London Film Festival

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When bad news is nothing but good


Halle Berry and John Cusack have the Oscars in their sights, David Lynch says farewell to film, and Clint turns in a top tune

Jason Solomons
Sunday October 28, 2007
The Observer


Over the past few years London's film festival has made a habit of hosting prospective Oscar nominees. This year was no exception as two Hollywood stars blossomed into award contenders - Halle Berry, back to her best in Things We Lost in the Fire, and John Cusack in Grace Iis Gone. Both actors are now 41 and have been popular for nearly two decades. They are both flourishing playing characters who initially deny, then deal with, grief over the premature loss of a spouse. Berry, of course, won an Oscar for playing another widow in Monster's Ball in 2002 but she has been trapped in a succession of rotten roles ever since.

Berry is exquisite in Susanne Bier's delicate drama, playing a mother of two in suburban Seattle, numbed after the random shooting of her husband (David Duchovny). As she recovers she strikes up a friendship with her husband's best friend, a recovering heroin addict played with bruised charisma by the superb Benicio del Toro. As in her Danish films such as Open Hearts and After the Wedding, Bier's Hollywood debut concentrates on little twists of fate, tiny glitches in the cosmos, the family drama here occasionally flitting back in time to allow the audience to piece together fragments of emotion. It's to the immense credit of the director and her actors that melodrama is avoided in this tasteful, mournful interpretation of Allan Loeb's script.
Cusack has more of a familiar screen persona to shed than Berry as he takes on the most serious role of his career in Grace is Gone, playing a patriotic father of two young girls whose wife is killed on a tour of duty in Iraq.

Both actors get their big moment coping with the bad news - Berry's is delivered by two policemen, Cusack's by the dreaded visit from two servicemen, and it sends him into a paralysis of denial, so much so that to avoid telling his children the truth he whisks the girls out of school and on to a long road trip from their midwestern home to a Florida amusement park called the Enchanted Garden. Cusack gives his character a silly, pigeon-toed walk and some other over-acted mannerisms, but this simple, downbeat film written and directed by James C Strouse provides him with his finest role and features a marvellous performance from debutante Shelan O'Keefe as his 12-year-old daughter.

The fog of war spreads over London this festival. Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is perhaps the most intriguing contribution, re-enacting a terrible episode in which US marines exact revenge for a terrorist bombing in an Iraqi town by opening fire on a room full of women and children. It's amazing drama, of course, but perhaps most interesting is the question of whether it's true or not. I have no way of telling, and I think that Broomfield, for so long a documentarist, knows this as he embarks on a new form of dramatic reconstruction cinema.

Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs brought Tom Cruise to Leicester Square and, although widely derided, provided a gripping debate on the subject of the current 'war on terror'. Unfussily directed by Redford, its very simplicity is its virtue, letting the script's ideas come to the fore.

The familiar war in Brazilian cinema is one with favela drug lords, and it is thrillingly explored in City of Men, director Paulo Morelli's follow-up to Fernando Mereilles's City of God. It focuses on two 18-year-olds trying to break out of the ghetto's cycle of guns and violence and face responsibilities as young adults.

Morelli takes in big themes of social pressure and fatherhood while creating a dizzying sensory canvas of Rio slum life, full of colours, samba rhythms and gang warfare. I felt its honesty and positive energy were refreshing in a predominantly gloomy festival.

The cat's whispers

Was Halle Berry joking when she said there was a possibility of Catwoman returning? Radiant in her Versace gown, pregnant Berry told the audience after her Leicester Square screening that she and her Things We Lost in the Fire director Susanne Bier had been discussing reviving her widely-panned role. 'She'd do a lot better job of it than the last time round,' said Berry. At a post-screening reception for the film at Mint Leaf restaurant, I asked the director if they were serious. 'It's true we would like to work together again and I did suggest Catwoman to her. It would be very different, more feminist, but I think we could pull it off, so don't count it out.' We won't.

In tune with Oscar

I've heard a song you'll be hearing on Oscar night. Jamie Cullum sings it and Clint Eastwood wrote it and it's the title track of Grace is Gone, a powerful, bluesy ballad, delivered with gusto, and playing over the final credits to the film. 'It's as if you can hear Clint in the notes as he [Cullum] plays this beautiful, haunting theme,' the film's star, John Cusack, told me. 'It's a blessing for our film.'

Digital Lynch

David Lynch has admitted for the first time that he will never return to traditional cinema. The cult American director of such diverse films as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and The Straight Story told me: 'I'm never going back to 35mm cameras, never, never.' Lynch, who was visiting the LFF to promote the benefits of transcendental meditation with his pal Donovan, used digital technology for his last film, Inland Empire - starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons and Naomi Watts in a bunny suit - which had trouble finding audiences outside his most loyal fans. Despite that film's rough ride, he remained unbowed and declared traditional cinema techniques to be dead, a statement that will shock his many admirers. 'Film has had its day and you could do interesting, beautiful things with it, but digital is the new thing. It's much better, way better for the scenes and every aspect of the story you're telling,' he said. 'Aesthetically you can do so much more with it and more plug-ins are coming along all the time.'

Lynch, who was the subject of the annual David Lean talk at Bafta last night, said he hadn't yet come up with the idea for a new film but that the muse could strike at any moment. 'We're getting to the stage with digital that if you can think it, you can do it. And I meditate twice a day - haven't missed one session in 34 years - and believe me, the ideas come at any time.' With typical humour he added: 'And these days, the ideas come digitally.'