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Film reviews round-up: Jane, Daddy's Home 2, Beach Rats, Lost in Paris

Brett Morgen’s documentary about Jane Goodall proves fascinating, while festive Will Ferrell vehicle Daddy’s Home 2 is mired in goofy, gloopy sentimentality

Geoffrey Macnab
Wednesday 22 November 2017 14:31 GMT
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Jane Goodall with David Greybeard, the first wild chimp to lose his fear of her, as seen in the feature documentary ‘Jane’
Jane Goodall with David Greybeard, the first wild chimp to lose his fear of her, as seen in the feature documentary ‘Jane’

Jane (PG)

★★★★☆

Dir. Brett Morgen, 90 mins, featuring: Jane Goodall

Brett Morgen is on the track of conservationist Jane Goodall in his extraordinary new feature documentary, Jane. He is bewitched by his subject.

Goodall is the middle-class English woman from Bournemouth who went out to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in her mid-20s to study chimps in the wild. She hadn’t been to university – that was beyond her means. She had been hired as a secretary by Dr Louis Leakey, the eminent scientist she first met in 1957, but was given complete freedom to carry out her own research.

Leakey believed that studying the chimps “might lead to new insights about the behaviour of early man”, and Goodall was his secret weapon. Leakey chose Goodall to go out into the field precisely because she wasn’t an expert. She had no preconceptions and was therefore open-minded in her observations.

Jane works on many different levels. The swirling, dramatic musical score, composed by Philip Glass, gives the film an emotional undertow you don’t expect in a natural history documentary. Goodall is a feminist heroine “doing things men did and which women didn’t”, as she puts it. She is an old-fashioned British adventurer, living in the wilds and sleeping under the stars. She is also like a character in a biblical fable, finding her Eden and then discovering death and woe lurking within it.

Morgen tells Goodall’s story using 100 hours of pristine, colour footage shot by the National Geographic photographer Hugo van Lawick, who came to Gombe in the early 1960s on a job and ended up marrying Goodall. Van Lawick’s footage was intended for a TV documentary that was never released. It had lain unseen until being rediscovered in 2014. Morgen deploys this material alongside his own interview material with Goodall, who is now 83. Her voiceover gives us the impression that she is telling her own story as if she is still a young woman, arriving in Africa for the first time.

“I wanted to come as close to talking to animals as I could, to be like Dr Dolittle. I wanted to move among them without fear, like Tarzan,” Goodall says of her younger self. She had grown up yearning to go to Africa – and that is where she went. Astonishingly, this blonde-haired, well-spoken ingénue who looked a little like Tippi Hedren in a Hitchcock film ended up living her dream.

Just as Goodall studied the chimps, the filmmaker is studying her. The parallels are sometimes a little obvious. She and Van Lawick had a child. The film pays as much attention to the way they chose to raise their son as Goodall herself once did to Flint, the baby chimp with such a close and ultimately tragic bond with its mother.

Goodall is eminently sensible. She also has a streak of fatalism. When she arrives in the jungle, she has an inner conviction that nothing bad will ever happen to her. Van Lawick’s footage shows her continually in the wild. Whatever the conditions, whether it is rain, wind or sun, she remains the same stoical, level-headed and incongruously glamorous presence, “tall, blonde and beautiful” as the press back home in Britain called her. The chimps gradually begin to accept her. She was an intruder but she stayed around for so long that they grew accustomed to her, “the strange white ape” in their midst.

Goodall can’t resist anthropomorphising the chimps, giving them names and characteristics that make them seem like inhabitants of some close-knit English village. There is Mr McGregor, “a somewhat belligerent old male”; there is Flo, the patient and maternal chimp; there is David Gray Beard, “with his calm and dignified personality”. She sees them all in her own image. She is kind-hearted and thinks they must be the same. “Staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back,” she says. “I thought they were like us but nicer.”

