A coda to the 'Peaky Blinders' series

    Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man serves as a sufficiently honorable coda to a series created by Steven Knight and starring Cillian Murphy. The series spread over 36 episodes, beginning in 2012 and concluding in 2022. 

   During its run, the series found deep and surprising moments for a cast that created indelible characters, even when the stories began to feel a bit repetitive.

    Before watching the one-hour and 52-minute movie version now playing in select theaters and bowing on Netflix on March 20, I viewed the entire series. It definitely helps to have some of the Peaky Blinders details in mind when you see this movie version. 

   Another caution: You'll probably miss some of the characters who made the series so memorable. Too bad many of them had the misfortune of dying before The Immortal Man begins.

     I'm not sure how director Tom Harper, a series  veteran, and show creator Knight, who wrote The Immortal Man, could have topped the brilliant conclusion to the sixth season. What they offer echoes past achievements more than it surpasses them.

    So where does The Immortal Man begin? Tommy has withdrawn into rural isolation with his loyal associate, Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee), serving as a helpmate. Essentially, Tommy has given up on the world.

    The world, however, has moved on. The story has entered the 1940s. Britain is embroiled in World War II, and Tommy's recently discovered son, Duke (Barry Keoghan), who entered the series during its final year, runs the Peaky Blinders gang with little regard for any gangster ethos.

   Untamed and reckless, Duke must be saved from himself, which means Tommy needs to put aside the biography he's writing and return to Birmingham to reestablish the sense of family that has all but vanished from the gang.

   Tommy initially resists the call to return, even when his sister (Sophie Rundle) pleads for a comeback. He changes his mind when Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), the twin sister of Duke's late mother and a Romani Gypsy seer, visits. Tommy, as immersed in his belief in the power of curses as ever, must meet his destiny. 

   One of the problems with a movie version of Peaky Blinders is that the characters can't develop the novelistic complexity the longer format not only allowed but often used to maximum effect. We really got to know the characters, even those we came to fear or despise.

    The plot builds on a trend established in the final season. Fascists in Britain pose a threat to a country that's already under bombardment. Tim Roth portrays Beckett, a Nazi sympathizer involved in a German counterfeit currency scheme that's meant to undermine Britain's already shaky economy and lead to the country's collapse.

    The third act resolution of Tommy's efforts to thwart the plot deftly build tension and excitement. At times, though, the movie overdoes things. A fight between Tommy and Duke finds them wallowing in the mud of a pigsty, for example. 

   During the final season, Tommy's ambition had already begun to curdle into resignation. His inner torment intensified. Now, Tommy is a bit of a dead man walking, a depleted husk of a man who lives among ghosts but has been denied the peace of joining them. He eventually dons his trademark cap and long overcoat, but much of the old juice has drained away.

     Beyond that, the key idea of family connection, with all its tests, contortions and possible betrayals, was stronger in the series, partly because the theme here is more stated than deeply felt.  

     A familiar question arises. Can Tommy find redemption? Tommy's attempts to foil a Nazi plot offers him an opportunity to do something good in the world, the best a man such as Tommy, who has accumulated a large body count, can hope to achieve.

   Whatever you think about this addition to the Peaky Blinders catalog, I can't imagine that devotees -- even those who wind up being mildly disappointed -- won't want to see it. 

    When a graying Tommy rides into Small Heath on a black horse, the movie offers a mix of nostalgia and stirring imagery: A lone savior comes to the rescue of those who lack the will to get the job done. Sure we've seen it before, but this, after all, is Tommy Shelby.

     As a series fan, I'm glad to have seen The Immortal Man, primarily because Tommy Shelby has earned his place in gangster lore as a keenly intelligent but brutal man whose thoughts remain hidden but whose eyes reveal the echoes of the poetry that haunts his damaged soul. 

A coal man's troubled conscience

   

   A  drama of tormented conscience, Small Things Like These cloaks a tough-minded story in the somber light of a forbidding Irish winter. In his first screen performances since his Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy directs his energies inward to play Bill Furlong, a family man who earns his living delivering coal to locals in the small town of New Ross.

