Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut
Bob Ellis on In The Loop and Invictus.
Anyone who’s hung round political backrooms (like me) will recognise the terrifying truth of In The Loop, whose random screaming matches, moral panic, hectic hourly backflips, self-disgust and persistent paranoid suspense form the lifestyle of all who battle the twenty-four hour news cycle and the post-Christian water-boarding Chicken Little chaos of the modern world. How to stop a needless war and still keep my job? How to talk for one more minute to this dumb and potent American without breaking his nose with a chair?
It is one of the five or six funniest films in English and needs to be seen, not least for James Gandolfini’s American general attacking the office furniture and speaking of eating live puppies, and David Rasche’s take on Rumsfeld, a micromanaging bloodthirsty psychopath who abhors bad language, and Mimi Kennedy’s lusty bewrinkled variant on Hillary Clinton, whose teeth keep bleeding in moments of stress, all of whom show Americans have irony too.
But the English (and Scottish) are narrowly, I think, the more rib-splitting. Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) the munchkin Minister caught improvising on camera and causing, perhaps, world war; Toby Wright (Chris Addison) the woolly young aide caught schtupping in Washington and feebly informing his English girlfriend it was ‘to stop this awful war’; Judy Molloy (Gina McKee) the tall cool appointments manager and, of course, the two Scotsmen.
Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, reprised here from The Thick Of It, adds an immortal to English literature. Like Falstaff, Scrooge, Basil Seal and and Basil Fawlty, he is instantly unforgettable and his violent epithets (‘You – the girl from The Crying Game!’) a staunchless torrent of hateful unjust abuse that stems, we feel, from an unquiet soul (the Rumsfeld character accuses him of going lonely to bed in women’s underwear) but everything he says and does persists in the memory like a Monty Python sketch. Paul Higgins as his offsider Jamie McDonald resurrects his verbal WMD (‘Think now, if that’s what I’ll do to the fax machine that sent this message, think what I would do to the person who wrote it!’); and he may be there, I fear, to fill in when Capaldi, who is looking strained and poorly, drops dead in mid-soliloquy half way through take nine.
Shot on the hop like a fly-on-the-wall documentary and co-written by much of the team behind The Thick of It, this fine copraphagic emboldened exercise in multidirectional abuse restores film dialogue (and monologue) to the primacy it used to have in Bogart’s, Groucho’s and the Carry On gang’s day. Steve Coogan’s walk-on role as a constituency grinch whose mum’s brick wall is falling down is likewise delightful and side-splitting and utterly accurate. A film that tests the mind as the ribs, an instant classic, see it.
A LEGEND DECONSTRUCTED
Invictus is another of Clint Eastwood’s deconstructions of legend: how, in this case, Nelson Mandela (a mild and luminous Morgan Freeman), newly President, encourages the mainly white Springbok team to beat the world at rugby and, under the captaincy of Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), a middle-class Afrikaaner as prejudiced as any other, they get better and better, and less and less racist, and soon, in their own stadium, in extra time…I shouldn’t spoil it for you.
Like Young Mr Lincoln it prints the legend; but it shows, as well, how difficult Reconciliation is, how much you must surrender to even begin to make peace with your enemies. Mandela kept his white persecutors’ anthem, their green and gold team colours, their hated name Springboks, the white Presidential bodyguards who had brutalised and killed his people, risked his life in roaring stadiums of prosperous Afrikaners who hated him, and like that other Great Surrenderer Mikhail Gorbachev gained so little before the chaos returned. South Africa is the most violent society apart from Iraq now; and so it goes.
In a nice little scene before the final contest with the All Blacks the New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger bets on the outcome. ‘All your gold against all our sheep,’ he says. Mandela demurs. ‘A case of good wine might be more appropriate,’ he says.
