Review No.82: Edge

Last year one of the most-talked about documentary films was Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life which blended real-life experiences with performances from actress Zawe Ashton. Though I haven't seen that film yet its success has meant the brief cinema release of her 2010 fictional film Edge which came onto DVD soonafter. The film follows a collection of disparate characters who are all inhabiting the Cliff Edge Hotel in Dover for differing reasons they include Paul Hilton's washed-up pop-star looking for inspiration, Maxine Peake's lost woman who has returned to the area where her life changed significantly, a young couple who have met on the internet, an older woman with a terminal illness who has come to the area to end her life and the Eastern European staff member who tries to talk her out of it. As Hilton's Glen and Peake's Elly meet in the hotel's bar, run by a very strange woman, they get to know each other a little bit more as he believes he's found his inspiration through her so starts to write a song about her. The film essentially then switches between the three pairs who all talk about bad life experiences, why they've ended up at the Cliff Edge and what they hope to achieve. The film ends by bringing all six characters together on the cliff itself after one of their number threatens to jump off before everybody returns to life as normal.

Morley's message in Edge seems to be that we're all lost and just looking for that person to help us along the way which everybody does to an extent in her film. There are lots of scenes in which the camera simply pans along following the characters not saying anything but instead just in deep contemplation. Though all three stories do get equal footing it is that of Elly that we are most intrigued due to her constant phone-calls and the newspaper clippings that she brings with her while her relationship with the much more upbeat Glen brings her out of herself slightly. The strangest story has to be between youngsters Phillip and Sophie, played by former Skins actor Joe Dempsie and Nichola Burley, who have seemingly met on one of those websites however one of them has tracked the other down for a different purpose. Their story arc throughout is pretty odd and the way it ends is hard to believe seeing as everything they went through up to that point. However my favourite of the three stories is that between Polish maid Agata and older patron Wendy which is like something out of a play as these two very different women talk of shared experiences. Morley's characters sometimes feel real but other times feel like caricatures which is a shame as visually Edge looks the part and resembles its characters very cold, very sad but with moments of brightness. I also found the score to be fairly dour only perked up occasionally by Glen's singing or Phillip whistling the tune his father used to hum. Essentially this felt like a two-part TV series rather than a proper film however there was enough interest in the characters to keep me going throughout despite the fact that, from the reviews I've read, Morley's strengths lie in her documentary work rather than her fictional pieces.

Verdict: A well-shot yet uneven piece Carol Morley's fictional film suffers from an overabundance of melancholy but does have some interesting things to say along the way so I'll give it a 6/10

Review No.33: Best Laid Plans

It's interesting when film-makers try and adapt classic literature into a modern setting for example when Clueless took Jane Austen's Emma and placed in California or making Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew into 10 Things I Hate About You. However Best Laid Plans, an adaptation of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, doesn't involve a group of pretty American teens but instead is a sub-Guy Ritchie British crime flick. The film stars Stephen Graham as Danny a fast-talking Scouser who gets in trouble with the local mobsters after he steals a lot of drugs and fails to give them back any money. The biggest parallel between this and Of Mice and Men is the relationship between the charismatic Danny and the slow-thinking but large of build Joseph which bares resembles that between George and Lennie in Steinbeck's text. To make up for his debts the gangsters get Danny to use Joseph in a number of underground cage fights and with the money Danny buys more drugs and begins a relationship with a prostitute despite promising Joseph that the two would relocate to island in a camper van. There is also a subplot involving Joseph's awkward romance with a similarly mentally disabled woman Isabel, played by Maxine Peake, the relationship with her could see Joseph's rise above the gutter but Danny is suspicious of her parents' motives.

The success of Best Laid Plans can be seen in it's quieter moments between Joseph and Danny as the mis-matched pair try and navigate life the best way they can. Stephen Graham is a brilliant actor and the character of Danny is something that he can get his teeth into while Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje is an intimidating presence, he is best known for playing Lost's Mr Eko, so it is interesting to see him play a character who isn't violent but rather protective. Maxine Peake is also predictably excellent as the sweet and charming Isobel but aside from that this feels a little generic. The scenes involving the cage fighting and the characters of the gangsters could be taken out of any film post Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and are predictably generic. Personally I also thought that Danny's relationship with the prostitute Jill progressed a little too quickly for my liking and the end to this plot arc didn't feel right. The ending was a little different from Of Mice and Men but this wasn't a good thing and overall the clever aspects of the plot were outweighed by the fact that this film was trying to conform to a genre that felt outdated several years ago.

Verdict: Three strong performances along cannot save a film that feels like another entry in the long list of sub-par British gangster films so I will award it 5/10