   Bill lives modestly with his wife (Eileen Walsh) and five daughters. By nature an observer, Bill eventually learns what's happening at the local convent, the place that houses both the town's Catholic school and one of Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries, now-defunct institutions where abused unwed mothers provided unpaid labor.

    A perfectly cast Murphy concentrates a growing sense of anguish in Bill's beneficent face as awareness of what transpires in the laundry takes its toll. At the end of each day's work, Bill scrubs his hands vigorously, a hard scrapple metaphor for trying to wash away sights that can't be unseen. 

      Set in 1989 during the week before Christmas, Small Things Like These employs flashbacks to shed light on Bill's past, a mixture of small disappointments and substantial grief. One Christmas, Bill’s mother gave him a hot water bottle instead of the jigsaw puzzle he wanted, but Bill’s real torment comes from knowing that his unwed single mother, who died young, barely escaped the Magdalene laundries.

      Bill’s sensitivities were nourished by a woman (Michelle Fairley) who took Bill and his teenage mom underwing. Among other things, Fairley's Mrs. Wilson helped Bill develop an enduring taste for Dickens, an author who knew how to drown a story in a sea of troubles.

     The plot conspires to bring Bill’s adult conscience to a boil when a young woman (Zara Devlin) who has been exiled to the laundry’s coal shed asks for help. Bill is moved but doesn’t know what to do.

      The head nun (a terrific Emily Watson as Sister Mary) knows Bill has penetrated the convent’s "secret." She tries to salve Bill's conscience with a fat Christmas bonus. 

     Aware that money always presents a problem for her struggling family, Bill's wife encourages him to go along to get along. The town has spent years ignoring the laundry. No one wants to upset the prevailing order.

       Mielants and screenwriter Enda Walsh aren't interested in big emotional effects. Spare as it is poignant, Small Things Like These turns a novel by Claire Keegan into a revealing big-screen story about one man who wrestles with the price of denial in a dreary town where most consider it wise to keep their eyes averted and their mouths shut.

Oppenheimer: The story of man and his times

 

    In Oppenheimer, the story of the scientist known as "the father of the atomic bomb," director Christopher Nolan takes a deep look at a complicated man who found himself poised at a pivotal moment of history.

    A theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer led the bomb-making effort in the Los Alamos, New Mexico. Deemed an unlikely choice for the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was supported by Leslie Groves, an Army officer charged with overseeing the project, which employed  some of the world’s most gifted physicists.

    Oppenheimer might be less stylistically self-conscious than such Nolan movies as Inception, but that doesn't mean the movie lacks style. Nolan presents his story in sharply edited narrative bursts that brim with detail and suggestive power.

   Working from American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Nolan builds the story around a politically loaded 1954 closed-door hearing at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance was challenged.

   At three hours in length, Oppenheimer is comprehensive enough to be a compelling account of the invention of the atomic bomb and a character study about a man riven with contradiction. Simultaneously proud of his achievement and aware of the horrific destruction he helped unleash, Oppenheimer was cursed with irresolvable conflict.

    Cillian Murphy brilliantly portrays Oppenheimer from his student youth through his appearance at a closed-door hearing which pitted him against Lewis Strauss. As head of The Atomic Energy Commission, Strauss had it in for Oppenheimer.

     Subtle, reticent and wily, Murphy’s Oppenheimer belongs to a rare group of scientists devoted to pursuits about which most of us remain only sketchily aware. In Oppenheimer's case, quantum mechanics.

    Oppenheimer wasn’t immune from the intellectual arrogance such endeavors can breed. He often held his cards close to the vest, minimizing his liberal/left leanings when necessary. Nonchalant about his association with friends who were members of the Communist party, he ultimately got caught in the backwash that swept the country during the McCarthy era.

     As intriguing as Murphy can be, he receives support from one of the strongest casts to populate a movie in some time. 

