Glorious 39 *

Director: Stephen Poliakoff
Cast: Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Julie Christie
Eddie Redmayne, Juno Temple, David Tennant, Charlie Cox
Jeremy Northam, Hugh Bonneville, Jenny Agutter
Christopher Lee, Corin Redgrave

If you liked Atonement but wished it had been a bit more like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, then Glorious 39 might just be the movie for you.
Set in England during the summer of 1939, it recounts the dramatic story of Anne Keyes (Garai) a wealthy film actress who discovers her family might be involved in a political plot to stop WWII.
That might not sound like a bad thing, but it is! Setting the bizarre mood for a movie that rarely knows where it's going and much less how to get there.
You see, the pro-appeasement movement in pre-Churchill England was not merely used to avoid combat but also would help maintain the status quo among the upper classes who promoted it.
Of course writer/director Poliakoff doesn't seem to care about this and instead of using these ambiguities to make a comment on the way money shapes history, simply chose to throw it all away in favor of a plot that has everyone, except Garai's character, act like Stepford wives.
This is especially sad for the older actors, especially Christie and Lee, who has to endure a scene so terrible in the end that you wonder how much they paid him to go through with it.
Surprisingly Garai survives the movie with the least harm. The camera is obviously in love with her and despite Poliakoff's intentions to turn her into someone else (look it's Keira Knightley! No wait it's Cate Blanchett!) Garai's uncommon beauty helps her deliver a performance that's magnetic and well intentioned. She tries to be Ingrid Bergman in Notorious and obviously fails, but her spirit overcomes the tragedy that is the rest of the movie.
Therefore, an amazing ensemble is utterly wasted, used to bring to life a plot that confuses with its erratic tonal shifts.
The thing with Glorious 39 is that it doesn't know if it wants to be an homage to classic films (sometimes it feels like a "count the Hitchcock references" game), a Gothic horror movie, a surrealistic psychological portrait or a parody.
It moves so aimlessly among genres and styles that you never know for sure which one to pay attention to.
But beyond genres it fails to make any sense of who the characters are, which seems impossible to understand given the actors playing them.
Even the fact that the heroine is an actress (point which is brought up by mockers and skeptics throughout) teases us with an actual intention on the director's part.
Can he be trying to mention something about history's need for drama or about the roles we play unexpectedly? Can he be drawing parallels between the work of a spy and the work of an actress?
To formulate those kinds of questions would be too kind an offering for a movie that shows us a burning pile of cats and dogs, confuses randomness with intrigue and would make G.K. Chesterton roll in his grave.

Creation **

Director: Jon Amiel
Cast: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly
Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Martha West, Benedict Cumberbatch

"Creation" opens with the promise of telling us how "the biggest single idea in the history of thought" came to occur.
Said idea is none other than Charles Darwin's publication of "On the Origin of Species" but the film is very far from fulfilling its intellectual promise. What we get instead is a by-the-numbers production that tries to put historical figures in cinematic forms to make us empathize with them.
Here Darwin's (Bettany) genius is reduced to a simplistic battle between religion and science filtered through his feelings for two people. On the science side he has to make justice to his deceased, daughter Anne's (West) memory. Her ghost appears to him constantly and reminds him of all that he taught her about dinosaurs and natural selection.
On the other side he has his wife Emma (Connelly) a devout Christian who questions his need to quarrel with God and separate his family from society.
Where Anne's death (which is told in strange uneven fractured narration) could've been a smart propeller towards intellectual debate (Emma clings to faith while Charles sees science fail) it's turned into a cheap plot device to create tear inducing scenes and melodramatic moments.
Bettany gives a marvelous performance and convinces us of his aging by a mere change in his facial expressions. His inner struggles are much more effective than his loud conversations with Annie's ghost.
The actor is able to tap into a source of creativity that creates brilliance along with frustration. He's immensely watchable even when the screenplay forces him to concentrate more on forced ideas than authentic actions.
Connelly is equally good, perhaps because she's already played this part before (and won a heap of awards for it as well) when we see her dealing with a genius husband who talks to imaginary figures we realize this might just be an 1800's version of "A Beautiful Mind".
When Amiel should've trusted Darwin's ideas to be sufficiently original to catch our interest, he prefers to recur to visually pleasing allegories that try to digest the theories for us.
Therefore when Darwin narrates about his thoughts on sea creatures we see the actual Darwin undergoing hydrotherapy...this unimaginative angle goes as far to make us believe that he actually wrote the book out of a Graham Green-esque vendetta with God.
For a movie about someone who was so fascinated by nature, "Creation" ironically lacks a spark of life.