THE ACCOUNTANT
★★★★★
FROMFEBRUARY 15/ RATEDMBen Affleck plays an autistic savant whose
skills include advanced math and killing
people: he’s Rain Man crossed with Jason
Bourne, and he’s here to kick ass, take
names and enter them into a database. If
those familiar with autism might sneer at
this portrayal, at least director Gavin
O’Connor (Warrior) presents the disorder
as a double-edged gift, rather than merely
a disability. Affleck tamps down his natural
charisma as a man who struggles with
social interaction, but he’s in fine form
when the action starts: the fight scenes are
brutal, efficient and plentiful. Anna
Kendrick is wasted as the dorky and
helpless love interest, Jon Bernthal gets to
use his Punisher training as a rival hitman,
and JK Simmons looks great in a hat as a
G-man on Affleck’s trail.
EXTRAS Featurettes. TIM KEENTHE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS
★★★★★
FROM FEBRUARY 15 / RATED MA15+Set at the end of WWI, Michael Fassbender
and Alicia Vikander are a couple beginning
their life together off the coast of WA.
Pairing those two actors together is smart
casting — they’re a terrific team and the
film’s greatest strength. Vikander puts in
an absorbing performance as Isabel, the
small-town girl who spies an escape in the
handsome new lighthouse keeper. But
things don’t stay perfect forever, becoming
darker as Isabel’s desire to become a
mother becomes more urgent. This burning
maternal desire leads the pair to make a
fateful decision — one that will haunt them
for the rest of their lives. But in the third
act, it becomes increasingly contrived as it
tries to wring as much drama as possible
from its set-up. Still, despite the
contrivances that got us there, it’s a hardy
soul who won’t leave feeling moved.
EXTRAS TBC. ANNA SMITHmeaning is not always clear, even for people
speaking the same language.
The scope of the challenge is brilliantly
visualised by the design of the alien heptapods
themselves (part squid, part Venus ly trap, part
old-person’s-hand — we half-expected them to
offer Amy Adams a giant Werther’s Original), and
especially their language, which is utterly unlike
human language (although sounds vaguely like a
whale trying to escape from an echo chamber.)
And as Dr Banks starts to understand more
about their unique written language (which looks
like a coffee cup ring on a paper towel), other
changes begin to occur to her perception of
reality – like downloading a new programming
language that starts to reformat her neural
software. Or hardware. Or... look, we don’t know
how computers work, alright? The point is, it’s a
fascinating concept, backed up with a smattering
of actual science, although one wonders how
deeply those scientists sighed when they watched
the movie. Arrival is best considered within the
dreamy context of both Dr Banks’ expanding
worldview and the ilm itself, which proceeds
within its own self-referential bubble; start taking
things to their logical conclusions and
conundrums begin to appear. But we’re not here
to pick nits, and indeed the ilm never aims to be
a TED talk; certainly screenwriter Eric Heisserer
(Lights Out) and Villeneuve balance
middleweight intellectual aspirations with an
emotional core more successfully than, say,
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
Some of that credit should go to Amy Adams,
who manages to convey multitudes while
portraying a quiet and interior character,
struggling with very personal demons. As the focal
point for the entire narrative — past, present and
future — Adams embodies a mixture of
conidence and doubt, of openness and fear, of
scientiic caution and recklessness.
We are completely embedded with Dr Banks,
thanks to clever camerawork and editing — we
don’t even really see the alien ships properly until
the irst time Louise sees them; and the more
Louise understands about the heptapods, the
more clearly they are shown on screen. If the story
is mysterious to us, it’s because it’s equally
mysterious to her.
If language is the tool of peace, and ambiguity
is the enemy of diplomacy, what does a world —
and some very powerful individuals — addicted to
bite-sized tweets and post-factual status updates
mean for the future? Arrival contemplates these
questions at a very timely moment.
EXTRAS Featurettes. TIM KEENLouise Banks (Amy Adams)
and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy
Renner) translate heptapod.