A losing battle.
Friendly rivalry between bands turns poisonous in DiG!; a drug addict fights to put her demons aside for the sake of her child in Clean; and Tom Cruise struggles with aliens and his own children in War of the Worlds. By Declan Burke
DiG! *****
Clean **
The War of the Worlds ***
Where most film documentaries engage with a single band or scene, DiG! has at its heart a conflict that raises it above the more conventional examples of the genre. Here, the Brian Jonestown Massacre are led by the Kooh-i-Noor of crazy diamonds – one Anton Newcombe – a musical polymath for whom creative credibility and commercial success are mutually exclusive concepts. When the documentary begins, BJM are the friendly rivals of The Dandy Warhols, who subsequently go on to become the darlings of the indie-pop tabloids. Friendly rivalry then becomes something more poisonous, to the point where Newcombe sends the Dandys individually wrapped shotgun shells.
Director Ondi Timoner shot over 1500 hours of film while following both bands around for eight years, and the result is a compelling love-hate narrative laced with heroin addiction, egomania, drug busts and on-stage brawls. Timoner pulls a master-stroke by having Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor Taylor narrate, and it's the narrative tone, as the Dandys go on to headline major festivals while BJM implode from heroin abuse, that truly elevates DiG!. For all his smug satisfaction, industry poppet Taylor can't help the wistful tone in his voice as he relates the squalid details of Newcombe's relative failure, a self-destructive spiral that is at least conducted on Newcombe's own terms.
"These journalists have a romantic idea about self-destruction," says Clean's rueful protagonist Albrecht Hauser (Nick Nolte) after his aging rocker son Lee overdoses on heroin in a Canadian backwater. Lee's girlfriend Emily (Maggie Cheung) is jailed for six months for heroin possession. When she gets out of prison, she has lost her home and her son Jay (James Dennis), who is being cared for in Vancouver by his grandparents, Albrecht and Rosemary (Martha Henry). Determined to get clean and prove herself a capable mother, Emily goes to Paris and hooks up with record producer Elena (Beatrice Dalle). Meanwhile, Albrecht and Rosemary travel to London with Jay for a series of tests on the terminally ill Rosemary.
In a simplistic study in conflict resolution, Nolte plays Albrecht as a bedraggled Wild Man of the North, and yet it is he – and not Jay's natural mother – who proves himself worthy of Jay's affection. Emily, meanwhile, is struggling to reconcile her inner conflict, in which an instinctive wild streak must be tamed if she is to live her life to its full potential.
Perversely, for a well-intentioned tale of internal and external conflict, Oliver Assayas's story (he directs and co-writes with Malachy Martin and Sarah Perry) is remarkably free of tension, its narrative arc something of a flat line throughout. Maggie Cheung's performance is stilted at best and hysterically contrived at worst, and she looks the picture of health for a supposed ex-junkie struggling to get by on methadone and pills. The restrained Nolte, all growly whispers and bleak, seen-it-all eyes, is the best thing by far about this film.
Conflict is writ large in War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg's reworking of HG Wells's novel of alien invasion. Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, a hard-living longshoreman separated from his wife and kids, Robbie and Rachel (Justin Chatwin and the intensely irritating Dakota Fanning). The kids are at Ray's for the weekend when the aliens strike. As helpless as anyone else in the face of the invaders' technological superiority, Ray bundles his kids into a car and heads for the hills.
"Is it the terrorists?" Rachel asks, and you expect a conventional Hollywood post-9/11 response, in which Ray somehow contrives to kick alien butt. But if War of the Worlds is a post-9/11 movie, it's a movie imagined from the Iraqi perspective, as a brutal and technically superior force invades and makes terrified refugees of an entire population. Unusually for a blockbuster, Ray is in no position to influence events (although Cruise is allowed a laughable hero moment near the end); instead, and understandably, he repeatedly runs away as yet another wave of tripods appear over the nearest hill.
The emphasis is less on the invasion (although there are some spectacular scenes of destruction) and more on the conflict resolution going on between Ray and his kids, neither of whom think he's a particularly good or nice person. Time and again, Ray is framed in windows or mirrors, some of them broken; the idea, presumably, is that we see our Everyman through a microscope of sorts (as the aliens examine the human race before invading), and the overall impression is of a flawed man doing his best to be honourable in the face of impossible odds. With that in mind, and given that the real conflict underpinning War of the Worlds is that between the squalls of Spielberg's notorious 'inner child' and the adult demands of earning squillions of dollars from making blockbuster movies, this might well be Spielberg's most personal film yet.