majorarcana

Astonishingly, I’m not even sure I’d heard of this before noticing it in the BFI January brochure, where it was showing as part of their Wim Wenders season. From the notes I observe Hammett had a somewhat troubled production history and seems to be generally regarded as not being entirely successful. Nevertheless, this is by no means a bad film. Frederic Forrest gives a great performance which ticks all the boxes in what I want from a fictional Hammett. The plot takes a while to coalesce, and the stab at social comment seems rather slight, but everything builds to a satisfying conclusion and the film evokes the atmosphere of the noir genre brilliantly. It also has a striking John Barry score, which I definitely need to track down a copy of. Great stuff.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is the kind of ruthlessly competent dramatic thriller you’d expect from a seasoned director such as Lumet; a superbly executed car-crash story of a disintegrating, disfunctional family which manages to be gripping and yet profoundly uncomfortable viewing at the same time. Hoffman is the stand-out in a uniformly excellent cast, and whilst it’s by no means terribly original, it’s a pleasure to see a film which just does everything right for once. I enjoyed it a lot.

Also, I saw it at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, which I was visiting for the first time, despite it being (roughly) on my patch, and indeed, on a bus route which drops me off pretty much outside my front door. It’s a fantastic place, a genuinely impressive-looking building, beautifully restored interior and a lively bar. The week before I’d been to the Raindance open night where Chris Auty was speaking, and happened to mention he’d previously worked for a company which restored cinemas - the two projects he mentioned specifically being the Ritzy and Notting Hill Gate (where I saw Blade Runner: The Final Cut the other week). All I can say is nice job, Chris.

I read Beowulf the poem in primary school and loved it; it had monsters and heroes, horror, death and darkness, pretty much ticking all the boxes as far as I was concerned. As such the story has always had a great deal of resonance with me, accounting for the sense of feint dread I felt when this film was announced. Gaiman and Avary script - okay, could work, but Zemeckis? Directing it as a CGI animated feature? Already pessimistic, I was still a little surprised to discover Beowulf was even worse than I’d dared to speculate.

It’s not really the fact that the film departs from the poem, which is a threadbare account of three battles between the hero Beowulf and a series of monstrous opponents, upon which various interpretations have been foisted over the last century or so and would clearly not easily translate faithfully into a modern mainstream film. Changes were inevitable, and many of the aspects Gaiman and Avary introduce have plenty of precedent in academic interpretations of the poem, as well as adaptations such as John Gardner’s Grendel.

The most predictable amendment was always going to be the imposition of some sort of over-arching plot or thematic link to tie the three episodes together. I don’t object to that in itself, but the actual nature of the addition, with Beowulf’s Faustian pact with a demon, has the effect of turning the film into a morality play, and rather a pat one at that. It’s not so much of a dumbing down so much as a dumbing up, developing the poem’s skeleton of a story, open to a fascinating range of interpretations, into something utterly pedestrian. Zemeckis was clearly looking to tell a stock tale of heroic fantasy, and he’s accomplished just that, in the blandest, most uninspired fashion possible.