With global politics taking a massive swing to the right, there has been a tendency among liberal-minded film critics to locate the zeitgeist in just about anything – be it a stern-minded issue drama or an instantly disposable animated meringue. Sometimes we pull a muscle reaching for such connections. In the case of Arrival (eOne, 12), which hit cinemas days after Donald Trump’s election triumph, it felt like a case of the right film descending from the heavens with near-supernatural prescience. Denis Villeneuve’s ravishing alien-invasion fable – if, indeed, “invasion” is quite the word – uses a fantastical framework to examine the all-too-real suspicion of the other permeating our leadership in the era of Brexit and border walls.
As world powers differ in the caution and aggression of their response to extraterrestrial visitors, gifted linguist Louise (Amy Adams) is charged with finding out what they are and what they want. What emerges is no idealistic why-can’t-we-all-get-along parable; as the ambiguities pile up in her findings, the film becomes an anxious plea for speech before fire.
And that’s the relatively straightforward side of Arrival, the most mind-melting discoveries of which are earthbound, albeit temporally elastic. Louise is introduced caring for her cancer-stricken daughter; the burden and consequence of creating a life weighs heavily on the film throughout, yet a late, spectacular narrative leap into the void entirely dislocates the existential stakes. If you’re after a comfortingly conventional, gardenia-scented familial grief weepie, seek out Rafe Spall in Mum’s List (Studio Soho, 12), also out this week. Arrival, on the other hand, is a dazzling metaphysical pretzel that has to be seen to be believed, felt and, after a time, fully understood.
I’d like to make similarly far-reaching claims for Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom (Fox, 12), a historical drama that also has clear relevance to the present moment. The true story of Seretse and Ruth Khama, whose interracial marriage prompts a colonial crisis between Britain and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (modern-day Botswana) to which Khama is king-in-waiting, it’s fascinating material that nods to ongoing bigotry and conservative insularity among the Westminster elite. But Asante’s stiffly polite, Sunday-night telly approach preserves this bristling tale in amber. Despite a booming performance from David Oyelowo as Khama, it’s a worthy, trudgingly edited affair that never quite sheds its tea cosy.
Also taking a standard approach to potentially incendiary (and Southern African-accented) subject matter is Oliver Schmitz’s apartheid-era legal drama The Hangman: Shepherds and Butchers, which recently slipped on to iTunes with little fanfare. Despite pedantic storytelling and the awkward miscasting of Steve Coogan as a jaded Cape Town defence lawyer, there’s still a seething charge to this fact-based anti-death penalty drama. – centred on the racially charged case of a teenage prison warder on trial for an inexplicable mass murder – that makes it compulsive, not to mention a dynamite turn from Andrea Riseborough as Coogan’s courtroom opponent.
The Fits (Lionsgate, 12), by contrast, couldn’t be quicker, tighter or tougher, even as it leaves room for soaring flights of fancy. A perfectly syncopated 70-minute miracle, hitting shelves shortly after an all too brief cinema release, it’s a deceptively scaled whopper of a debut for US writer-director Anna Rose Holmer. She crams a wealth of unspoken social, racial and feminist tensions into its close-up character study of 11-year-old Toni, an African-American tomboy torn between boxing practice and cheerleading at her hard-up Cincinnati youth centre. Never shooting Toni outside the community space where she’s most empowered, Holmer makes her a subtle conduit for a sparring range of identity politics. She’s marvellously played by Royalty Hightower, and if that splendid name doesn’t spell future stardom, there’s scant hope for the rest of us. Though not marketed as family viewing, I can hardly think of a better film for parents to watch with their nascent adolescent daughters – it makes a new, blandly handsome made-for-TV adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (Second Sight, PG), also out on DVD tomorrow, look like a cutesy visitation from another planet.
The increasingly fertile classic-DVD market recently welcomed an exciting new label in Indicator. They’re coming fast out of the gate with a range of beautifully polished-up reissues, none more well chosen than John Huston’s still criminally undervalued Fat City (Powerhouse, 12). If you’ve never seen this crepuscular 1972 ode to losers on the spirits-soaked fringes of California’s boxing scene, now’s the time. Practically smelling of sweat and tobacco, it’s one of the great, grungily sad American films of its era, devastatingly anchored by Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges as boxers at opposite ends of a path to failure.
