartbreaking.
Death Defying Acts, Cineworld, tonight, 8pm, and 24 June, 5pm; Obscene, Cineworld, tomorrow, 9:45pm; Mum and Dad, Filmhouse, tomorrow, 10:15pm; Wellness, tonight, 5pm, and tomorrow, 7:15pmThe full article contains 884 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
