Great Performances: ATONEMENT

Paul Marshall: the creepiest character on film.

Atonement is not a particularly great movie.  It's not bad movie, precisely, either.  It's worth the price of a rental. Not worth the price of a movie ticket.

Except that the approximately seven total minutes of screen time that feature Benedict Cumberbatch's Paul Marshall make it worth many times the price.

Paul Marshall segues through simple pompous bore to creepy older man inappropriately 

Perfectly mannered bore.

aroused by the presence of a nubile 13-year-old girl to child rapist. It's a performance so perfectly nuanced in every moment, so disturbingly real, simply so perfect, you are compelled to watch it over and over again.

It is, in a word: stunning.

The YouTube video is a mash-up of Cumberbatch's scenes.  The most compelling, the nursery scene, begins at 1:34.   It's quite worth watching the first minute thirty-four, however, to see his perfect moment-by-moment development of the character. Benedict Cumberbatch is an actor who plays the entire performance in

Hiding something.

every scene. 

Even in the very beginning, when he is introduced, his turn away from the lovely adult sister of his friend, from the light to the darkness, the wiping of his mouth presage something unsavory, someone hiding something essential about himself.  Someone who lies.

Later, in the schoolroom, you at first see him come alive, from bore to nice warm man. For a few moments.  It's the offhand and completely inappropriate "Nice slacks," that cue the viewer that something dangerous has gotten into the nursery.

The scene is most famous for Marshall's line telling the girl how to eat the candy bar.  But it's the thing a few seconds before, the sudden discomfort, the hand to his mouth, predator becoming aroused evident in his body language and expression.  Fleeting.  

This is the thing Cumberbatch does to jaw-dropping perfection. Immense talent is not enough. An actor has to have extraordinary courage to allow himself to play lust for a child.

Possibly the real problem with the rest of the film is that no other character in it is as compelling as Paul Marshall.

And while all the others are certainly fine actors, once the viewer sees Cumberbatch give this perfect performance, once he has made Paul Marshall this fully- dimensional, technicolor presence, everyone else seems pale by comparison.

Paul Marshall's story, the movie that happens off-screen, is so much more interesting.  

I believe you can rent the whole movie on YouTube. Do so. 

The Tragedy that is The Fifth Estate

Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange

It's well-known that the U.S. government mounted a media blitz to demonize Julian Assange.    Watching The Fifth Estate it occurred to me:

Maybe the NSA coerced Condon to make this terrible picture so future films about Assange would be regarded as box-office poison. Only a conspiracy explains why this movie with these actors is this egregiously bad.

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There is no finer actor than Benedict Cumberbatch. That's a given by this blogger at all times. His work is not the issue.  IT WAS EVERY OTHER ELEMENT OF THE MOVIE.

The script is a monumental turd, an embarrassment to screenwriters everywhere.  No thru-line.  No story.  No structure.  A confusing mash-up of a fine documentary (We Steal Secrets) and some personal issues of Domscheit-Berg, apparently.

Lost in the visual confusion.

The set design is enough to make you want to dig your eyeballs out with a spork.  Is every house, apartment, venue, nightclub, office in Europe really this ugly?  It's almost as if someone set out to make the surroundings so visually confusing the actors would be lost in the mess of stuff and shapes.

How is it Condon shot a scene about a building with a glass roof  that gives us the essential motivation behind WIKILEAKS and Assange's life, that bonds the main characters and no one in the audience can actually make out the glass-roof?  Perhaps if you live near it, see it every day, it's obvious.  But to the entire rest of the world?  Huh?  While trying to figure out wtf Assange and Domscheit-Berg are talking about, you miss the speech.

Missing speeches isn't much of a tragedy in a film that sinks so often under exposition.   But the true tragedy here is that there is a great story to tell. And no one told it.

There is no story, no structure, nothing for an audience to root for.  Or root against, really.   No dramatic line to follow.   What constraints they put on Josh Singer that may have caused him to utter this mess of a script, or who rewrote what, when, we cannot know.  There is no blame for anyone but the man who had the reins: Condon.