    Made-up to the point where he almost disappears, Robert Downey Jr. portrays Strauss, a figure whose presence grows as the film progresses. Downey creates an indelible portrait of a man cast into a world in which he's almost always out of his depth.

      Matt Damon does solid work as Groves. Other performers find featured moments, including Benny Safdie as physicist Edward Teller. 

      The movie's all-star group of scientists and theoreticians includes Kenneth Branagh as Neils Bohr and Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and participant in the Manhattan Project.

      Nolan dips into Oppenheimer’s tangled personal life with performances by Florence Pugh as a politically consumed woman and Oppenheimer paramour and Emily Blunt as Kitty Harrison, Oppenheimer’s wife. The harried mother of his children and a hard drinker, Harrison emerges as a woman who refuses to be bowed by her husband's interrogators.

     The test of the atomic bomb precedes the movie’s third act, which tends to make the remainder of the story feel slightly anti-climactic. 

      Still, scenes at the hearing (in black-and-white) allow for a burgeoning conflict to emerge: Oppenheimer came to oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb, a position that put him at odds with Teller and a defense establishment increasingly mired in Cold War frenzy.

       There are genius strokes: Focusing on Oppenheimer’s face when bombs explode in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Nolan spares us the sight of nuclear devastation. We know that Oppenheimer knows what he's wrought.

       Nolan also displays a keen understanding of how an academic environment that sheltered so many gifted scientists merged into the country’s war-time agenda. He captures the fervor of men who found themselves moving from the world of theory to the world of practice.

         With help from composer Ludwig Goransson, Nolan masterfully infuses a surfeit of expository scenes with tension and urgency, leaving it to us to debate some of the ethical considerations that probably are more evident today than they might have been during the heat of war.

        A movie about a momentous subject that’s branded as one of the year’s most important releases carries a major burden. Time will tell whether Nolan has lived up to it.

       Meanwhile, Oppenheimer deftly illuminates the allure and dangers of being caught in the sweep of history.

       It's a movie about Oppenheimer, yes, but you remember him in the well-developed context of the movie's cascading scenes and shorthand revelations, a man fully and sometimes dangerously situated at a historical turning point whose implications still reverberate.

Expect jolts. Surprise? Not so much

   I suppose it makes twisted sense that the first film I've seen with an audience since the start of the great Covid pandemic is a sequel, namely A Quiet Place Part II. 

   Sitting in a multiplex with a state-of-the-art auditorium, I felt an alarming sense of deja vu. Rather than feeling elated about returning to the theatrical experience, I felt as if nothing had changed in more than a year.

    I wanted renewal. I got more of the same — which makes a decent lead-in to the review of Part II.

   Director John Krasinski follows the unexpected success of the 2018 original with a movie in which the technical achievements -- the use of sound in a story about  ferocious  aliens with heightened hearing abilities  -- built unnerving levels of  suspense. 

    In case you've forgotten, another reminder: The Quiet Place aliens respond to noise. Make a sound and they'll hunt you down faster than you can switch from here to another Web site.

   And, no, I'm not suggesting you try that.

  In the first outing, Krasinski concocted a movie in which waiting -- the simple act of having to be silent -- crackled with suspense and we marveled at the ingenuity required for a mother and father (Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt) to save their family.

    Now,  the attacks and their attendant noise constitute the main event: Noises trigger the attacks which proceed with fury and lots of of flashing teeth and claws. In 2021, the aliens are more than ready for their close-ups.

    Fans of the first installment also remember that Krasinski's character died in that movie. Perhaps to serve as a refresher, Krasinski opens Part II with an action-filled prologue in which he appears.

    Fast and efficient, the prologue gets things off to an ominous start, introducing a couple of major characters whose issues echo throughout.

    As a kid whose Little League game is interrupted by an alien invasion, Noah Jupe's Marcus must overcome a quivering lack of confidence. Millicent Simmonds portrays Marcus's sister Regan, a teenager who can't hear but who has enough smarts and courage to see things through.

