Movie Muser

The great JK Simmons won Best Supporting Actor for Whiplash at the Golden Globes last weekend. Classic Hollywood, as if ever there was a leading role in a film, this is it.

Simmons bestrides this paper-thin plot like a colossus, throwing everything into his role as a guru at a New York music school. His students are terrified of him, including nice young Miles Teller, the boy who wants to be one of the great jazz drummers.

Simmons gives him a chance, and initially is encouraging, but slowly his high standards start to demand retake after retake, and Teller starts to wilt. He questions his own talent and motivation and starts to crack up, while Simmons drives him ever harder and faster.

It’s a tremendous performance from Simmons, who made the Spider-Man movies tolerable and excelled in Juno, Up in the Air and so many others movies. And here he really lets rip as the sadistic tutor. It’s part drill sergeant, part Shine, and he clearly relishes every moment. Dressed permanently in black t-shirt and trousers, it’s a toss-up as to what bulges more, his biceps, veins or eyes, but they all do their fair share. His initial comment, that Teller is dragging, becomes almost a chant, so many times does he say it, his voice getting ever louder. The two worst words in the language to him are “nice job”.

In terms of plot there’s not that much more to it. Teller has a girlfriend that he can’t keep due to his obsessive practising, and has a slightly difficult relationship with his dad, but that’s about it. Teller drives himself on to try and win a competition, with Simmons yelling ever worse insults into his ear – at times they are very un PC, but quite funny.

Clearly the piece is pretty much a vehicle for Simmons to show just how good an actor he is. He must be, as I put aside my loathing of jazz just for these two hours in his company.

Overall verdict: A tour de force performance from Simmons saves what is basically a remake of Fame, in a burning, visceral two hours.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

It was inevitable that for the 100th anniversary of the First World War there would be a film version of Vera Brittain’s best-selling novel. The result is solid, good-looking, well-acted and at times extremely moving, but there is a nagging sense that it could have been a whole lot more, which is a shame. At times it moves dangerously close to Mills & Boon territory, and that thing about being good-looking? Sometimes that’s not what is required of a war film.

Swedish actress Alicia Vikander tackles the title role, an Edwardian girl fighting desperately against prejudice and trying to get into Oxford to read English. Her parents, Dominic West and Emily Watson, are dead against it, but she fights a good fight and takes the entrance exam along with her brother Edward (Taron Egerton). She also has a budding romance with Edward’s pal Roland (Kit Harington), much to the disappointment of other friend Victor, who fancies her like mad. The group’s idyllic life of piano, poetry and picnics comes to a shuddering halt with the start of the war. All the men sign up, while Vera has her studies abruptly ended and decides to shun Oxford and become a nurse.

After a harrowing experience in London she goes full pelt and heads for the Western Front, to be nearer to her loved ones. However there are no happy endings here, and she ends up heading back to Oxford after the war fighting the Suffragette fight.

BBC Films are high on the list of credits here, and at times the film does have the feel of a made for TV drama. Vikander is all doe eyes, flawless skin and Agnes B clothes, and she struggles with a posh English accent, although it has to be said she is no worse than half of the cast of Downton Abbey, and she’s Swedish. Her romance with Roland, swapping poetry notes and cups of tea at rainy train stations, is a little drippy and there are far too many shots of her peering out of steamy windows. However, the relationship with her brother is real and vivid, and his secret, revealed to her on the front, is well done.

Perhaps the best thread is her friendship with Victor, the fresh-faced chap doomed to love her and forever be disappointed. Her parents too play a vital role, although West seems to be struggling with both his accent and his role as her stuffy father, while Watson’s breakdown towards the end is disturbing.

The sight of men in tin hats with boots deep in mud and a no man’s land resembling the moon is starting to look a little clichéd, so much of it have we had on our screens recently, but that is inevitable when ther are so many docs, drama and reconstructions being produced. This sits a little uneasily amongst them, being neither a brutal depiction of the war nor a political explanation of it. It’s genuinely moving at times, yet with some tighter editing could have been so much harder hitting.

Overall verdict: Worthy addition to the roster of war dramas, which reaches a little too quickly for the sentimental when it could have been harder-hitting. Well-acted and solid, if a little forgettable.

Reviewer: Mike Martin