24FPS @ LFF 2019. Day 4

Clemency

Dir: Chinonye Chukwu

The death penalty, as it is practiced in the US, has long been a favoured subject in film. This is one of three death penalty dramas to have done the film festival rounds recently (true stories Trial By Fire and Just Mercy are awaiting UK release, the latter is a late addition to this year's LFF). It’s not hard to see why; the issue raises passions on both sides and the drama is inherently high stakes and emotional for all the characters.

Clemency takes a different angle on the drama than most films, putting Alfre Woodard front and centre as Bernadine Williams, a prison warden in an unspecified state. The last execution she supervised was botched and now Bernadine is having trouble coping: she can’t sleep and seems conflicted about the upcoming execution of Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), whose conviction may have a few doubts hanging over it.

In her second feature, writer/director Chinonye Chukwu strips a lot of things back. She knows when to simply let the camera sit, to allow the actors to carry a moment purely in their faces rather than attempt to emphasise things with cutting or dialogue. This is an all too rare quality these days, and it raises Clemency above a fairly run of the mill screenplay and only light engagement with the real world issues that lie behind this fictional story.

Chukwu is aided in her focus on performance by a clutch of fine actors who allow their feelings to rage under the surface while clearly trying to keep it all in check. Most notable among them is Alfre Woodard, a great actor who ought to get more roles that utilise her talents like this one. The somewhat cold control she shows to the outside world on the surface is gradually and credibly cracked, up until a late close up which is a brilliant depiction of someone whose emotions are trying to escape from her every pore, but which can’t be shown in that moment. In many ways, her performance is much like that of Aldis Hodge, whose Anthony Woods is also a person who doesn’t want to show his vulnerability to the wrong person at the wrong time though he, more than her, has a few moments at which the dam simply has to burst. The characterisation of Woods isn’t especially deep, but Hodge plays him effectively, as a man who probably feels the cage he’s in is half of his own making, but that the other half being there is deeply unfair, and fully cognizant that he’s very unlikely to escape it.

The supporting cast is full of talent, with Wendell Pierce the standout as Bernadine’s husband, who seems both concerned and impatient with her struggles. One scene, when they talk at the dinner table about their marriage, quietly brings out the best in both performances.

While the performances make Clemency intermittently powerful, the film as a whole can’t get past the fact that while the angle may have changed somewhat, this is a story we’ve seen many times before. The third act in particular suffers from a thudding inevitability that isn’t helped by Richard Schiff’s stock character and equally stock performance as Anthony’s lawyer. By never exploring what exactly went wrong with the execution the film, while clearly inspired by them, misses the chance to engage with live issues in the death penalty debate like states experimenting with different drug cocktails because companies are refusing to supply the standard execution drugs. 

Alfre Woodard will be justly acclaimed for her performance here and the film should also act as an effective calling card for Chinonye Chukwu, but perhaps next time it would be interesting to see what she can bring to someone else’s screenplay, because that’s what lets the side down here. 

★★★

Coup 53
Dir: Taghi Amirani

Politics at the moment is essentially a 24 hour global anxiety attack and it can be difficult to see past that. However, as with anxiety, it is worth trying to look underneath the symptoms for the cause and that, at least to some degree, is what Taghi Amirani is doing with Coup 53.

More than a decade in the making, the film explores the 1953 coup, led by MI5 and the CIA, to depose Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. In a fairly self-regarding first act, Amirani documents how, as he was working on the film, he discovered the source interviews for one of a series of BBC programmes about the end of empire and, buried within them, the transcript of an interview with an MI5 operative named Norman Darbyshire. This interview forms the backbone of the rest of the film, acting as entry point to the depth of Britain’s still officially unacknowledged participation in the planning and execution of the Operation Ajax—named for the household cleaner. Amirani digs deep, using archive and present day interviews to paint a damning picture of the motives behind the coup (spoilers: Oil), the upheaval of its execution and the far reaching consequences. 