    Once the opening fades, Krasinski leaps ahead to the time when Blunt's character, her three children (one still an infant) are on the run without their late father to help. Most of the pre-invasion world has fallen into that most sacred of movie territories, wanton disrepair.

   This is not to say that Krasinski totally succumbs to second-movie fatigue. The set pieces -- Regan entering an empty (wanna bet?) train car and Blunt racing toward safety carrying oxygen tanks -- are effectively tense. If you like jump scares, you won't be short-changed.

   The story derives most of its momentum from a plotline in which Regan attempts to find a safe harbor for her family. 

   She's joined by a former neighbor. Emmett (a bearded Cillian Murphy) reluctantly offers the wandering Abbott family shelter before joining Regan in a search triggered by a clue: a perpetual broadcast of Bobby Darin's Beyond the Sea. 

    Could it be a message about a place the aliens have yet to reach?

    Putting the movie's characters into separate story arcs doesn't always pay off.  A cross-cutting series of sequences that shifts between Jupe and Simmonds has a pro-forma quality about it and the movie's ending feels as if someone simply decided it was time to go home.

     Part II probably will make some noise at the box office and may encourage conversation about the ways in which a movie about disruptions to normal life resonates during the time of Covid. 

     I was jolted. I felt some of the more suspenseful moments but I wish I could tell you that in its fleet 97 minutes, Part II approached the surprise level of the original.

     Like the aliens that attack suddenly and at warp speed, Part II moves quickly but leaves little in its wake. Adding nothing much by way of depth or discovery, Part II feels more like an encore than a great sequel. 

      

      

     

'Party' guests are out for blood

Despite a strong cast, director Sally Potter's arch little movie takes us nowhere we haven't been before.

It concerns me to know that I’ve sometimes felt the way Timothy Spall looks in The Party, a slender black comedy filmed in black-and-white. But even at a shockingly brief one hour and 11 minutes, The Party feels as if it could have been condensed into a 40-minute short as it builds toward a nifty punchline.

Spall, who has never projected so much doom and futility, portrays a British academic whose doctor has given him a fatal diagnosis. Haggard and expressionless, Spall’s Bill seems the personification of pitiless depression.

Joining Spall's Bill in this happily bitter ensemble piece are his wife Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a variety of friends: the catty, mordant April (Patricia Clarkson), her bromide-spouting boyfriend (Bruno Ganz), a coke-snorting financial executive (Cillian Murphy), and a lesbian couple portrayed by Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer.

The group has gathered to celebrate Janet’s appointment to a ministerial post in the department overseeing Britain's health.

The movie revolves around Albee-style insults that the characters hurl at one another while harboring secrets that will be revealed as the movie builds toward its final surprise.

Part of the trouble with movies such as The Party is that they seem to ask us to feel superior to their embittered, pretentious characters while creating few points of real identification.

Directed by Sally Potter, who also wrote the screenplay, The Party's main thrust -- the celebration that goes terribly wrong -- feels awfully familiar. Clarkson deftly delivers her character’s withering lines and Spall convincingly dangles at the end of his character’s rope, but The Party passes without arriving at a consequential destination.

'Dunkirk' makes fear feel real

Trapped on a beach, British soldiers scramble to survive in the early days of World War II..

In 1940, some 400,000 British troops (along with French, Canadian and Belgian soldiers) were stranded on a beach in France. The soldiers were backed into a military cul-de-sac by German forces that rapidly were moving westward. The troops had little support from the air or the sea. On this lonely stretch of beach in northern France, they were strafed by German planes. Their only way out was to be transported back across the English Channel.

That's the backdrop for Dunkirk, the latest, and perhaps most masterful, film from director Christopher Nolan (Interstellar, The Dark Night Rises and Inception).
Watching Dunkirk, I kept recalling a long ago conversation I had with a World War II veteran who worked at the Rocky Mountain News. We were having coffee in a room behind what was called "the backshop," the place where the printers worked when newspapers still employed printers. I was telling him about some war movie I'd seen.

"You know what war is?'' he asked.

