Tag: Michael Sheen

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Good Omens

David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale in Good Omens.

If there’s one specific genre trick the British seem to do a lot better than Americans, or any other English-speaking writers, it’s combining comedy and sci fi/fantasy. The quintessential example is Douglas Adams. He was a writer and story editor (what we would now call “showrunner”) for Doctor Who in the late 1970s whose speciality was punching up scripts where the Time Lord slyly acknowledged how silly it was to be saving the world from stuntmen in rubber suits. He originally pitched The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy as a BBC radio play, and it metastasized into a bestselling book and hit TV series, before becoming, after a long delay, a mediocre-at-best film in 2005.

Neil Gaiman was Adam’s biographer before becoming a one-man publishing juggernaut with the seminal Sandman comics series and a run of novels such as American Gods. Early in his career, Gaiman had the incredible good fortune of co-writing a novel with Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld novels were the underground darling of the fantasy community. Pratchett’s work has plenty of social commentary, and they’re dripping with British wit, but they’re not, strictly speaking, satire, because he was able to make you care deeply about his comic characters, even as they fell down and humiliated themselves in baroque manners.

The novel they wrote together was Good Omens, and it’s been a classic for two decades. Pratchett died in 2005, and since Gaiman had good fortune converting American Gods to TV (at least one season of it), Amazon and Aunty Beeb teamed up to create a big-budget adaptation.

Remember that Looney Tunes cartoon where the sheep dog and the wolf are friends until they clock in to their respective, adversarial jobs? That’s pretty much the relationship of the two co-protagonists of Good Omens. Crowley (David Tennant) is a demon from hell who took the form of a snake and tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) is the angel who was given a flaming sword and tasked with keeping the fallen humans out of the Garden. They’re minor characters in a famous, sweeping story — in this case, the traditional Judeo-Christian narrative of creation and revelation or at least the Anglican/Catholic version. Like Rozencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s play, they take a jaundiced view of their role in the sweep of cosmic history. After being on Earth for a few thousand years, they come to like the humans they’re tasked with helping and/or tempting. And more importantly, they like the finer things in life the humans have invented. Since their respective home offices don’t really care too much about the details of what happens on Earth, occasionally they fill in for each other when one of them, say, wants to see this excellent new play called Hamlet that is currently playing at the Globe Theatre in London.

They’ve got a pretty good scam going on until it hits a snag. Crowley is tasked with delivering the baby antichrist to his prospective parents, an American diplomat who will be well positioned to help kick off Armageddeon. Unfortunately, there’s a mixup at the Satanic convent masquerading as a hospital where the baby switch is to take place, and the son of Satan goes home with the wrong set of parents—an average English couple who make the Dursleys from Harry Potter look positively fascinating.

Crowley and Aziraphale, faced with the possibility that they won’t be able to get good sherry in either heaven or hell, conspire to stop Armagedeon by subtly sabotaging the Divine Plan. Their biggest enemy turns out not to be The Adversary, but their own decadent incompetence. By the time they realize, 11 years too late, that the Antichrist has been misplaced, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are getting saddled up.

Josie Lawrence (right) as Agnes Nutter

And there are other complications. The subtitle of Good Omens is “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.” Nutter (Josie Lawrence) was the last witch burned in England, and the only person who ever wrote a book of prophecy that was actually accurate. Her distant descendant Anathema Device (Adria Arjona) has the only remaining copy of the book and, since Agnes specifically told the family to invest in Apple early, a lot of money. It’s her job to stop the Antichrist, while the descendant of the Witchfinder General who burned Agnes, played by Michael McKean, searches England for her.
Good Omens has the kind of byzantine literary plot that inevitably gets flattened into incoherence when you try to make a two-hour movie out of it. The six-part miniseries is the perfect amount of time to devote to it, and Gaiman, who wrote the scripts, knows exactly how to use the format. With Frances McDormand narrating as the Voice of God, the result is like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Apocalypse.