As a film, this is one of a handful of documentaries that can truly make the argument for being seen in a cinema. Much of this is likely down to the involvement of Walter Murch, whose peerless control in the editing room is felt not just in the artfulness of some of the transitions but in the precision and sharpness of the timing (at least after that sticky first act). One moment even draws a laugh, as there is an abrupt cut to an unexpected face, filling in for the lost footage of Darbyshire. There is also some beautiful watercolour style animation by Martyn Pick, which is well used and I’d have been pleased to see more of.

As far reaching and deep as its research goes and as much as we learn from the collection of footage that Amirani makes use of, his film also feels something like a jumping off point, so much is the impression driven home that this episode changed our world, with implications we are still feeling. As much as it shows and tells us, Coup 53 left me wanting to know and understand more.  
★★★★

The Brink [15]

Dir: Alison Klayman

To me, the title of Alison Klayman’s documentary about Steve Bannon speaks to where we are as a planet. We’re walking up to the line in so many ways, and on the political side, it seems Bannon exists to give us that one last push over the edge.

Bannon is a far right strategist who co-founded Breitbart News in 2007 and became a late addition to the Donald Trump campaign in 2016, coming in as campaign CEO. He now credits himself with Trump’s win, as do many people, to be fair to him. For most of The Brink, Klayman follows Bannon after he has left the Trump administration, as he begins to form what he and his allies call ‘The Movement’; an initiative to unite the far right parties across Europe to increase their influence.

Bannon is a loathsome human, he looks like a thumb that gained sentience and that’s the least ugly thing about him. However, he does have an ability to wrap the vileness of his politics in an outward veneer that, when you put yourself in the shoes of the people who believe the poison that emanates from him, you can see why they are drawn to him. For most of the film, Bannon speaks outwardly reasonably, he’s not screaming in the faces of his opponents, indeed in a debate with David Frum he appears to have an easy - if not especially insightful - humour to his delivery. This difference between tone and content is what makes him dangerous.

This is where Klayman’s approach works well. She’s not a Michael Moore, deftly picking the worst moments her subject exhibits and drawing them together, she at least appears to be trying to show a fuller picture of Bannon. What emerges is a slippery character. Whenever another person on camera with him begins to push the rhetoric too far, Bannon will end filming, but again, the framing is interesting with him often saying something like “You’ve got everything you need here?”, when he clearly doesn’t mean the question mark. This is one of a couple of recurring refrains that seem designed to allow Bannon to play the nice guy while clearly manipulating people. The other happens every time he poses for a picture with a man and a woman, putting the woman in the middle saying “a rose between two thorns”. Both of these repeated phrases, in a way indicative of how Klayman allows Bannon to make himself look bad, end up feeling very sinister.

Another sinister and slippery side of Bannon, and of his influence, comes across whenever he’s challenged or things look bad on his side. Bannon himself seems most uncomfortable when the inherent racism of his views is questioned. He knows that if he wants to win more people to his cause that there HAS to be plausible deniability on this point (a way, at least, for supporters to say “I’m not racist, but”), the thing is that he hasn’t developed an answer beyond flat denial, it’s one thing he simply doesn’t have an argument on. We see some of this attitude reflected in his staff after the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, who sent homemade bombs to a number of prominent left wing figures and lived in his van, which was covered in Trump paraphernalia, as one of them - again without quite coming out and suggesting a ‘false flag’, says that he finds it surprising, that he’s not sure the bombs were real, and that the left is so much more violent before going on to invoke no true Scotsman over Timothy Mc Veigh. It’s in exchanges like this that we see Bannon’s ideas reach fruition.

That carries over into The Movement, whose meetings of rich white men conspiring to freshly empower the worst of the far right make for the most frightening segments of The Brink, especially in light of the recent success of the Brexit Party and the resurgence of Bannon cohort Nigel Farage. We see Bannon challenged, particularly robustly by Guardian reporter Paul Lewis, and we see him take losses like the US Midterms, but there’s definitely a sense of the momentum going his way overall. That’s why The Brink is more terrifying than a film that would set out to ‘take down’ Bannon more overtly: it shows how horrific his ideas are, how proudly he embraces them and their associations (“How would Leni cut it?” he says of a trailer for a film he’s making, half joking, half winking) and how, if he’s not entirely winning, he’s also not losing.

★★★★