By Roger Moore

FILM: The Truth about Emanuel

CAST: Kaya Scodelario, Jessica Biel, Alfred Molina, Frances O’Connor

DIRECTION: Francesca Gregorini

 

A sense of mystery is a hard thing to create on film. So much so that discarding that sense, once you’ve created it, is almost always a mistake.

That’s the blunder of The Truth About Emanuel. It sets up a lovely psychological puzzle, things that we do not know about the title character, which the ensuing movie doesn’t really justify. And then it ruins the effect by over-explaining pretty much everything in the third act.

Emanuel uses the masculine spelling of her name. (“They thought I was going to be a boy.”)

But this skinny, sassy and morbid beauty is anything but. Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario) is a self-confident loner who lives with the knowledge that her mother died in childbirth. “It’s on my tab,” she narrates. “It accumulates interest with every passing day.”

Which may explain her dark take on the world, a persona she’s layered on top of the usual doses of teen sarcasm and self-absorption. She has the confident wit of a great beauty who knows she intimidates men — like the boy (Aneurin Barnard) she flirts with on the bus, or the boss at the pharmacy (Jimmi Simpson) who lets every rude remark slide, just to enjoy another day of her company.

Emanuel wants nothing to do with Dad’s newish wife (Frances O’Connor) or indeed Dad himself (Alfred Molina). But the fetching new neighbour attracts her attention. Linda (Jessica Biel) is a new mom. And she needs a baby-sitter. Emanuel figures she can squeeze that in.

“I need the money. I’ve decided I’m going to become a collector of ‘Precious Moments’. “

But Linda has a secret, one that she’s apparently unaware of. Her baby, Chloe, is just a doll. And Emanuel cannot figure out how to process this or broach the subject with the “new mom”.

Director Francesca Gregorini sets us up for something sinister, toying with Linda’s fixation on a static-filled baby monitor and Biel’s loopy interpretation of loony Linda.

Emanuel’s response — to keep Linda’s secret, to never point out to the crazy woman the obvious — suggests that she wonders if she’s hallucinating this reality, or merely bending that reality to suit her psychological needs. Somebody’s crazy. But who?

There’s a sort of “Juno” sass and swagger to Brit actress Scodelario’s interpretation of the character. She turns the overmatched Claude, her bus acquaintance, into a “boyfriend” by fiat, shocking fellow bus-riders with whispered suggestions that she needs the seat next to her to tell her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. Her Emanuel gets away with rude eccentricity on her brass, her looks and her wit.

But the Truth About Emanuel that writers and director come up with is far too pedestrian for this catty, catwalk-ready monster. They had a couple of characters and a couple of actresses playing them who could have led us anywhere — into the dark recesses of guilt and insanity, or worse. Instead, they waste this cast and these characters on a story so conventional, so neatly wrapped up in the finale, that the real mystery is how Gregorini and co-writer Sarah Thorp didn’t see that. — MCT

 

A mother in search of her son

By Connie Ogle

FILM: Philomena

CAST: Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Anna Maxwell Martin

DIRECTION: Stephen Frears

 

Philomena is a good movie about a terrible injustice that continued for decades in Ireland and affected thousands of young women.

Based on a true story — one that you will marvel at by the end of the film, so remarkable and infuriating is the outcome — the film details the search of Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) for her son 50 years after he was put up for adoption by a Catholic orphanage and workhouse that made virtual slaves of the disgraced and traumatised young women it took in.

Ireland’s brutish adoption laws stonewall any attempt to track down an adopted child after the fact, and so Philomena, still half-believing she deserved what happened to her for getting pregnant, has gone on with her life (we don’t learn much about her past beyond the fact she has a grown daughter and used to be a nurse).

But on her son’s 50th birthday, she finds herself staring at the one photograph she has of him and knows she has to find him.

Enter Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the script and produced the film), a former BBC correspondent and recent civil servant dumped from his Downing Street job amid controversy. With nothing but time on his hands, Martin is threatening to write a book on Russian history, even though the mere mention of it sends everyone else into spasms of boredom. Then he runs into Philomena’s daughter at a party, and she pitches her mother’s plight as a human interest story. He pitches it to an editor (Michelle Fairley) and soon he has an assignment: File a story that is fabulously happy or a desperately sad. Either one is acceptable, the editor tells him. Anything in-between will not suffice.

Much of the beauty of Philomena, which was directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen), lies in its odd-couple characters and the superb actors portraying them. Martin and Philomena are two very different sorts of people who baffle and surprise each other but who can’t help but grow close as the search goes on.

Coogan plays Sixsmith (who wrote the book on which the film is based) as a casually snobbish, upper middle class smoothie impatient at working-class Philomena’s appetite for romance novels and salad bars (when he goes out to eat, he eats in a little bistro around the corner, he tells her). Dench, of course, is marvellous, and her no-nonsense presence grounds
the film and keeps it from growing
maudlin.

There are lessons to be learned by Martin, of course, but they are not all predictable ones, and what could turn cloying turns out to be heartfelt in the hands of Coogan and fellow screenwriter Jeff Pope. — The Miami Herald/MCT

 

DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha