A vivid look at a woman who wrote

 She wrote only one novel but it became a classic. She was thirty years old when she died of tuberculosis. One of her sisters also became a famous novelist. Sounds like Jeopardy, no? Answer: Who is Emily Bronte?

 In Emily, director Frances O'Connor draws on some the limited facts about Bronte’s brief life. More importantly, she finds something of the wildly independent spirit that infused Bronte's signature work, Wuthering Heights.

  That's not to say that Emily spends all its time brooding or wandering the moors that haunted Bronte's Heathcliff. Brilliantly rendered by Emma Mackey, Emily becomes a semi-fictional creation that helps us appreciate the artist behind the art, not a character who once lived but one who feels fully alive.

   The movie embeds Emily's story in her family life.

   Bronte's stuffy widowed father (Adrian Dunbar) favors sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and tolerates wayward brother Bran (Fionn Whitehead). 

   Gemma Jones portrays Aunt Branwell, the woman who holds the Bronte household together. As the youngest of the Bronte sisters, Anne (Amelia Gething) benefits from everyone's affection.

  Aspiring writers during the time the movie takes place, Emily and Charlotte engage in an intense sibling rivalry. Charlotte, of course, wrote Jane Eyre, another highly regarded novel.

  Bronte scholars will recognize the many liberties that O'Connor, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, takes -- none more prominent than the inclusion of a torrid love affair between Emily and newly arrived clergyman William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). 

   Tormented by his clerical conscience, Weightman staggers into an affair that Emily has far less trouble embracing. He can't entirely overcome the guilt that springs from an ingrained sense of propriety. 

    It's hardly a spoiler to note that the affair leads to heartbreak and allows O'Connor to make effective use of a hoary literary conceit. No fair telling more but this risky ploy easily could have curdled. Instead, it works, giving the movie a novelistic feel.

    Emily's brother Branwell proves a delusional mess, the Bronte who declares himself a writer and romanticizes his role as such. The problem: If he ever had any talent, Bran surrendered it to drink and opium.

    When Branwell shares a manuscript with Emily, she delivers a takedown so withering, it may give you chills. I was tempted to try to copy it verbatim should the need for such a brutally honest reaction ever present itself. And, no, I don't think it I could say those words to anyone.

     In the movie's most unsettling scene, Emily dons a mask that her father had made of her late mother. She seems to channel her mother's spirit. I didn't quite know what to make of the moment and I'm not sure the movie did either. Still, it augments the unease surrounding Emily, the feeling that she exists at a remove from others.

    O'Connor presumes that we understand Emily's attraction to the fragrance and forbidding mysteries of the moors.  It helps I suppose to have read Wuthering Heights or at least seen William Wyler's 1939 adaptation starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. 

    Emily isn't a bona fide biopic. Maybe that's why the movie never feels as if it might by suffocated by period-piece trappings. Besides, Emily may be something better than a straight depiction of Bronte's life: A look at the vital spirit that burned in a writer whose dark novel about ferocious love still resonates almost 175 years after her death.

A movie based on a real art theft

  A portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Francisco de Goya disappears from the British National Gallery in London during the summer of 1961.

  Sounds like the set-up for a caper movie revolving around a carefully detailed scene in which cunning thieves find a way into the museum and a way out with the famous painting.

  But director Roger Michell has something different in mind in The Duke, the story of a real-life theft involving a 61-year-old man who never met a cause he wasn't willing to stand up for. 

 When we meet Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), he has focused considerable passion on what seems an exceedingly narrow crusade. Bunton doesn't want to pay for the TV license that allowed British TV watchers to access the BBC in the 1960s. He's disabled his set so that it can't receive the BBC and sees no reason why he should be required to have a license.

   Bunton claimed he had no interest in profiting from the Wellington  heist, insisting instead that he kidnapped the painting and planned to use it as a bargaining chip to persuade the government to fund access to the BBC for the poor and for elderly pensioners.

  He was less a robber than a quasi-imaginative Robin Hood who wrote plays that brought him little response other than a copious supply of rejection letters from the same BBC that he refused to pay for.

