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Tag: Carey Mulligan

QuickView: Wildlife (2018)

11 June 2024 | | Reading Time: < 1 minute | 0 Comments

“You know what they call trees in a forest fire? Fuel. You know what they call the trees left up when the fires go by? They call them the standing dead.”

Jeanette Brinson

Actor Paul Dano’s directorial debut is a 1960s family drama set in a small town that is surrounded by wildfires, a metaphor for the claustrophobic relationship and sense of impending doom at its heart. Dano’s style is restrained, trusting his actors’ performances to carry the film and he draws out wonderfully nuanced performances from Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. Both characters are harmed by their own pride, early tension arising when Jerry loses his job, set against the backdrop of shifting gender roles. The focus of Wildlife is really on Jeanette’s erratic behaviour in response to her marital troubles, and here Mulligan excels. The audience perspective is that of the couple’s 14-year-old son, and in key moments Dano chooses to leave the camera on Joe’s expression whilst the audience can surmise — contextually or through audio — what is happening off-screen. This is engaging, if old-school, performance-centric film making, and it serves the material well.

8/10

QuickView: Maestro (2023)

25 December 2023 | | Reading Time: 2 minutes | 0 Comments

“There are many things stopping me, but fear is not one of them.”

Felicia Montealegre

A musician is again the subject of Bradley Cooper’s second directorial outing, a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the first American conductor to receive international acclaim. Although Cooper plays the titular maestro, it is Carey Mulligan who receives first billing for her powerful performance as his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Cooper uses the couple to explore the multifaceted nature of humans, the complexity of forging an identity from disparate parts, and and the strain that can place on a single partner. In his career, Bernstein refuses to be constrained, retaining his Jewish surname and embracing musical theatre composition in additional to more respected orchestral fare. Montealegre provides Bernstein with understanding and support to explore all of himself but begins to feel isolated by his lack of discretion in relationships with men. Like Oppenheimer, it now seems in vogue for biopics to eschew chronology, and Maestro jumps around repeatedly, using black and white and varied aspect ratios as the primary indicator to the audience. This structure leaves the film feeling fractured, without particularly aiding the underlying themes. Cooper again collaborates with Matthew Libatique (also Darren Aranofsky’s preferred cinematographer), who dazzles early on with his black and white composition like a face shrouded in shadow, only an eye glinting in the light. Cooper’s Bernstein is expressive under Kazu Hiro’s impressive prosthetics, and he embodies duality of the extroverted performance of the conductor (“I love people so much that it’s hard for me to be alone”) and the isolated creativity of the composer.

8/10

QuickView: Promising Young Woman (2020)

23 April 2021 | | Reading Time: 2 minutes | 0 Comments

“Look how easy that was. I guess you just had to think about it in the right way.”

Cassandra

A bold and unpredictable female revenge thriller, stripped of the male gaze that typifies the genre, Promising Young Woman is an arresting directorial debut from Emerald Fennell. Carey Mulligan’s performance is enthralling, turning on a dime between vulnerable and predatory, but revealing greater emotional depth through her relationships with her parents, her boss and a potential new love interest. The juxtaposition of these softer scenes provides tonal shifts that are uncomfortable without feeling exploitative, since they are about the character’s different headspaces rather than simply a visual cut between sex and violence (indeed, for all the darkness of its subject matter, there is little of either on screen). Cassandra’s strength is her dauntlessness rather than aggression, leading to some wonderfully feminist wish-fulfilment sequences like silently staring down a group of catcalling builders until their bravado falters. The tonal disconnect is heightened through a soundtrack of female-fronted pop, culminating in an instrumental strings cover of Britney Spear’s Toxic that drips with menace. It is the combination of these aspects that makes Promising Young Woman feel so fresh in cinema, a continuation of television experiments like Killing Eve (on which Fennell was a writer). Using this remarkable concoction to make sharp points about rape culture, the prioritisation of men’s reputations, guilt, complicity and historic transgressions, makes this an important — as well as impressive — achievement.

9/10

QuickView: The Dig (2021)

20 February 2021 | | Reading Time: < 1 minute | 0 Comments

“From the first human handprint on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous.”

Basil Brown

A gentle British drama around the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial site in 1938, The Dig is enjoyable without injecting unnecessary artifice to largely mundane work or becoming overly twee in its historic countryside setting. The first half is the most compelling, as landowner Edith Pretty and excavator Basil Brown make the discovery. The kinship between Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan’s characters is evident, with Pretty protecting Brown from the elitist incursions of his more academically qualified peers, and Brown adopting a paternal role toward her son. Once word of the find spreads, the cast grows significantly and the film’s focus unfortunately drifts away from its strongest characters to address the relationships between the younger newcomers. Set against the urgency of imminent war, there is greater emotional breadth than one might expect from a burial excavation. However, with no characters so well established as Pretty and Brown, we are invariably less invested in their outcomes.

7/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2025 Priyan Meewella

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