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That, though, wasn’t the case. In the second half of the film, the darkness falls. The chimps suffer a polio epidemic which causes horrendous suffering. They also show an extreme brutality to one another that shocks her to the core.

On the human side of the equation, money is always an issue. Goodall may be blissfully happy in the wilds but she is aware that if her research doesn’t turn up anything new, her funding will dry up and she will have to return to damp, drizzly Britain. National Geographic commissioned Van Lawick’s trip to Gombe. Neither he nor Goodall seemed to realise that he was only there on assignment. They were shocked and hurt when he was called back.

Morgen can’t resist a few melodramatic flourishes. The treatment of Goodall’s blossoming romance with Van Lawick is a little on the Mills & Boon side. (He sends her telegrams asking her “do you like emeralds stop. What size is your finger.”) The film is also very selective. It homes in on a small section of Goodall’s life, in the 1960s, when the 100 hours of footage was shot, and skims over the rest of her story. It is still a fascinating affair, both as a natural history film and as a closely focused study of a woman who lived her own real-life version of The Jungle Book.

Daddy’s Home 2 (12A)

★★☆☆☆

Dir. Sean Anders, 100 mins, starring: Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell, Mel Gibson, John Lithgow

Daddy’s Home 2 is goofy Yuletide entertainment featuring some very funny moments alongside far too much sentimental sludge. Will Ferrell provides most of the highlights. The moose-faced American actor-comedian has a flair both for slapstick and for deadpan delivery. Whether it’s a simple sight gag – Ferrell being kicked on the head by kids on swings in a playground – or a more complex set piece in which he brings down all the Christmas lights, his timing is always immaculate. He also excels at giving that look of wounded, baffled, Bambi-like innocence whenever he has just been humiliated.

Brad Whitaker (Ferrell) and Dusty Mayron (Mark Wahlberg) are the “co-dads”, living side by side and sharing parental duties looking after the kids. Dusty is the real father, Brad is the stepfather. They’re getting along together very much better than in the first film. There is a storm brewing, though. The grandfathers are coming for Christmas.

Dusty’s pop Kurt (Mel Gibson) is a macho womaniser whose idea of entertaining the kids is to tell them stories about “two dead hookers”. Brad’s father Don (John Lithgow) is the touchy-feely type who loves to wear brightly coloured Christmas jumpers. He hasn’t seen his son since Thanksgiving – that’s to say, for a matter of two or three weeks – and reacts to seeing him again as if it is the most important reunion in his life. To Kurt’s disgust, Don kisses Brad on the lips and hugs him tight.

Some of the humour in the screenplay by Sean Anders and John Morris is well enough observed. There is an early scene at a school Christmas play when the parents are told not to use their cameras and smartphones as the event is being recorded professionally. Every single one of them disregards the advice. The mums and dads are all far more concerned with filming their precious children than in actually watching them perform.

Kurt books the extended family a luxurious house in the remote, snowy woods where the simmering tensions between fathers and kids, dads and stepdads, husbands and wives, can best come to the boil. Everybody gets on everybody else’s nerves. There are rows over the thermostat temperature, Will Ferrell wreaks havoc with a chainsaw and tries to teach his stepson the meaning of life. Just when the film threatens to exhaust our patience, there will always be a new gag or one-liner that actually works.

Some of the set pieces here look as if they’ve been stolen wholesale from the Meet the Parents comedies. Attempts to delve a little more deeply into the characters’ emotional lives (for example, revealing Don’s marital woes) don’t get very far. The film is at its best when it’s at its silliest and most inane.

Writer-director Anders throws in a finale (everybody stuck in a snowbound cinema singing “We Are The World”) that is so bizarre you half suspect it is intended as a mocking satire on the typical Christmas film. Ferrell, though, doesn’t do cynicism. His comedy is based around his character’s goofy naivety and misplaced idealism. There is no Scrooge-like malice here, and in his bungling, good-natured presence, everyone else’s behaviour changes too. Even Mel Gibson’s bad-tempered patriarch eventually shows a softer side. Ferrell fans will enjoy Daddy’s Home 2 but others will find its gloopy sentimentality very hard indeed to digest.