Instead of telling the story, the film is a commentary on the story it supposes we already know.

Blaming Benedict

It seems to be popular for American critics to blame Benedict Cumberbatch for this picture's failure, the bottom line being he cannot carry a movie.  Apparently they've missed  Hawking,  To the Ends of the Earth and Parade's End.

Blameless

But Assange is not the protagonist of the picture.  Domscheit-Berg is.  It was Daniel Brühl  who was supposed to carry this picture, if anyone did.  It was Cumberbatch, better known here, on whom the burden of publicity fell for the American audience.

But neither of these actors could possibly save this train wreck of a movie.  They could only do what they could with the roles they played, with the script in their hands at the mercy of a director who seemed determined to try and make both these beautiful men as unattractive and uncomfortable as possible when he shot them.

Time to move on and take with us from the picture what there was of value:

Great Performances: Starter for 10

Srsly, dude?  

Starter for 10 is where you want to start talking about Benedict Cumberbatch's greatest performances?

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Yup. Because Patrick Watts was intended as a bit of comic relief in a film thought to be a vehicle for James McEvoy to become a teen-heartthrob. Which worked. Sort of.

Rebecca Hall - as "Rebecca" 

But the immensely talented Rebecca Hall and the stunning nuanced performance that maintained the intended broad-comedy dimension of his character by Benedict Cumberbatch, hijack Starter for 10.  In the years after one has seen it, very little is recalled of anything McEvoy did, while Patrick Watts' moments of humility and leadership, bravado and foolishness are cleanly etched in our memory banks.

Patrick Watts

The young Cumberbatch might have wished he'd been offered the part of the decidedly not posh Brian Jackson, scholarship student and romantic lead.  Perhaps if they had, it would have become a breakout hit in America and earned more than $200k.  

But the potential for the great performance was in Patrick Watts, not written to be three-dimensional or heroic or an icon of character that often accompanies what is sometimes called "good breeding."  Patrick Watts has valor.

In the moment when Watts has to put doing the right thing ahead of ego or status, we see the struggle.  It's not written and cannot be directed.  It is simply happening inside of Watts and seen on the outside of Cumberbatch.  It's so subtle, yet so perfectly delivered, one begins to suspect a form of actor/audience telepathy at work.

Benedict Cumberbatch gleaned recognition and awards from Hawking, which he did around the same time.  And that is, quite obviously, a brilliant performance.

But rising to the challenge of that portrayal is, in fact, simply to be expected.  To bring the same dedication, depth and intensity to something Cumberbatch could have phoned-in and his audience and director probably been as happy with, is what defines greatness in an actor.

Little Favour

"Little Favour" is the first offering from Benedict Cumberbatch's Sunny March, Ltd. production company. The 21 minutes short released through iTunes on November 5th of 2013 holds the distinction of being the highest pre-ordered short in iTunes history.

"Little Favour" is the most brilliantly acted, professionally produced student film I have ever seen.

How the flaws in this script escaped the notice of an actor as intelligent, experienced and erudite as Benedict Cumberbatch is almost unfathomable.    Possibly, it can be attributed to how incredibly busy he was during pre-production.  Or, perhaps, he simply trusted the very inexperienced Patrick V. Monroe (writer/director) and best mate Adam Ackland, (producer) to develop the material. Possibly he felt, as friends often do, that criticizing them would jeopardize the relationships the actor so highly values.

This is why doctors aren't allowed to operate on their loved ones.

"Little Favour" was financed almost entirely by willing contributions from fans of Benedict Cumberbatch after the actor filmed an online appeal.  Of course, fans responded enthusiastically giving far more than was necessary to produce the short.   But if Patrick Monroe had appealed for funds, if he perhaps had done a "trailer" for "Little Favour" as he did for "Oscar's Escape" (found here on YouTube) the chance people would have financed him is very slim.

23 seconds of walking.

Sunny March has said it would like to reimburse all investors.  And while they have also said the picture had the highest number of pre-orders iTunes ever recorded, they have posted no figures.

