Movie Reviews: The Rover, The Congress, Hector and the Search for Happiness
Set in Australia ‘ten years after the Collapse’, stars Guy Pearce as Eric, a loner whose car is stolen by an armed gang of bank-robbers in a remote Outback town. Rey (Robert Pattinson) is a simple-minded soul, and a badly wounded gang member who has been left for dead during the getaway. Determined to get his car back, Eric shanghais Rey — who knows where the gang will rendezvous — and sets off in pursuit. David Michôd’s film offers a pretty straightforward story, but it’s a gripping tale of obsession. Pearce is superb as the raddled, dispirited Eric, a brutal character who is as much animal as man as he tracks his prey with a disturbingly single-minded zeal. Pattinson, however, is even more impressive, playing a simpleton thug struggling to accommodate not only the fact that he is likely dying from his wounds, but also that his brother Henry (Scoot McNairy), a fellow gang member, has abandoned him in his hour of need. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Natasha Braier, the Outback becomes a character in its own right. The post-apocalyptic backdrop is deftly rendered too; vignettes of people hardened by extreme deprivation unfold as they battle one another and the elements for the last remnants of dwindling resources. A sweaty, grimy neo-Western, The Rover is an exhilaratingly bleak experience.
Robin Wright stars as herself in playing a difficult, washed- up actress who receives a final offer from her movie studio: give herself over to computer animation and allow the studio to make any film they want with her digital likeness, or never work again. It’s a double-edged offer, however: signing over her digital rights means that Wright, who defines herself by her profession, can never again work as an actress as herself. Years later, Wright – as an animated character — makes a pilgrimage to The Futuristic Congress, which takes place in a digitally animated world, where she discovers that segueing between reality and fantasy can exact a terrible price. Loosely adapted from sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, The Congress is written and directed by Ari Folman (the animated section has the same hypnotic, psychedelic quality that marked his superb Waltzing with Bashir). It’s a luminous and tremendously brave performance from Wright, it’s much more than a variation on ‘Being Robin Wright’. Co-starring Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Paul Giamatti, the story raises questions about the future of filmmaking and where we draw the line between reality and fantasy, and asks (largely unanswerable) existential questions about the nature of truth. The middle section feels unnecessarily long and self-indulgent as Folman establishes his animated world, but for the most part The Congress is an absorbing, thought-provoking and potentially award-winning film.
Simon Pegg stars as the eponymous hero of in which Hector – a buttoned-down, mild-mannered psychiatrist secretly seething with pent-up frustration, takes a sabbatical from his job and his girlfriend Clara (Rosamund Pike) and travels the world in search of the secret formula for happiness. Hector encounters a diverse bunch — among them characters played by Stellan Skarsgård, Jean Reno and Christopher Plummer — as he wends his way through the continents, experiencing Zen Buddhism in Asia, voluntary aid work in Africa, and eventually meeting up with Agnes (Toni Collette), his old flame from college, in America. Directed by Peter Chelsom, the story frequently undercuts Hector’s naïve optimism by placing him in some very dark places indeed, although the overall story arc, and Hector’s eventual destination, is never in any doubt. The intention, it seems, is a bittersweet Preston Sturges/Frank Capra comedy along the lines of Sullivan’s Travels, but Hector’s learning curve appears to amount to him realising he must ignore the lure of adventure and opt for the comfort of a safe, cosy life back home. That said, Pegg is unusually understated in the lead role, and makes for a genial if gormless tour guide on his whistle-stop tour.
