ARTS 29
28 May 2022 THE WEEKFilm
Audrey Niffenegger’s debut novel, The Time
Traveler’s Wife, has sold so many copies since its
publication in 2003 that “most people know the
basics” of the plot already, said Lucy Mangan
in The Guardian. In case you don’t, it revolves
around a librarian called Henry, who has a rare
genetic disorder that causes him to travel through
time, landing him “dazed and naked wherever the
cosmos takes him”. Over the course of these
“unchronological journeys”, he meets his
soulmate, Clare, but they are regularly wrenched
from each other’s arms “to reunite weeks, months
or years later in more or less romantic scenarios”.
The book was made into a 2009 film, and now
Apple TV+ has had a go, with some success. Rose
Leslie brings “spark” to the title role, and directorSteven Moffat (of Doctor Who fame) ensures that
Henry’s comings and goings “create a choppy
energy rather than chaos”. But even Moffat can’t
make up for the “slightly depressing” fact that the
story is built around Clare’s passivity: she’s always
waiting for her man to come back to her.
I found the series dated and sluggish, said
Barbara Ellen in The Observer. It’s frankly
“concerning” seeing Henry as a naked older man
visiting child-aged Clare, lurking in the bushes
and insisting it’s their “secret”. It is “problematic”,
said Hugo Rifkind in The Times, and you start to
wonder why “local law enforcement” has never
taken an interest in this naked man; but ”it works”,
thanks to strong performances and a plot that
throbs with “pleasing allegorical heartache”.The Time Traveler’s Wife: a “problematic” adaptation of the hit novel
Feature films by the British writer-director Terence Davies “don’t come along very often”, said Brian
Viner in the Daily Mail, but when they do, they are “usually worth watching”, even if they demand
a “certain perseverance”. Benediction, about the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, slots into
that category: “it is pretty hard going, but has its rewards”. Sassoon, who died in 1967 at the age
of 80, is played as a young man by Jack Lowden, and in his embittered older age by Peter Capaldi.
Davies “powerfully” punctuates the tale of his life with original footage from the War, “of shell
bursts over the trenches and cheerful Tommies showing their gap-toothed smiles to the camera
as they march to their doom”. The sections set after the War drag a bit – and Capaldi fails to quash
“a faint Scottish twang” – but there’s plenty here to move and enlighten.
Lowden is “excellent” as Sassoon, said Matthew Bond in The Mail in Sunday, but the script is
an often tedious blend of “clever verbal jousting and over-polished bons mots”; and with a parade
of caustic characters that includes Ivor Novello and Edith Sitwell, there are times when it feels like
an “Evelyn Waugh-style pastiche”. I loved it, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Davies approaches
the life of the poet “with great feeling and tenderness”; and he eschews the usual cinematic clichés
about writers: we never see Sassoon crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it across a room. Be
warned, however: the film is heartbreaking. In 1917, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen (Matthew
Tennyson) in hospital, and recognises his arguably greater talent. The intimate friendship that follows
is handled “with such restrained emotion you will almost certainly weep”.Benediction
2hrs 17mins (12A)Moving Terence Davies
film about the life of
Siegfried Sassoon
★★★The original Top Gun propelled Tom Cruise from “a heart-throb to a household name”, said Robbie
Collin in The Daily Telegraph. With this “absurdly entertaining” late sequel, we have possibly the
“Cruisiest” film to date. Within moments of the opening credits, Maverick – Cruise’s charismatic
fictional fighter pilot – is recalled to his “old Top Gun stomping ground” to train a new generation
of aviators who have assembled for a deadly mission: the neutralisation of a uranium enrichment
plant in an unspecified location overseas. Among the youngsters is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son
of Maverick’s friend Goose, who died in the first film. For my money, this is the best studio action
movie since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road; it is also “Dad Cinema at its eye-crinkling apogee – all
rugged wistfulness and rough-and-tumble comradeship”, interspersed with flight sequences “so
preposterously exciting” that they seem to invert the cinema “through 180 degrees”.
This film isn’t short of “rock’n’roll fighter-pilot action”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian,
but weirdly, it has none of the original’s “homoerotic tension”. “Where, oh where, is the towel-
round-the-waist, semi-nude locker-room intensity between the guys?” Weirder still, it’s even “less
progressive on gender issues” than the 1986 blockbuster, which did at least put a woman in charge
(Kelly McGillis’s civilian instructor). It’s true, the female roles here are pretty thankless, said Clarisse
Loughrey on The Independent, but the film is so “damned fun” you forget to care. Director Joseph
Kosinski has made “the kind of edge-of-your-seat, fist-pumping spectacular that can unite an entire
room full of strangers sitting in the dark, and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye” to boot.Top Gun:
Maverick
2hrs 11mins (PG)Tom Cruise’s Maverick
returns to the skies
★★★★This “disturbing and compelling” Norwegian film poses the question, “What would happen to little
children if they suddenly developed superpowers?” Its answer, said Kevin Maher in The Times, is that
they would “do very bad things” indeed. Set on a high-rise housing estate in Oslo over the course of
a long, hot summer, The Innocents follows a group of “mildly neglected latchkey kids” who suddenly
find they can do anything from “shamanistic spirit-jumping” to mind-reading. The most powerful
of these “preteen demigods” turns out to be Ben (Sam Ashraf), a “dead-eyed tyke” who initially uses
his new-found skills to fling rocks, but then deploys them to torture his own mother from afar, and
hijack the bodies of susceptible adults, in order to use them to commit murder. The premise is of
course fanciful, but with no “Marvel-style effects shots, laser lighting or bombastic orchestral cues”,
this “chilling” film feels “more Ken Loach” than Doctor Strange.
“Any film driven by child performances is particularly dependent on quality casting,” said Wendy
Ide in The Observer. “In this, the film is first-rate.” The four main actors are “utterly persuasive, even
as they are wielding cast-iron frying pans with their minds”. Director Eskil Vogt “never falls into the
trap of explaining” how their superpowers have come about, said Alistair Harkess in The Scotsman,
but instead focuses on the far more interesting “specifics of each kid’s individual home life”. Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw was turned into a film called The Innocents, and this one offers a
“similarly creepy and psychologically nuanced portrait of the terrors of adolescence”.The Innocents
1hr 57mins (15)Chilling Norwegian film
about children who
develop superpowers
★★★★
Theo James and Rose Leslie