"What?" I responded, readily conceding that his knowledge of the subject was far greater than mine since he had served with Patton's Third Army in France and Germany. For him, war wasn't a movie.

"Fear. Nothing else," he replied.

It's too early to determine whether Dunkirk is a great war movie, but I believe Nolan got one thing right. He conveys the fear of men who, minus air support or ships to transport them off the beach, became targets. The term "sitting ducks" seldom has been more appropriately employed.

Nolan uses all of his considerable cinematic skills to make us feel the explosive force of bombs, the startling eruption of bullets or the vulnerability of the few British pilots who made their way to Dunkirk in planes that, by today's standards, seem like little more than flying crates.

Nolan divides his story into several related parts. In the first, a British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) escapes German gunfire that wipes out all his fellow soldiers on the streets of Dunkirk. He arrives on the beach, where thousands of British soldiers have assembled.

He and another soldier (Aneurin Barnard) carry a wounded soldier to a Red Cross rescue ship. They race through masses of soldiers carrying a stretcher toward the pier where the boat has docked. Their motives have a double edge. They want to board the ship themselves.

The officers on the beach are played by Kenneth Branagh (Navy) and James D'Arcy (Army). The soldiers await help, but Branagh's character knows that the British command wants to preserve its destroyers for later battles. Prospects for rescue are dim.

Another story focuses on a British civilian (Mark Rylance) who decides to sail his private boat to Dunkirk to help rescue the stranded soldiers. He's accompanied by his son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and a local teenager (Barry Keoghan).

On their way to Dunkirk, this civilian crew saves a stranded soldier (Cillian Murphy) whose ship was sunk by a German torpedo. Cillian's shell shocked soldier wants Rylance's character to turn his boat around. He doesn't want to return to the nightmare he just left.

If you see the film in an IMAX theater with the sound cranked, you'll feel every shock and rumble -- many of them enhanced by Hans Zimmer's score, a pounding affair that rises like an adrenalized pulse. It's the musical equivalent of writing in all capital letters: DREAD. FEAR. PANIC.

Nolan's third story deals with the air war. Tom Hardy files a RAF Spitfire. Hardy's character -- his face mostly obscured by the mask that supplies him with oxygen -- engages in dogfights with German planes. These dizzying air battles rank among the best ever filmed. (Nolan shot his film with IMAX cameras on 65 mm film; he puts us in the cockpit with Hardy in ways that are disorienting and, of course, frightening.)

It's difficult to imagine that cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema won't win an Oscar for his stunning work here.

Nolan shifts between all these stories in an effort to provide an encompassing view of Dunkirk. Individual stories are subordinated to the creation of an overall feeling of war chaos.

We can assume things about the characters from their behavior -- Rylance's steadfastness, Branagh's leadership, Whitehead's "ordinary-Joe" qualities, but Nolan leaves most of that work to us.

In some respects, the movie's heroism belongs mainly to its civilians. As it turns out, a small armada of private boats traveled to Dunkirk to rescue the stranded soldiers. It was a stirring moment of British unity that defined the pluck and spirit of a united people facing terrible duress. To portray it, Nolan mostly dispenses with dialogue.

If I have a beef with Dunkirk, it's this: Nolan's movie consists almost entirely of climaxes, the kind of scenes that other war movies build toward. And once, the chaos subsides, Nolan doesn't seem to know what to do. Scale overwhelms everything in ways that make sense if you acknowledge that Nolan's aim is to make us feel as if we, too, are on that beach.

That's part of the point, I think, to make us understand that once the fighting starts, thoughts about patriotism tend to give way to the urge simply to survive.

Nolan has made a movie full of fear and frenzy. It's impressive for sure but sensation-oriented films tend to fade once the sensation stops.

Judging by the inescapable sadness in the eyes of the veteran I mentioned earlier, that's not the case for those whose wars weren't fought at the movies.