Beach Rats (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Eliza Hittman, 96 mins, starring: Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge, Neal Huff, Nicole Flyus, Frank Hakaj

Writer-director Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats is a Brooklyn-set coming of age story made with a gritty lyricism bound to provoke comparisons with the work of French director Claire Denis.

Young British actor Harris Dickinson gives a very striking performance as the troubled young hero, Frankie, trying to come to terms with the death of his father and his deeply conflicted feelings about his own sexuality.

Frankie likes to hang out on the beaches or at the arcades in Coney Island with his friends, Nick, Alexei and Jesse. They’re good looking, macho, aggressively heterosexual delinquents who little suspect that Frankie spends his time at home on the computer, cruising gay pick-up websites.

Frankie’s father has terminal cancer and is bed-bound. His mother Donna (Kate Hodges) is trying to hold the family together. His younger teenage sister Carla (Nicole Flyus), with whom he bickers constantly, has just started a relationship with a boy. Frankie is popping pills and desperately trying to make sense of his life. He is guilt-ridden and desperate to conform, one reason why he takes up with the sassy, uninhibited young femme fatale, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), he meets on Coney Island. She looks and dresses like a young Madonna in her Desperately Seeking Susan years.

But his courtship of her is half-hearted; his real attraction is to the men he can arrange one-night stands with through the websites he visits. He always goes for older lovers who don’t live locally and therefore don’t know him and can’t expose him.

There is a grim inevitability about the predicament Frankie lands himself in. He lies to everyone – to his mother, his friends, his ostensible girlfriend, and even to himself. His guilt about his attraction to other men and his grief and confusion about his father’s death leave him in a vulnerable and very muddled state.

Hittman shoots her movie in grainy, atmospheric fashion, contrasting the fireworks over Coney Island, the bright lights of the arcades and the glamour of the night-time sequences with the claustrophobic, dimly lit apartment in which Frankie hides out in front of his computer. He tries to tell his friends about his true feelings but can’t bring himself to be honest. It’s a failure that eventually unleashes extreme violence. Dickinson excels as the deeply conflicted Frankie, a charismatic and likeable but increasingly torn and neurotic figure whose self-deception has tragic consequences.

Lost In Paris (12A)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, 83 mins, starring: Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, Emmanuelle Riva, Pierre Richard, Emmy Boissard Paumelle

Lost In Paris is a throwback both to Hollywood slapstick and to bawdy, romantic old French movies like Boudu Saved From Drowning or L’Atalante in which Michel Simon would star as a belligerent tramp or working man. Made in cartoonish, highly stylised fashion, this is the story of the misadventures of a librarian, Fiona (Fiona Gordon), from a remote Canadian town who ventures to Paris on the welfare of her elderly aunt Martha (Emmanuelle Riva), who appears to be in trouble.

Fiona is thin and angular in the extreme, an actress who can’t help but evoke memories of Olive Oyl in Popeye.The filmmakers can generate considerable comedy out of a simple scene of her trying to walk through the turnstiles of the subway station with her enormous backpack. Misfortune follows her wherever she goes. Her aunt won’t answer the phone. She has no other contacts. In no time at all, she has fallen backwards into the Seine, mislaid all her possessions as well as her mobile phone, and is well and truly lost and alone in Paris.

Gordon co-directs alongside her partner, Dominique Abel, who also plays the opportunistic tramp, Dom, love interest of both the aunt and the niece. He too is tall, thin and angular. They present near mirror images of one another. The storytelling can become winsome and kitsch at times, especially when Canadian mounties are on the scene. The film throws in anarchic physical comedy with picture postcard-style imagery of Paris at its most alluring. It’s a generally winning combination.

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