Visual fireworks and metaphysics from Pixar; old Hollywood dramatised; blues and race in ’20s Chicago…
S
OUL Pixar’s latest feature shows the studio very much in ruminative Meaning Of Life mode. It’s as close as digital animation comes to being a mindfulness seminar or a fullblown treatise in cosmology – but don’t worry, it still has a funny talking cat. It’s directed and co-written by Pete Docter, whose Inside Out – a pop-art mapping of theories of the self – was the studio’s most outré to date. In Soul, he sticks his neck out even further. Pixar’s first African-American-themed feature, it focuses on Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle-aged Harlem music teacher who feels he’s missed his vocation as a jazz pianist. One day, he gets his big chance to accompany a saxophone legend (voiced by Angela Bassett). But an accident leaves Joe’s soul – a blue glowing bespectacled blob – hovering in a parallel dimension, in a metaphysical premise that winks at Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life And Death. He finds himself mentoring novice soul ‘22’ (Tina Fey), a wiseacre little tyke, and the two return to Earth in a bizarre body-swap incident, pursued by a character who’s essentially a collection of wiggly lines… As you’d expect with a film about a musician, Soul really cares about its score – with Jon Batiste providing a snappy jazz soundtrack to complement Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s gently mind-bending electronica. It shows a dizzying visual imagination, with sequences that mix 3D and 2D, futurism and retro, and it plays gorgeous, outright experimental tricks with colour, light and texture. It’s a shame that the film is exclusive to the Disney + platform, as it would be a wonder to see on the big screen. Still, you suspect that its strangeness might have been a liability for multiplex release, its complexity and sometimes arcane wit making for an outright child-baffler: pity parents having to explain the jokes about Jung and chakras. It’s
Mank: Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz and Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies
perhaps not as much fun as Inside Out and not quite in Pixar’s absolute top rank – but it’s a thing of joy and real aesthetic audacity. MANK According to a controversial theory advocated by critic Pauline Kael, the real creative force behind Citizen Kane was not Orson Welles, but its screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz. Accordingly, Welles – played by Tom Burke – is only a fleeting presence in Mank, David Fincher’s portrait of the writer. Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz, boozy, cynical and indisposed, holed up in the desert under orders to produce the Kane script – which he does via a series of flashbacks to his time around the studios and in the court of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), commonly agreed to be the model for Charles Foster Kane. This black-and-white Netflix project is unlike anything that Fincher has made – a labour of love, steeped in lavishly baroque visual style. The film was scripted by the director’s late father Jack Fincher, but if the suggestion is that writers make movies as
much as directors do, Mank rather disproves the point: a wordy, even over-literary script is brought to life by flamboyant direction and heightened acting. Erik Messerschmidt’s magnificent photography channels Welles’ own visual tropes and other period tropes: even the clouds in the opening sequence feel authentically early ’40s. But it’s an unconvincing, even unengaging film. There are endless sour bons mots and world-weary zingers tossed over shoulders, with Mankiewicz characterised as a flaneurat-large who seems able to stroll onto any set or into any mogul’s office and scathingly, boozily talk truth to power. Oldman gives a big performance – possibly his biggest – but it’s distractingly eccentric, sometimes seeming to parody the old movie shorthand for sophisticated-lush behaviour, with a delivery weirdly reminiscent of the great Hollywood actor Burgess Meredith. The drama depends on us caring about old studio lore – about bosses like Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg, and about MGM’s newsreel war against writer and Democratic politician Upton Sinclair (here’s
REVIEWED THIS MONTH SOUL
Directedby Pete Docter Starring (voices)Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey Streamingfrom December 25 Cert PG
8/10
MANK
Directedby David Fincher Starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried Streamingfrom December 4 Cert 12A
6/10
MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM
Directedby George C Wolfe Starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman Opens December 18 Cert tbc
7/10
110 • UNCUT • FEBRUARY 2021
MURDER ME, MONSTER
Directedby Alejandro Fadel Starring Victor López, Esteban Bigliardi Opens December 4 Cert tbc
7/10
THE MOLE AGENT
Directed by Maite Alberdi Starring Sergio Chamy Opens December 11 Cert PG
7/10
