Film: Three Peaks (at the London Film Festival 2017)

Three Peaks

You know a film is good when you’re still talking about it several days later. So it was with Three Peaks, directed by Jan Zalbein which I saw at the London Film Festival. [Incidentally I noticed an ad for the 'Face to Face with German Film' campaign in the LFF programme but no further details were given. Is it coming to the UK?] However, I was still a little worried that the film might be a dud simply because it was a three-hander, featuring a child. Occasionally, and this is particularly true of British cinema, you get a child in a movie who cannot act at all, for instance, the kids in Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe et al.). We Brits seem to demand nothing of child actors (beyond speaking their lines in the right order) and consequently we get nothing (or less in the case of Harry Potter) while the US has a history of high expectations and correspondingly high achievers from the 1970s to the 2000s, from Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, Justin Henry in Kramer vs Kramer, the ubiquitous Jodie Foster, Henry Thomas in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, through Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and AI: Artificial Intelligence to Jacob Tremblay in Room, not to mention Dakota and Elle Fanning in almost everything else. I’m relieved to say this is not the case with Three Peaks. Arian Montgomery, who plays eight-year-old Tristan, is a revelation. Entirely believable in every scene; you immediately empathise with his stepfather Aaron’s desire to connect with him.

This film is about identity, love, parenthood, fractured families and the effect the last has on all involved. It depicts the predicament of the new man in a mother's life, illustrating how he performs the father role in all but name, depended upon, even taken for granted by the child, sharing in all the labour and reward of raising the boy and, from the opening scene, it seems, completely accepted. And we also see it from the boy’s point of view, in which Aaron is the interloper in his family, having usurped his father (whose presence is established by regular phone calls), all complicated by Tristan’s own guilt for occasionally preferring Aaron to his father.

Carrie and Jonas/Homeland

Alexander Fehling, who was very good in Homeland, in which, coincidentally, he also had to play father figure to someone else’s child, the daughter that Carrie (Claire Danes) has with Brodie (Damian Lewis) although his role is secondary to the main storyline (for more on Homeland, see secretsquirrelshorts), is the easy to identify with Aaron, who has to negotiate the tightrope of this awkward situation, in which he is asked to be a father but never be called a father, in which he plays second fiddle to the whims and wishes of a wilful and demanding but sometimes incredibly charming eight-year-old, and has to handle the pressure put upon him by Lea (played by Bérénice Bejo, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Natalie Wood) who wants to be fair to her child, his father and her new man. Aaron is frequently tripped up (dangerous on a tightrope), courted and betrayed by both.

Lea, Tristan, Aaron

The rather cosseted Tristan continually tests the boundaries, crossing the line between mischief and malice. He can be deliberately and casually affectionate and just as deliberately and casually cruel. Realising that he’s a king in his court, he wields his power accordingly, bestowing and withdrawing his trust randomly, so that poor Aaron is forever placating him in order to gain his favour, scavenging for crumbs at the table. But what the boy gives with one hand, he takes back with the other, pulling him towards him as he pushes him away. Loved and resented in equal measure, with Tristan revealing himself to be capable of minor violence, Aaron is in a quandary. Should he come down hard or brush it off? He opts to ignore it.

'Papa'

Aware that he holds all the cards, Tristan toys with Aaron, who’s begun to see him as his own son, and undoubtedly loves him, by calling him ‘Papa’ just to see how it feels and what the reaction will be – poor Aaron is beguiled and grateful, happily reporting it to the mother only for her to disapprove – he should have made it clear that he’s not Tristan’s father because Tristan already has a father and this might confuse him. The unfortunate Aaron is in a no-win situation here. If he had said ‘Don’t call me Papa’ I can well imagine the tantrums that might have resulted. From mother and son.

In danger

Repeatedly offered an ultimatum by Tristan, as their circumstances become more desperate, and the man's situation more precarious, Aaron, like the people who attended the film’s screening cannot conceive that a child would resort to something much more dangerous and violent in order to force a return to the status quo. It's shocking but suddenly, because of the way it's played, also totally credible.

(Stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the movie)

The ending is cleverly ambiguous. At one point, I was reminded of the scene in Before the Fall (Napola) when the character runs out of options and chooses to sacrifice himself. The director realised that such an outcome might prove unpalatable to some audiences (and such it proved at the LFF, where they chose to believe in the innocence and innate goodness of the child despite all evidence to the contrary). We were allowed to come to our own conclusions. We were allowed to hope.

At the time of viewing, Three Peaks had yet to acquire a UK distributor, which is a real shame. It definitely deserves to be seen.

Book: Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

I found The Ocean at the End of the Lane lyrical and moving so got this from the library when I saw Neil Gaiman’s name on the cover and didn’t look at the title till I got it home. Oh no, I thought, because I had tried to watch the movie and thought it clichéd and dull, with terribly uninteresting characterisation and a storyline that achieved the extraordinary feat of being bland, formulaic and unbelievable at the same time. Not to mention totally wasting the talents of Claire Danes.

Stardust

In Stardust, Gaiman, like the magpies he writes about, randomly purloins bits and bobs from all over the place, in his case, from other better fantasy writers (C. S. Lewis and J. R. R.Tolkien), in a ‘this might be good in my book’ way, cobbles them together like an inexpert seamstress (ending up with a badly darned sock of a book – well, I never met a magpie who was good at sewing), while failing to reinvent or develop them in any worthwhile manner. You don’t get a sense that there’s any thought behind his (or rather his take on other people’s) ideas whereas with Lewis and Tolkien’s worlds, you know and believe that there’s a whole mythology (or religion) underpinning them. Here, there’s a thin veneer, gold leaf (or rather gold-coloured leaf) over plastic. Scratch the surface and you get more surface. Gaiman’s novel is like an old-style Hollywood backlot – with only facades and no actual buildings, let alone any foundations. No depth. I assumed at first that this was because it was written for children although I think children actually deserve better.

Elijah Wood as Frodo

It takes so much and gives nothing back – a quest (ok that’s in everything); ‘Think of it as a fellowship’ - hmm, sounds familiar; talking trees - ditto; a witch queen; dwarves who mine and are silversmiths of great skill; a reluctant wanderer (‘Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain’ – remind you of any hobbit in particular?) None of this is expressed with any originality or flair.

The plot is derivative and unexciting and the characters at worst extremely irritating (think a book full of Tom Bombadils), at best uninvolving. The whole thing is fantasy-lite. I was prepared to think that the film-makers had done a poor job in adapting the book but that simply isn’t so. What’s incredible is that anyone thought it was worth turning this slight, shallow tale into a movie. My advice is to go read The Ocean at the End of the Lane instead.