Always.

This movie is a rare animal, a curiosity from a director who is best known for blockbusters. Always (1989) is reputed to be the weakest of Steven Spielberg's body of work! But for some reason has been reported to be the director’s own favourite film!

Described as a romantic adventure drama it's set against the background of the men and women who are contracted to fight forest fires from both the ground and the air. The film stars Richard Dreyfuss as Pete one of the pilots who is tasked with flying a plane which helps the ground based fire fighters with extinguishing out of control fires that burn there way through great sways of dry forest and bush. When Pete’s fellow pilot Al (John Goodman) gets into problems mid-air Pete fly’s in to save him but during this brave rescue attempt the gallant Pete gets himself killed. Dorinda (Holly Hunter) one of the ground-based crew has been in love with the newly deceased pilot and starts her grieving process.

 

Dreyfuss with Hollie Hunter.

Pete is replaced by Ted (Brad Johnson), a handsome young man who immediately fancies Dorinda. The movie now descends into fantasy. Pete's journey to a better place is interrupted when he meets an angel called Hap (Audrey Hepburn her last appearance in a feature film before her death in 1993) who tells him he is to return to earth and mentor Ted in not only his flying skills but also with his intended affair with his ex. She also explains that unless he does this and says a final farewell to Dorinda he wont get though the pearly gates and 'rest in peace'.

 

Fighting Forest Fires.

The film is a remake of Victor Fleming's 1940's movie A Guy Named Joe that starred Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunn with Spielberg changing the timespan to the present day and not the World War 2 backdrop of the original.

 

Audrey Hepburn in her last feature film.

Films that span two worlds, that is the hereafter clashing with the present, if done well, can be very entertaining for example the Powell and Pressburger 1946 movie A Matter of Life and Death which starred David Niven as a 'dead' wartime pilot and even better was the recent BBC television drama River (2015) which starred Stellan Skarsgard as Detective Inspector John River and Nicola Walker as his murdered partner DS Jackie Stevenson whose apparition is repeatedly materialising throughout the investigation into her own death.  Both these are nowhere as weak as Spielberg attempt to cover this re-embodiment genre. Casting Dreyfuss in the lead romantic lover role was not the best move while the eighties time period really dates the movie; some of Hollie Hunters costumes are really dreadful! I think the best way to describe the film is to use the word ‘silly’ in regard to the story line, corny in regard to the script and unbelievable in regard to the actor’s attempts to make an interesting and believable film. It's hard to believe that Steven Spielberg directed this malarkey between Empire of the Sun (1987) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) both far superior pieces of work from this well regarded American director. 

Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre’s screening of the melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) was shown as part of the cinema’s Film Club season. Introduced by Rachel Findley she told us that the film was about a week in the life of a singer who is active in New Yorks folk scene in 1961 just before Bob Dylan exploded on the scene and ‘folk’ music was changed forever.  The inspiration for this latest Joel and Ethan Coen written and directed vehicle is the music and memoir’s, (The Mayor of MacDougal Street), of Greenwich Village folk legend Dave van Ronk and the muted hues of the front cover of Bob Dylan’s second album released in 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It shows Dylan with Suze Rotolo at the corner of Jones Street and West Village New York City with critic Janet Maslin summing up the iconic impact of the cover as "a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging".

 

The Bob Dylan album.

Llewyn Davis (  When Davis hitches a ride to Chicago to audition for producer Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) he meets jazzman Roland Turner (John Goodman) who OD’s on the journey but recovers with the help of his valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund). The audition is not successful but Grossman does offer him a chance to form another duo but he turns it down deciding instead to go back into the merchant navy. Yet another plan that did not come to fruition!

Oscar Isaac), an unreadable character, is a self pitying loser who had made a name for him self as part of a singing duo until his partner throw himself off of the George Washington Bridge and he now spends his time looking for singing gigs around the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and bumming free board and lodging from friends and intellectuals that want to show him off to their friends as their ‘pet folk singer’. Other characters in his life are the married folk singing duo Jean and John Berkley (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake) Jean is pregnant and it could be Davis’s child, but as most of Greenwich Village fancies Jean so it could be anybody’s. All the same our wandering minstrel has to raise the $200 for an abortion!

 

The Peter, Paul and Mary type duo. 

Scraping together the abortion money!

Like the tracks on a lot of music albums from that period, the film itself is a little uneven at times, with high and low points. More like the rather disappointing A Serious Man (2009) than the brilliance of films like True Grit (2010), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), Fargo (1996) or my own personnel favourite The Big Lebowski (1998). But a Coen Brothers release is always appreciated and this one is very well constructed, the cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel is superb highlighting the period detail and as usual the acting is first rate but what worries me is the brothers reliance on a cute animal to under right this movie for no real reason which is not usually the case!  The music that forms a large part of the narrative is under the direction of T Bone Burnet with some input from Carey Mulligans husband Marcus Mumford and unusually the numbers in the film, which contextualise the era, are complete which has the tendency to slow the narrative down. It has been suggested that this film is not about the failure to make money but the failure to be connected to others, now theirs something I know about?