Movie Reviews: Relationships, redemption and the call of the wild
Love isn’t real, it’s just a chemical reaction in the brain — or so our hero, Henry Page (Austin Abrams), learns during the course of Chemical Hearts (15A, pictured above), an unusually downbeat high school romance.
Henry, self-confessed as ‘nothing remarkable’, enters his senior year as an as aspiring author who is passionate about writing, but who finds that he has nothing to say. Enter Grace (Lili Reinhart), who has just transferred to Henry’s school.
Grace is still recovering from a serious car accident and walking with the aid of a crutch — but preferring to walk wherever she goes. When a mutual interest in classic fiction emerges — Romeo and Juliet, The Catcher in the Rye, The Sorrows of Werther — Henry falls head-over-heels for his depressed, enigmatic muse. But Grace refuses to play along with his simplistic interpretation of love …
Adapted by Richard Tanne from Krystal Sutherland’s novel, with Tanne also directing, Chemical Hearts is a refreshingly honest exploration of complex teenage emotions. Being young is ‘an impossible burden’, Grace tells Henry; the transition from child to adult represents a sensory overload that plays havoc with teenage heart, mind and soul.
There are no quick-fix solutions: Henry’s hobby is the Japanese art of repairing broken vases, but Grace skewers the obvious metaphor by informing him that her shattered life isn’t simply bits of pottery to be glued back together.
The result is a compelling drama rooted in the messy realities of emotional complexity, with both leads delivering mature performances as they embody callow young adults struggling to escape the bewildering chaos of their ‘teenage limbo’.
(15A) stars Emilie Hirsch as Martin, boyfriend to Ginnie (Analeigh Tipton) and a banjo-playing vegetarian who makes a rather poor impression on his future father-in-law Frank (JK Simmons) when they first meet at dinner.
Six months later, with a depressed Martin still in mourning after his break-up with Ginnie, Frank arrives on Martin’s doorstep to tell him that Ginnie is missing, and that he needs Martin’s help in tracking her down.
Seth Owen’s script is a fairly straightforward affair of a mismatched Odd Couple joining forces, with the initially contemptuous alpha male, Frank, learning to appreciate Martin’s gentle approach to life, and Martin learning a thing or two about how to 'man up' when the chips are down.
Bonding over a shared love of Bob Seger, and via a long day’s journey into night that involves a bar fight, a mushroom trip and getting arrested for breaking and entering, Martin and Frank gradually acknowledge their own limitations and the other’s strengths.
But while the story occasionally hints at hidden depths — the theme, obviously, is interpretations of masculinity, with the hapless pair entirely clueless as they explore the mysteries of Ginnie’s world — the emphasis remains on the slapstick quality of their ongoing failure.
That said, Hirsch and Simmons are terrific value in the lead roles, both of them underplaying their characters and delivering deadpan comedy: neither is a caricature, and both fully earn our sympathy as they stumble towards a belated redemption. Even at an unusually brief 86 minutes, the film runs out of steam long before the final credits roll, but for the most part, All Nighter is a surprisingly sweet-natured comedy.
Loosely based on a true story, (PG) opens in ‘the littlest Big Top on Earth’, a tiny circus based in a shopping mall, the star of which is the silverback gorilla Ivan (voiced by Sam Rockwell).
With audiences declining, ringmaster Mac (Bryan Cranston) invests in a new crowd-pleaser, the baby elephant Ruby (Brooklynn Prince). Placed in the care of the veteran elephant Stella (Angelina Jolie), Ruby is an instant hit — but Stella, who has spent her whole existence in captivity, wants Ruby to experience life in the wild…
A live-action film with computer-generated animals (the menagerie also includes the mongrel dog Bob, voiced by Danny DeVito, Snickers the poodle, voiced by Helen Mirren, and a baseball-playing chicken Henrietta, voiced by Chaka Khan), the movie is a charming fable that explores profound themes, including aging and death, slavery and freedom, and the irresistible impulse for self-expression.
