★★★
‘Each McDonald’s burger has two pickles, a pinch of onions and a precise shot of ketchup and mustard’. It’s consistency and uniformity that define the fast food industry, you always know what you’re going to get for your money. Taking a similar ethos and methodology as its driving force, The Founder, latest from the Weinstein Company, runs with a conventional plot adding to its consistency a smattering more flavour than you might expect.
★★★
We swan around in our privileged lives and it makes me sick.
80,000 children go missing in India every year. Read that sentence again. It’s a harrowing truth and deeply upsetting. It’s also the opening message and concluding statement of Garth Davis’ cinematic debut Lion, a profoundly moving film taken from the true story of a boy separated from his family by terrible misfortune. Lion begins with five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) and his elder brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), stealing and selling from a coal train to support the rest of their impoverished family. Chaotic camerawork, so common in filmmaking’s approach to the fast and overpopulated Indian metropolis, follows the pair as they buy milk for their troubles and return victors of the ‘hunt’. Things go awry when Guddu leaves an exhausted Saroo on a station platform during a night job but does not return. Saroo’s journey as it unfolds hereafter takes the story thousands of miles and results in his adoption and emigration to Australia to live with John and Sue (David Wenham and a masterful Nicole Kidman). It is a jump of twenty years into the future and the sensory awakening provided by an Indian treat from his childhood that inspires in Saroo (now Dev Patel) an emotionally destructive obsession with rediscovering his home.
★★★★
You could never accuse Martin Scorsese of lacking in diversity when it comes to his body of work. Silence, Scorsese’s latest to hit the screens, follows a fowl-mouthed Wolf of Wall Street which was itself preceded by the charming (and, unusually, child-friendly) Hugo. In a way, however, Silence predates both having been first conceived back in the nineties – not long after Scorsese concluded work on his Last Temptation of Christ, a film of kindred spirit to its later successor. Silence battled much in its pilgrimage to production – appropriately surviving its own ‘hell’, albeit a development one – and must be termed another passion project of willpower for Scorsese. It’s not hard to see why. Adapted from the book of the same name by Shūsaku Endō, Silence tackles themes potent amid Scorsese’s oeuvre. Guilt, faith, Catholicism…all present and correct. I have niggles but wouldn’t hesitate to call the effort worth it.
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