Australian film critic David Stratton reviews To Catch a Killer
The actor’s turn as a grizzled veteran FBI agent who likes to break the rules makes To Catch a Killer a four-star film.
To Catch a Killer (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★★
If Ben Mendelsohn has ever given a bad performance, I haven’t seen it. In a productive career that commenced in the mid-1980s in Australian television and feature films, Mendelsohn has played a wide variety of roles – including that of the young Rupert Murdoch in Black and White (2002).
In To Catch a Killer Mendelsohn is cast as Lammark, an unconventional FBI agent assigned to track down the perpetrator of a series of mass shootings in the city of Baltimore.
This very well-crafted thriller opens with a literal bang.
It’s New Years Eve and the city is celebrating with the inevitable fireworks. As the people party, a sniper based in a high-rise apartment opens fire, shooting randomly, but with a formidable degree of accuracy – 29 innocent victims are shot dead before a bomb destroys the killer’s location, destroying all the evidence.
One of the first local cops on the scene is Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley, one of the film’s producers). While her colleagues speculate that this was a terrorist attack, Falco is heard – by Lammark – to describe it as the work of a loner. No fan of the local cops, the FBI man enlists this junior officer as his liaison with the Baltimore police and, together with another agent, Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo), sets out to identify and capture the perpetrator.
Falco, it turns out, previously applied to join the FBI but was rejected; she has a bit of a history. But she works well with Mackenzie and, especially, with Lammark, a grizzled veteran who tends to break the rules.
The local police round up all the usual suspects but make little progress. Two more mass shootings occur, one in a shopping mall, the other in a supermarket, before the action moves from the city into the wintry countryside and the trail leads to an isolated house.
In the meantime, the screenplay, by Argentine director Damian Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham, probes the lives of the two main characters. There’s a surprising reveal when Falco asks Lammark how long he’s been married: “Ever since we were allowed” is the reply and we suddenly see Lammark in a new light – as a gay man who has presumably had to battle prejudice as he rose in the ranks of the Bureau.
In a nuanced portrayal, Mendelsohn succeeds in bringing to life a character who is both tough and tender. To Catch a Killer marks the English language debut for director Szifron and it’s only his second feature; in 2014 his debut, Wild Tales, made in his native Argentina, was a hit in Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar; Killer isn’t as original as that film but it’s an excellent example of the police procedural thriller, distinguished by chillingly well-staged action scenes and intelligent characterisation.
It’s a must for fans of gritty thrillers.
One Fine Morning (Un beau matin) (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★½
The latest film from French director Mia Hansen-Love marks a return to her cinematic roots after a couple of interesting but somewhat flawed English-language productions. One Fine Morning is a film about the problems faced by ordinary people even though its leading actor, Lea Sedoux, severely deglamorised for the role, could never be “ordinary”.
Seydoux plays Sandra, the single mother of 8-year-old Linn (Camille Leban Martins). Sandra works as a freelance translator and mother and daughter live in a modest apartment. During the course of the film Sandra is faced with two crises.
It’s become a cliche of contemporary French cinema to explore the relationship between a single woman and a married man, but that’s one of the themes of One Fine Morning. After years without a relationship, Sandra has a chance encounter with Clement (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend she hasn’t seen in some time. He has a wife and son but that doesn’t prevent him embarking on a sexual liaison with Sandra who is both thrilled and troubled by the affair.
In the meantime she’s also absorbed with the plight of her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a retired professor who is suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder that has robbed him of much of his eyesight and is starting to affect his memory. Sandra is faced with the prospect of finding the old man somewhere to live where he can be cared for. But, as in Australia, such places are expensive and hard to find, and then there’s the problem of his beloved – and extensive – collection of books.
While holding down her job, caring for her daughter and juggling her love affair with the increasingly urgent problems of her father, Sandra is a woman with a great many challenges.
To make matters worse, the befuddled Georg keeps mistaking Sandra for another daughter, Leila (Fejria Deliba), who is presumably his favourite, while his ex-wife (Nicole Garcia) tries to be supportive.
The director’s gentle, subtle approach to this material is typical of her best work but One Fine Morning feels a shade derivative and there’s an unfortunate Christmas scene in which the adults pretend to be Santa. Seydoux is always worth watching even with the unbecoming, cropped hairstyle she adopts here.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (M)
In cinemas
★★½
Well-regarded books don’t always make a smooth transition to the screen.
Rachel Joyce’s 2012 debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, found its way into the top 12 listed for the Man Booker Prize, won the UK’s National Book Award for a new writer and became the best-selling book in hard cover by a new writer that year.
Joyce has now adapted the book for the screen, but the experience of actually seeing an elderly man walking 620 miles – almost a thousand kilometres – is not so entertaining, even when the man is played by the incomparable Jim Broadbent.
Harold Fry (Broadbent) lives in what appears to be a very boring retirement with his wife, Maureen (Penelope Wilton) near the sea in Devon. It seems to be a sterile marriage with the shadow of their lost son hanging over it.
One day Harold gets a letter from Queenie (Linda Bassett), a former work colleague, who is in a hospice in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, dying of cancer.
Harold writes a rather formulaic letter to his friend but can’t bring himself to post it – instead, inspired by a story told to him by a girl (Nina Singh) in a garage – he sets off on foot, vowing to walk to Berwick and to deliver the letter personally. He calls the hospice and conveys to Queenie that she has to live until he gets there.
And then he sets off, without proper walking shoes or wet weather gear – this is England don’t forget. He keeps in touch with Maureen, who is comforted by Rex (Joseph Mydell), their widowed neighbour.
On the long, long road north Harold encounters various people who are kind and/or helpful, among them a troubled gay man, a Slovakian doctor (Monika Gossmann) who is unable to practice in the UK and is reduced to cleaning toilets, a lad (Daniel Frogson) who reminds him of David (Earl Cave), his son, a kindly farmer’s wife, and others.
When eventually someone takes a photo of him and posts it on the internet other “pilgrims” join him on the road.
I just couldn’t believe that such an elderly man – Broadbent is 73 – who has apparently not walked much in the past, would survive such a journey, sleeping out in woods, accepting kindness from strangers. As a result, the film’s potentially moving conclusion simply didn’t ring true.
Director Hettie Macdonald does a capable job, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is well photographed and very well acted – but “unlikely” is the operative word here.