Tennant, the best 21st-century Doctor Who, absolutely shines as Crowley. He puts his whole lithe body into the performance. Even glimpsed in silhouette as he rescues his friend from Nazi spies during the London Blitz, he’s instantly recognizable. Sheen, a veteran actor who has done everything from Emperor Nero to a minor part in Twilight, is his exact opposite, a twee goody-goody who secretly wants to be talked into some fun. The par are like an infernal/holy version of Molly and Amy from Booksmart, and every minute they’re on screen together is electric.

Gaiman and Sherlock director Douglas MacKinnon fearlessly play with form, such as in the third episode which stretches the cold opening out for 25 minutes before rolling the opening credits. It looks great, it’s full of twists and turns, and most importantly, it’s subtly hilarious. Some may find Good Omens too twee and byzantine for their tastes, but I’ve loved every second of it.

Good Omens

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Film Features Film/TV

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

The word “entrepreneur” has its roots in a French word that originally meant something like “go-between.” By that definition, Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a consummate entrepreneur. He runs the consulting firm Oppenheimer Strategies —rather, he is the consulting firm Oppenheimer Strategies. We first meet him, white iPhone earbuds in place, mapping out social connections on a Starbucks napkin. He’s trying to land a $300 million deal for …something. We’re not quite sure what. And neither are any of the people he gets on the other end of the phone.

But Norman doesn’t seem to get discouraged, even as door after door is slammed in his face. When his nephew Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen) describes contacting one of his billionaire targets, Jo Wilf (Harris Yulin), as “a drowning man waving to get the attention of an ocean liner,” Norman replies that he is “a very good swimmer, as long as I have my head above water.”

Norman’s consulting business basically consists of his trying to bring people together — he even consults with other consultants, he brags. But the biggest problem is, he doesn’t add much value to the deal. Whatever water he used to carry in New York is long dried up. Now, he’s just an old widower living by his wits, waiting for his luck to run out.

Richard Gere plays the titular role in Joseph Cedar’s Norman.

But then, Norman is hit with one final stroke of luck. After talking his way into an international oil-and-gas exploration conference, he sets his sights on Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), a Deputy Minister of Trade and Labor for the Israeli government who seems to be on the way out of government. The plan is to use Micha’s name to get a foot in the door with billionaire Arthur Taub (Josh Charles) and to use Taub’s name to get Micha’s attention. Both parties think Norman is friends with the other party, and he plays the two off of each other for influence.

If this plot is sounding unbelievably convoluted to you, that means you’ve got a good handle on Norman (full title: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer). The film is at its best in the early stages, when Gere as Norman serves as a sort of tour guide through the corridors of elite New York wealth and power. People in fine suits are unfailingly cordial, until they sense that Norman is no use to them and throw him out. That all changes when, after a story break of three years, Micha’s luck turns and he becomes Prime Minister of Israel. With a single warm hug at a state reception, people are giving Norman their card instead of the other way around. And that, of course, is when Norman gets himself in way over his head. What Norman thinks of as favors for an old friend, Israeli federal law enforcement officer Alex Green (Charlotte Gainsbourg) thinks of as illegal influence peddling.

Israeli-American writer/director Joseph Cedar has crafted a story that lies somewhere between The Manchurian Candidate and the Bill Murray/Richard Dreyfuss comedy What About Bob? His biggest directorial challenge is making scene after scene of Richard Gere talking on his omnipresent iPhone visually interesting, and he goes far beyond the conventional split screen by digitally blending the halls of power with whatever random Office Depot the borderline-destitute Norman happens to be drifting through at the moment. Gere, for his part, is at least taking the role seriously. He shares some crackerjack scenes with Steve Buscemi as a pugilistic rabbi and Hank Azaria as a younger hustler who latches onto Norman late in the proceedings. But still, none of that can overcome the fact that Norman is a fairly innocuous film. Its highs are not very high, its laughs never grow beyond a chuckle, and its lows leave you with a shrug rather than a tear. It’s good to see original ideas and mature, politically sophisticated subject matter get a chance in contemporary Hollywood, but simple competence isn’t enough to make Norman more than a passing curiosity.

