CINEMA
Prima
Donna: Minnie Driver in Hope SpringsA romantic comedy; a classic adaptation and a Scottish road movie - three new British films all have their charms, even the one featuring Minnie Driver's trademark Prima Donna routine, says Sukhdev Sandhu.
Hope springs infernal when it comes to films
starring Minnie Driver. All too often she comes across like a spoiled child
bawling her eyes out because she's just dropped a lollipop on the floor, a
flouncy prima donna kicking up a fuss upon learning that she can't have the
restaurant table she wants. How odd, then, that her latest role is in a
romantic comedy, a piece of miscasting on a par with asking Daniella
Westbrook to play Celia Johnson's part in a remake of Brief Encounter. Hope
Springs, directed by Marc Herman, is based on a novel by Charles Webb,
writer of The Graduate, and stars Colin Firth as Colin Ware, an artist who
flees England to go to Hope, Vermont, after he learns that his fiancée, Vera
(Driver), is going to marry someone else. O lucky man, one might think, but
he takes it all very badly and finds solace in drawing pictures of the local
townsfolk.
I Capture the Castle is a film that, albeit topped up with lingering and by no means unwelcome shots of Tara Fitzgerald dancing naked in the rain, recalls the kind of program that once upon a time was commonly seen on the BBC on Sunday afternoons.
It has a sense of proportion, balanced elegantly between levity and melancholy, eloquence and wordiness. It derives much of its beauty from the rolling, verdant landscapes, but never loses sight of the fact that it is the characters - their loves and their squabbles, their fear of bankruptcy both financial and creative - that matter most. For all its charm, the film is also hard and flinty, with many tough insights into the necessary selfishness of desire. Like Dodie Smith's book itself, the character of Stephen (Henry Cavill), a local family hand who is in love with Cassandra, is somewhat underwritten. His heart remains an unexplored cave. Still, it's Romola Garai as Cassandra who steals the film. It seems scarcely believable that this is her first major role; she captures her character in all its complexity - her self-conscious naivety, her observational wit, her arty pretension and her child-like wonder, her selflessness as well as her blossoming sense of self. Hard it is to decide whether it would be better to be her or to spend the rest of your life with her. Actors who provoke that kind of dilemma are rare indeed. The Last Great Wilderness is also set in the countryside. An erratic but always compelling cross between The Wicker Man and Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom, it's that rare beast - a Scottish road movie. It follows anti-hero Charlie (Alastair Mackenzie), who is driving to Skye to burn down the house of the man who stole his wife, and his temporary friend, a faux-Spaniard gigolo (Jonathan Phillips), who is on the run from a couple of gangland heavies who want to cut off his balls. They arrive at a strange retreat whose motley crew includes a dying old woman, a fat sex addict and an ex-churchman with paedophilic urges. The movie, shot on chill-inducing digital video by director David Mackenzie, never quite knows what it's doing. Is it a surreal send-up of Highland lore? A dark redemption tale about the importance of letting go some of the negative energies that stop us from truly living? A hipper version of an avant-garde classic such as Andrew Kotting's This Filthy Earth? Its own uncertainty keeps us alert and guessing. Meanwhile, some of the shots are hard to forget: Charlie trampolining in a forest; a joyful wake in which the retreat crazies walk across hot coals. Any film scored by the pioneering and ceaselessly adventurous Scottish band the Pastels has got to be good. And The Last Great Wilderness is better than good. Funny, grotesque, moving, it's a genuinely fresh and emphatically independent work from a major new directorial talent.