A plot to kill a top Nazi

Anthropoid is not the latest horror movie to roll off the Hollywood assembly line -- at least not in any conventional way in which we use the word "horror." Rather, Anthropoid takes its title from a World War II code name for a Czech-conceived operation designed to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the worst members of a Nazi hierarchy in which competition for the title was pretty stiff. Anthropoid doesn't entirely do justice to the story of a duo of Czech fighters (Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy) who parachute into their country to kill Heydrich, a.k.a., the Butcher of Prague. The two Czechs, who had been living in London, are housed with a local family, and begin to associate with a variety of members of the Czech resistance. Both young men develop relationships with women, one with the daughter of the family that's hiding them, the other with one of the daughter's friends. Most of the cast is British, which means much of the dialogue is delivered with accents. Director Sean Ellis stages the assassination long before the movie ends, which means that much of Anthropoid's second half deals with attempts by the characters to escape capture by the SS. Heydrich died shortly after the assassination attempt, and the Germans unleashed brutal reprisals on the Czech population. The story culminates with a lengthy gun battle in which German soldiers try to wipe out resistance members, who, by this time, are hiding in a church. If the battle feels interminable, that's probably what Ellis intended. This intensely depicted and appropriately exhausting bit of warfare brings the movie, which has its longueurs, to its sad conclusion, but decent and often restrained work from Dornan (as Jan Kubis) and Murphy (as Josef Gabcik) can't quite lift the movie out of its earlier doldrums. Anthropoid serves as a rudimentary introduction to a neglected World War II story, but it should have accomplished more.

Johnny Depp dwells in a computer

Transcendence: a muddled look at the perils of artificial intelligence

I don't know exactly what's in the hearts and minds of director Wally Pfister and screenwriter Jack Paglen when it comes to the perils humanity faces as mankind inches closer to a time when artificial intelligence threatens to undermine the biological basis of life.

And that's the trouble.

I should have left Transcendence, which purports to deal with just that subject, feeling a sense of outrage -- or at least brooding concern. I'd gladly have settled for glimmers of hope that we'll come to our senses and cling to the flesh-and-blood quality of our lives.

Instead, I left wondering what the hell Pfister was trying to say and whether too much A-line pap has diminished Johnny Depp as an actor.

I also wondered whether whether Pfister, an excellent cinematographer who has worked on almost all of director Christopher Nolan's movies (e.g., The Dark Knight and Inception) forgot that the main job of the director has less to do with cinematic flourishes (of which Transcendence boasts many) than with with storytelling.

The longer Transcendence goes on, the more it feels as if the story hadn't been thought through or perhaps had been tinkered with by a committee. Don't you think we need a love story? How about adding hybrids? No, not cars, but zombie-like folks ready to form an automoton-like army.

Depp plays Will Caster, a brilliant computer scientist whose work in the field of artificial intelligence has established him as a global genius. Caster's wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), runs the business side of Will's life, raising money for his work in league with Max Waters (Paul Bettany), another computer scientist.

Early on, Will is attacked by a radical anti-technology group called RIFT. He survives a gunshot wound only to learn that he was struck by a radioactive bullet.

With death looming, Hall and Bettany contrive to salvage Will's consciousness by uploading it into a giant computer. They succeed, and the trouble starts.

Will's humanitarian impulses become distorted. With all the world's information at his disposal through the Internet, he becomes power hungry -- for the good of mankind, he says.

Depp doesn't inhabit a computer as well as Scarlett Johansson did in Her. (A better title for Transcendence might have been Him.)

And the supporting cast is largely wasted.

Hall does what she can as a woman whose ideals increasingly are betrayed. Bettany brings hand-wringing sincerity to his role, but the rest of the cast -- Morgan Freeman (as a scientist), Cillian Murphy (as an FBI agent) and a grim looking Kate Mara (as a RIFT activist) is largely wasted.

It's depressing to watch an actor as gifted as Freeman playing a non-character in a sea of non-characters.

Maybe that's the rub: A movie that wants to remind us of our connection to the Earth and of our precious humanity might have made more of an effort to include a few interesting human beings.