by @saidonescottishlady
Big Budgets, Small Stories, and the Question of Authenticity
May has handed us two films sitting at almost comically different ends of the budget spectrum. One arrived on a marketing wave estimated at a quarter of a billion dollars; the other crept into a handful of cinemas with what felt like the change found down the back of the sofa. Both, in their own ways, are worth your time. Only one of them will leave you thinking about it on the bus home.
The Devil Wears Prada 2
David Frankel returns to direct, with Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci all reprising their roles two decades on. The set-up: Andy Sachs is now a respected reporter whose newsroom is unceremoniously laid off mid-gala, while Miranda Priestly finds herself under pressure as the magazine world wobbles around her. Their paths, inevitably, cross again.
Most sequels turn up two or three years after the original, while the iron is still warm. Twenty years is practically unheard of — and the small miracle here is that they managed to get the whole team back together: the director, the writer, all four leads. That alone is worth raising a glass to.
And it is fun. It is just not, I’m sorry to report, as fun as the first one.
What the cast do brilliantly is slip back into characters who never really left them. The first film was such a phenomenon that these four have spent twenty years being approached in airports, in supermarkets, on the school run, by fans wanting to hear them say “That’s all” or “Gird your loins!” or pronounce on florals one more time. They haven’t just played these roles, they’ve been living alongside them. You can feel that on screen — the ease, the lack of strain. Every glance, every pause, every weaponised eyebrow lands exactly where it should.
And the clothes — well, the clothes are extraordinary. If you came for the costume department, you will leave fed.
The film also tries to make a point about journalism, which is interesting in theory, but I’m not entirely sure it earns the right to make it. It is a bit like being lectured about the importance of public libraries by someone arriving in a chauffeured Mercedes — the message may be true, but the messenger is wearing Dior.
And here’s the thing I can’t quite shake: it is Ugly Betty without the texture. Without the different bodies, the different backgrounds, the different ways of moving through the world. Ugly Betty (a firm favourite in this house, I’ll declare an interest) understood that the fashion world is funniest and most revealing when you look at it from the outside, from the margins, from the office at the end of the corridor. Prada 2 is shot resolutely from inside the corner office. That is a choice. It is a beautiful, very expensive choice. But it is not the more interesting one. Shall we just call the thing it’s missing authenticity?
Note: Click the pics to go thought to the trailers for each film.
Rebuilding
And then, with a fraction of the noise — probably one per cent of the marketing spend, possibly less — there is Rebuilding.
Written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman, it stars Josh O’Connor as Dusty, a Colorado rancher whose land and home have been taken by wildfire. He ends up in one of those temporary trailer camps the American government sets up after disasters, surrounded by neighbours who have lost everything too, and tries to work out what comes next. Meghann Fahy plays his ex-wife Ruby; the wonderful Lily LaTorre plays his young daughter Callie-Rose. Amy Madigan and Kali Reis round out the cast.
This is a small, quiet film, but it has something firm and clear to say about the world — about what happens when everything you built is suddenly not there any more, and about the unexpected business of putting one foot in front of the other when you do not particularly want to. At its centre is the relationship between a father and daughter, and what makes the film so quietly remarkable is that it refuses to go where you assume it is going. It keeps catching you out, gently, with kindness rather than twists.
Josh O’Connor is having an extraordinary year (between this, The Mastermind, The History of Sound and Wake Up Dead Man, you could be forgiven for thinking he’s been cloned), and this might be the quietest and best of the lot. He does the very particular thing of playing a man who hasn’t got the words for what he feels, and somehow makes that wordlessness the most articulate thing on screen.
It is uplifting in a way that has nothing to do with sentimentality. It is uplifting because it takes loss seriously, and then takes community more seriously still.
Coat On or Kettle On?
Worth the trip, or worth the wait?
If you only have one cinema trip in you this month, Prada is the bigger night out — and there is genuine pleasure in watching four pros do what they do best, in clothes most of us will only ever see on a screen. But Rebuilding is the one that will stay with you. And in a month, in a year, in a decade, I suspect it is the one I’ll still be quietly recommending to people.
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