Movie Reviews: The Lady in the Van, Steve Jobs and The Hallow

The Lady in the Van (12A) is the ‘mostly true story’ of what happened when the homeless Miss Shepherd (Maggie Smith) parked her tiny camper van in the driveway of playwright Alan Bennett’s (Alex Jennings) Camden Town home

Opening in the 1970s — Miss Shepherd would stay for almost two decades — the story is on one level a charming ‘odd couple’ tale, as the spiky, independent and no-nonsense visitor refuses to acknowledge that she is accepting charity, while the mild-mannered writer and reluctant guardian angel tip-toes around her.

It’s also an intriguing meditation on the writing life, as the writer Alan Bennett argues with his alter-ego Alan Bennett, ‘the one who does the living’ — both characters are played by Jennings — as to whether he’s doing the right thing, and whether he’s entitled to write about Miss Shepherd while she is in his care.

Part of the charm of the movie is in watching Maggie Smith, best known now for playing Lady Violet in Downton Abbey, so beautifully inhabit a character radically different to her TV character, even if Miss Shepherd has little to learn from the Dowager Countess when it comes to delivering an acerbic one-liner.

For his part, Alex Jennings is quietly brilliant as the self-deprecating Bennett, who has taken in Miss Shepherd in part to assuage his guilt, viewing her as a ‘derelict counterpart’ to his aging mother in Yorkshire. Elegantly directed by Nichola Hytner, and adapted by Alan Bennett himself, The Lady in the Van is an exquisite gem, a meditation on life and the making of art that is by turns funny, poignant and profound.

“The very nature of people is something to be overcome,” states Steve Jobs

(15A) in Danny Boyle’s biopic of the visionary innovator and entrepreneur behind one of the world’s most iconic brands, Apple, and its Macintosh.

The film opens in 1984, with the launch of the Mac, and immediately we are party to Jobs’ (played by Michael Fassbender) single-minded but hypocritical megalomania as he refuses to accept anything less than perfection from his staff, led by PA Joanna (Kate Winslet), while revealing himself to be far from perfect in his relationship with Chrisann (Katherine Waterston), the mother of his daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss).

The pattern is repeated, with variations, as the story adopts a distinct three-act structure, each act revolving around the launch of the latest of Jobs’ products, and we watch Jobs not exactly mellowing with age but at least coming to understanding that it is his own nature that is something to be overcome.

The structure means that the movie has something of a stage-bound feel to it, but it does allow Danny Boyle to focus on a psychological exploration of the Steve Jobs phenomenon, dipping deep into his early childhood to suggest why he was so obsessed with ‘closed systems’ and maintaining complete control over every aspect of his life and career.

Fassbender, who was superb as the android David in Prometheus, invests his engrossing performance as Jobs with a robotic quality which captures the man’s inability (or unwillingness) to allow for human imperfection, while Winslet is in scene-stealing form as the long-suffering assistant.

Irish horror The Hallow (16s) opens with conservationist Adam Hitchens (Joseph Mawle) and his wife Clare (Bojana Novakovic) coming to live in a rural wooded area, tasked with the job of pruning out those trees that threaten the forest’s well-being.

Soon, however, Adam and Clare are being terrorised by unseen forces that are, the locals warn them, ‘the Hallow’: an ancient race once defeated by ‘fire and iron’, and which now lurks in the darkness of the woods as crawlers, banshees and malign sprites.

The basic storyline of outsiders (‘settlers’) being spooked by indigenous creatures is a well-trodden path, but writer-director Corin Hardy begins the movie in sprightly fashion, particularly in the way he isolates the Hitchens and subjects them to a series of alarming scenarios which may or may not be supernatural in origin.

The second half is less original in its execution, however, as the psychological warfare gives way to outright assault and the narrative tension is replaced with a seemingly relentless emphasis on thrills ’n’ spills.

The performances are solid, with Mawle chewing the scenery as Adam becomes increasingly unhinged, while Michael McElhatton and Gary Lydon provide strong support as sinister locals.

Hardy is bold enough to toss in a homage to both the Alien movies and HG Wells but such references only emphasise the extent to which The Hallow, while initially intriguing, doesn’t fully deliver on the promise.

The Lady in the Van 5/5

Steve Jobs 4/5

The Hallow 3/5