Having pre-ordered the film, myself, I can believe more than thirty-thousand people worldwide paid the approximately $3 to see it.  I hope that was enough.  Because Benedict Cumberbatch got his fans' money based on his well-deserved reputation as an extraordinary actor, a man of integrity and drive who inspires trust in a wide range of people.

Gritty hero.  Minus grit.

"Little Favour" provides a lot of fan service.  Good shots of  well-muscled post-Star Trek  Cumberbatch arms as well a heap of kick-ass Cumberheroism supplemented by close-ups of his now-iconic face wreathed in angst, trauma, determination, confusion, shock ...  a whole gamut of extreme human emotion.   But always with manicure intact. The star was beautiful.

The film is beautiful, as well.   It was also a cliché-ridden mess of stereotypes, underdeveloped characters, illogical action and wasted story opportunities.  The director managed to take pivotal moments and simply allow the critical visuals to be out of frame.  An essential underlying theme of the story concerns the horror perpetrated on children forced to become killers. The tragedy of child-soldiers.  (We know this because the producers made sure to explain the story to us in detail before the film was released, including parts not shown or even implied in the film.)

Look Ma, no gun!  Or hand, or action.  

Yet, when the innocent child (played quite nicely by Monroe's daughter Paris) reaches out to touch Nasty Bad Guy's gun, WE DON'T SEE IT.  We never see either the gun or her hand as shown in the screencap.   This very pivotal moment, this foreshadowing, this connection, is not only off screen, but when the Bad Guy suddenly objects, we really haven't a clue what he's talking about.

This is a blunder of monumental proportions.  The moment sets up the girl taking the gun from the standard-issue psychopathic Russian mobster-killer evil Bad Guy in the next few seconds.  Yet - we never see her hand in proximity to or on the gun to place this unbelievable feat even marginally within the realm of suspended disbelief.

But this isn't the worst thing this writer/director does.  This is the worst thing he does:

There is little as tragic or traumatizing than forcing a child to kill.  But this child, winks.  She is at that moment, defined as a psychopath herself.  The horror and tragedy of this extreme form of abuse is thereby negated.  Then she kills.

Those children are not humans without conscience and have not been made so.  They are broken, in pain, and often take their own lives later on.  The toll in human suffering is enormous.

He made her wink.  There are many many dramatic choices here to convey the depth of suffering of these children and show them for the victims they are.  But he presents us with a cool little killing machine.  It's reprehensible.

It's bad enough having this ludicrous character show up in Ace's flat:

Because we all know how much sense it makes for some guy with a sword to walk in with something (one begins to suspect a cast-off muffler from Sherlock) across his face to ...  what was he going to do with that sword?  Kill Ace, the only one who knows where "James" is?

It was bad enough that when we first see Ace be kick-ass most of the action  also happens out of frame so we have no idea how he does that.  Then, there are the other bad guys who come in (identity undisguised) and take the girl, but not Ace.  Nope, too easy. They have someone hide in his vehicle and kidnap him.  

Yet, all this laughably nonsensical bullshit is totally overshadowed by the egregiously inappropriate wink.

Contrast this dialogue-heavy 20 minute mess with the clean, tightly-written 11 minutes of "Inseparable," a short Benedict Cumberbatch also starred in released in 2007.  (Which can be seen here on YouTube.)  An extraordinary amount of character and story information delivered with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum use of the visual medium.

In "Little Favor" we have twenty minutes and little character development.  Monroe shows us an eternity of Ace driving back to his flat with the girl, yet, there is not a word exchanged.  The
opportunity to connect these characters emotionally with one another or the audience, the chance to explain something of Ace's supposed PTSD,  wasted in what looks like an homage to a Cumberbatch Jaguar commercial.  

Whatever Monroe's intention, it does not serve or advance the story.  It does not reveal.  It does not inform. In a feature a director can indulge himself with this sort of shot.  In a short, every second needs to be story.

What this film lacks is characterization, realistic narrative, a logical construct.   Every flaw can be traced to the amateur writer/director.  It's impossible to fault the production values of this project.  We are only left to ask, with some sympathy for our much-beloved star:  Oh, Mr. Cumberbatch, what were you thinking, allowing this to happen?