Before I Go to Sleep - film review

S.J. Watson's bestselling debut novel Before I Go to Sleep must have been a challenging book to adapt for film. Rowan Joffe took on the job a couple of years ago, and I think he made a good job of it, rather better than one or two reviews I've read suggest. And the key to the success of the film, for me, was the small but superlative cast. It was also very sensible (as it usually is) to keep the running time short - slightly over an hour and a half.

Nicole Kidman is Christine, the woman who keeps waking up to the nightmarish reality that she can't remember anything about her life. Each day, she has to be reminded by Colin Firth that he is Ben, her husband, and that some years back, she suffered a terrible accident which caused her to lose her memory. But it soon emerges that it was no accident. She was attacked by someone in a hotel.

She receives daily calls from a doctor, played by Mark Strong, who says he is trying to help her to recover her memory. But it soon becomes clear that he is attracted to her. What exactly are his motives? Can she trust Ben? And what part in her life was played by a friend called Claire (Anne-Marie Duff)?.

I've seen Nicole Kidman excel in a number of different roles; here, she is quite outstanding. Firth and Strong both have a powerful presence on the screen, and the combination works very well. Even though I'd read the book, I found myself gripped from start to finish. Definitely worth watching..

The Imitation Game - film review

Although I watch plenty of films, I usually only make a single annual pilgrimage to the cinema, at this time of year. This last couple of years I've seen two great movies, Skyfall and Gravity, and this year the choice was The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, who is most famous for his work on cracking the Enigma code.

I find codes and ciphers fascinating, although I don't always have the time and patience (or ability, in many cases) to try to solve them. They often crop up in Golden Age novels, and sometimes the explanations as to how to crack them can be rather tedious. And a story about building an early, complex computer could be very dull indeed if not handled correctly. The challenge for the writer of the screenplay, Graham Moore, was how to make the narrative gripping. He rose to the challenge quite splendidly.

Of course, he was helped by top-notch casting. Cumberbatch is brilliant, as usual, and Keira Knightley compelling, if perhaps slightly miscast as the gifted woman cryptanalyst, Joan Clarke (she played her as a strong woman confronting prejudice, which was fine, but much as I like Keira, I gained no real insight into the brilliance that Clarke must have had). Charles Dance and Mark Strong were very good indeed, as top brass at Bletchley, and Rory Kinnear excelled as a sympathetic policeman.

Moore employed several techniques. He used three timelines: the war years at Bletchley, Turing's schooldays, when he falls in love with another boy, and the post-war period when he was arrested on a charge of gross indecency. The story zipped around between the timelines, but was never confusing, partly because Moore delineated his characters clearly - quite simply, but in most cases with some depth. The film is based on a true story, but Moore was not afraid to deviate from the historical facts on numerous occasions. I didn't mind this, because it made for a pacy story that seemed convincing even if some aspects of it are debatable in terms of accuracy. And it seemed to me that Moore handled his depiction of Turing's sexual orientation sensitively and effectively, despite leaving some questions unanswered in my mind. You have to make choices as a writer, and I felt he made some very good choices. An excellent film, then, and a fine example of the screenplay writer's art.   

Sherlock Holmes - the movie: review

I wasn’t sure whether I would care for Guy Ritchie’s 2009 movie version of Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert J. Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. And for sure, it’s a film that will have purists wincing, as many liberties are taken with facts and the Holmes canon. Anachronisms abound and the casting of Holmes seemed like a gamble.

And yet, I must say that I enjoyed the film. I do think that film and TV adaptations of crime stories deserve to be judged on their own merits, even if I loved the original on which they were based. The real failures are those, like the recent The Secret of Chimneys, where it’s impossible to see what the point of the new version was.

Here, for all its quirks, the story was exciting and the visual effects quite brilliant. The plot involved the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong was credibly nasty in the part) who seems to be able to use occult powers with a view to taking control of the British Empire and then the world as a whole. What a cad!

The cast did a good job, with a nice take on the Holmes-Watson relationship, even if Conan Doyle would have been amazed at the re-inventing of Mary Morstan and Irene Adler. But then, the great Basil Rathbone films which first turned me on to Sherlock when I was very young were also far removed from the originals. I liked them, and slightly to my surprise, I liked this movie too.