     Michell, who died in September of last year, is best known for movies such as Notting Hill and Venus. It's no surprise then that the director, working from a screenplay by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, has made a character comedy that places itself solidly in the British working class where we meet Bunton's family -- his long- suffering wife (Helen Mirren) and his son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead). 

     The Buntons reside in unfashionable Newcastle where Bunton, who ultimately returned the painting, loses jobs and conducts solitary protests. 

     Michell spends little time on the actual theft, opting to showcase Broadbent's performance as a good-hearted, obstinate fellow whose beliefs, at least as depicted in the movie, might have been authored for a Frank Capra screenplay. 

     We're meant to look out for one another. I am you. You are me, etc.

      Broadbent and Mirren play an admirable duet in a movie that has no trouble embracing an old-fashioned spirit as it ambles toward a courtroom scene in which Bunton's barrister (a fine Matthew Goode) offers a moving defense of his client.

      It's unlikely that The Duke will find a place in the pantheon of great movies. It can't quite shake its obvious sentiment and a story element about a daughter that the Buntons lost doesn't quite find the emotional resonance Michell may have wanted.

     But the movie qualifies as a solid — if small — entertainment that gives Broadbent a showcase role. Broadbent previously worked with Michell in Le Week-End, a 2013 movie about an aging couple facing up to some of life's disappointments during a trip to Paris.

     Sadly, Michell's untimely departure -- he was 65 when he died -- will prevent another collaboration. Consider it a loss.*

*If you’re a faithful reader of Denerstein Unleashed, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet of late. As a result of knee-replacement surgery, I have not seen some of the most recent high-profile movies nor have I been able to do much writing. I’m slowly working my way back and, although I’m probably going to be reviewing fewer movies for a while, will resume more regular publication in May.

    

'Voyagers' travels a familiar route

    Once again, humanity faces extinction.

   In the year 2063, Earth's resources have been irretrievably depleted. As a result, a project to colonize a far-off planet begins. 

   The difficulty: It will take 86 years for the crew to reach humanity's potential new home. That means the colonists probably will be the grandchildren of the original crew, which is composed of 33 test-tube babies who, when the movie reaches the depths of space, all have become teenagers.

   Only one adult (Colin Farrell) makes the trip, a volunteer who feels compelled to protect the crew until it reaches its destination.

   Surviving on a spaceship for 86 years requires that the crew drink a substance called The Blue, which dulls their aggressive impulses and also inhibits their ability to experience pleasure. The designers of the voyage worried about what might happen should 30 hormonally charged teenagers be left to their own devices.

     It takes director Neil Burger, who also wrote the screenplay, a while to reach the story's pivotal moment. Two of the crew members (Tye Sheridan and Fionn Whitehead) learn about The Blue's effects.

     They stop drinking it and Whitehead's Zac begins seeing the ship's medical officer (Lily-Rose Depp) in a new light.

     It's hardly surprising that trouble looms. Nor is it much of a shock that none of the movie's characters achieves stand-out prominence. 

     Anyway, the story relies on a trick as old as Lord of the Flies,  putting a group of young people into an isolated situation, stripping them of ordinary stimuli, and trying to discern something about their essential nature. 

    Farrell doesn't display much personality as the adult in the room. It hardly matters because the movie ultimately belongs to the young actors who are pushed into a scenario that poses questions about how lies can be used to promote fear by those seeking power. Sound familiar?

    The possible arrival of an alien further amps up the stakes, which never seem especially high, and, truth be told, there’s only so much visual imagination that can be applied to the interior of a spaceship. 

    It doesn’t help, either, that all the crew members dress alike.

    After his initial bout with rebelliousness, Sheridan's Christopher matures, allying with Depp's Sela. Whitehead supplies the villainy as a young man in whom adolescent rebellion, hormonal turbulence, and envy fuel aggression.

   Can these young people control themselves for the sake of accomplishing something good; in this case, the continuation of the species?

    Intermittent moments of tension can be found, but the movie's desire to see what happens when characters are freed from restraints never feels dangerous, edgy, or fresh enough to find new life.

     So, yes, Voyagers is like Lord of the Flies -- only without the buzz.

'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.