Minecinebinge

Image via WikipediaI only managed two films yesterday: The Grey and J. Edgar. It was such a freezing cold day that I wanted to get the journey overwith and did not stay for a third film despite there  being more I would like to see.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The Grey was rather a foolish choice for a cold day given that it takes place in the Alaskan wilderness surrounded by snow and ice in blizzards and frozen rivers.

Based on a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers called Ghost Walker and also co-scripted by him, it stars Liam Neeson as a lost man in a community of lost human beings. One might say he starts the film suicidal and goes down from there.




Clearly no-one in their right mind would live in this hellish place although given that it is some kind of oilfield perhaps the money is very good. Liam though is there because it was that or the Foreign Legion. His great love has left his life and he no longer cares much about anything. By profession he is a killer of wolves, keeping them away from the oil workers. After the howl of one of these creatures distracts him from putting his rifle to another use we then join him and more of this misfit brotherhood on a 'plane out to Anchorage albeit in conditions that would shut down Heathrow in a minute.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The 'plane goes down in the middle of nowhere and the film begins proper with the small group of survivors having angered a pack of wolves simply by being in their territory. Just surviving the cold and lack of food would have been bad enough probably but the film becomes just about which of the two packs is going to whittle away the other to nothing. It is clear that that is what the humans become - a rival pack and just as the wolves see an unsuccessful challenge to their alpha male so the humans have a similar confrontation with Otway (Neeson), who has become more and more wolf-like, as the successful alpha of the human pack.

The harrowing constant jeopardy and the photography of the wolves and weather (by Misanobu Takayanagi) is very well done and if it had been the kind of film I really wanted to see I'm sure I would rate it higher. I quickly realised that I'd have liked something less cold and cheerless on the day though and felt a bit cheated by the ending too. [Later edit] I have warmed (ha) to this film a little since and in considering the various possibilities for the ending I am now rather in favour of the way it was done. I have also now heard the theory that Ottway actually DOES commit suicide at the beginning, meaning that the rest of the film is some kind of struggle for his soul to find rest I suppose. I quite like this theory but I'm not terribly convinced.

J. Edgar is of course a biopic of one of the towering figures of 20th century American history - John Edgar Hoover.

I am a big fan of Clint Eastwood's directorial work but I must say that, while there is much that is impressive, this isn't my favourite of his work. Leonardo di Caprio plays Hoover and I find it increasingly hard to believe that I used to dismiss him as a lightweight who had lucked into the big time. Once again he does a laudable job, as he plays the complex and rather unpleasant Hoover at all stages of his life, at times of necessity from behind a mask of make up and prosthetics.

While it is a fascinating insight into the ugly face of U.S. politics and paranoia it doesn't really come down on either side of the fence in its attempt to show the various facets of Hoover's character. It fails to make him either entirely a monster though you would not want to make an enemy of the spider in his web of surveilance and secret files or a wholly sympathetic human being. In some ways the film is a love story and at times the relationship between Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson (well-played by Arnie Hammer) is touchingly portrayed as is the relationship between Hoover and his Personal Assistant.

 Image via Wikipedia

There is only a fleeting reference to Hoover's alleged cross-dressing fetish but we do see quite a bit of his overpowering relationship with his mother (strangely, yet somehow inevitably, played by the old lady's old lady: Dame Judy).

Along the way we meet all kinds of other quickly sketched in characters from Ginger Rogers to Richard Nixon via Shirley Temple. In the end, though I found it engrossing and interesting, it suffers from trying to be objective and, for me, from being about a thoroughly unpleasant man we are probably better off without. Perhaps like the recent Iron Lady it will just have to do until the proper biopic comes out.