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Film Features Film/TV

Far from the Madding Crowd

The bucolic British countryside, like pornography, has a preordained end. BBC Films like Far from the Madding Crowd, which haunt our PBS stations and Academy Awards, are full of restrained and elevated diction and dress working their way to release.

Far from the Madding Crowd enriches this formula by placing Carey Mulligan front and center, often photographed in front of beautifully filmed landscapes as if green-screened there. Mulligan is great at registering emotions on her face and working to sequester them in her mouth. With a shock of mad-scientist hair dribbling over her forehead and a triple set of dimples, she constantly looks left and right and communicates sharply whatever her character won’t say.

Her costar Matthias Schoenaerts is a great match as Gabriel Oak, a beautifully bearded, aptly named rugged bit of handsome restraint. Their meet-cute over sheep is edited briskly, the vibrant colors of her dresses and the rolling hills changing to suggest even the editor is bored with this genre. As the film starts, it’s a pleasure to watch Mulligan turn down a series of too-sudden marriage proposals: She comes off like a modern girl in a world of traditional male suitors.

Carey Mulligan and Tom Sturridge

But unfortunately, as an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s early novel, the movie cannot go where the casting and early scenes suggest and create a kind of In the Mood for Love for Wessex. Nods toward the difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal agrarian society are made. Work is something mostly offscreen or metaphorical and delegated to peasant types. The English-speaking past is exoticized as a place where mildly aristocratic people can get over their shyness and find love.

As always, animal husbandry and farming are there to give something elemental: Udders are milked, fields shine, tadpoles are glimpsed in pools, but there is a remove — you know none of these details will touch the main plot or heroine. Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights did this, but better. The brutality of everyday animal murder on a farm, which looked real but was fake, sold both the violent passions of the narrative and the alien nature of the past through the outsider protagonist’s eyes.

Here, the dark melancholy of later Hardy books isn’t fully formed in the plot. The most evocative non-romantic bit comes early, when Oak’s sheep get herded off a cliff to smash on a beach and Oak bitterly shoots the responsible dog. That rough-hewn shock gives way to a standard plot and two well-cast but underwritten suitors. Michael Sheen’s Boldwood is all obsession and stammering. Tom Sturridge’s Sergeant Troy has a pool-cue nose, pert moustache, and pouty lips straight out of villain central casting. But they lack definition, and when the story jumps forward in ellipsis and suggestion, we don’t know how to take it. The pair primarily embody the two mistakes of marrying for sex and money, but only that. There’s a great bit where Troy drops his caddiness as he talks to his pregnant ex-girlfriend. It suddenly seems like the story will be jarringly modern, and the characters will mutually recognize that while illegitimate pregnancy in the 1800s may be a scandal, financial accommodation for destitute mothers is a must.

Likewise Troy’s erotic and possibly metaphorical sword prowess demonstration in the woods is another nicely jarring bit where the movie suddenly seems like it could go anywhere other than the regular stops. Sex might not result in shame. Choosing the wrong first boyfriend might be an ordinary misstep. But the movie adheres to Hardy’s plot without enthusiasm. A late murder is not set up well, and the body lands like a feather.

What works are Mulligan and Schoenaerts. Arguing over a scythe sharpener, degasifying the bellies of sheep, working to cover phallic haystacks in the rain, their sly rapport is better than the plot. Mulligan so often does this kind of character well. In Never Let Me Go and Drive, she played restrained characters who interact painfully with the world. But those worlds were weirder. Here, director Thomas Vinterberg, one of the Dogme 95 creators, is far too normal. Mulligan’s character avers her independence constantly, to the end uninterested in affirming marriage proposals, even as she is stuck in a movie operated by their mechanics.