Film reviews: Mission Impossible and Far from Men

French drama Far From Men looms as an Oscar contender, and action hero Tom Cruise still has what it takes at 53.

Reda Kateb and Viggo Mortensen in Far From Men, which is set in Algeria.

David Oelhoffen’s superb French language drama Far From Mentestifies to the durability and adaptability of the western. It’s set in Algeria in 1954, at the start of the independence uprising, so it’s about 70 years and 10,000km distant from the OK Corral, but it’s a western to its marrow.

Like many stories of the genre, it is about a journey reluctantly taken, one full of menace and the potential for betrayal. It shares DNA with John Maclean’s recent, brilliant, New Zealand-shot Slow West and, more obliquely, John Hillcoat’s 2009 film of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a western for the apocalyptic age.

The star of Hillcoat’s film, Viggo Mortensen, is the tightly coiled centre of Far From Men. Daru runs a remote schoolhouse in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains. It is spectacular, brutal terrain. We meet him teaching French geography to the children of local farmers, kids who are unlikely ever to see Algiers, let alone Paris.

When a veteran gendarme, Balducci (Vincent Martin), turns up, a young Arab tethered to his horse, the world of men threatens to break Daru’s self-imposed isolation.

The Arab (Reda Kateb) is accused of murdering his cousin in a dispute over grain. Balducci’s orders are to hand him over to Daru for transport to the authorities in Tinguit, about a day’s ride. Daru protests — he will not take a man to his certain death — but in vain, and from that point the film becomes an intriguing exploration of the relationship between captor and captive on their arduous journey.

Far From Men is based on Albert Camus’s 1957 short story L’Hote, an intentionally ambiguous title as the word can mean guest or host. Who is which in a country under colonial occupation? The question is further complicated by the fact Daru is Algerian-born but of Spanish descent. He is a true outsider.

The English title preserves this ambiguity. The relevant line in the story comes when Daru is thinking of his remote locale, “cruel to live in, even without men — who didn’t help matters either’’. Daru, whose background we learn slowly, has taken himself far from men. Yet forced into the intimate company of just one man, he must recognise the humanity common to us all.

Kateb, who had a small part as a Guantanamo Bay inmate in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winner Zero Dark Thirty, brings an absorbing intensity to this role. The young Arab (we learn his name later) starts out ill and cowed and becomes something much more impressive. Unlike Daru, he has a plan and it’s a surprising one, brave and sad. The early scenes in the schoolhouse, which cleave closely to Camus’s story, are full of still, watching tension, as compressed and uncomfortable as the situation would be.

Mortensen, who learned some Arabic for the role (he already had the French), is perfectly cast as a figure of compassionate, honourable masculinity. He’s a man who rejects the easy excuse that he has no choice. He can deliver the prisoner or he cannot. His struggle with this decision forces him to re-engage with the world and with himself. There’s a wonderful moment during a sudden downpour, with Daru’s reaction full of returning life.

Oelhoffen’s script expands the action of Camus’s far more interior story, which ends soon after the two men leave the schoolhouse. In this version, for which the director also drew on Camus’s nonfiction work Algerian Chronicles, their trek brings them into conflict with both sides of the nascent war between the Alger­ians and the French, and there are early signs of how dreadful it will be.

Far From Men was shot on the Moroccan side of the Atlas Mountains. Guillaume Deffontaines’s unhurried camerawork captures the lonely beauty of the landscape, an impression enhanced by the spare and haunting soundtrack by Australian rock star Nick Cave and his collaborator Warren Ellis. It’s still relatively early in the cinema year — most Oscar winners are released between October and December — but I’m confident Far From Men will be on my eventual list of the best movies of 2015.

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is the fifth instalment in the nearly 20-year-old franchise and has claims to being the best. It’s thrilling, smart and funny throughout, from a hair-raising pre-title sequence in which Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, at 53 still doing his own stunts) tries to board an aircraft from the outside, through brilliant set pieces such as an assassination attempt during a Vienna State Opera performance of Turandot, to its clever conclusion which plants a tiny seed a doubt about all that has unfolded on screen across the previous two hours.

Each of the MI films has had a different director and this time it’s Christopher McQuarrie, who won an original screenplay Oscar in 1995 for Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects. It’s significant that this is the first time the director is also the sole credited screenwriter: there’s a guiding vision evident in the mature plot, one that insists on good storytelling to underpin the conventional attractions of the espionage genre — the insane genius, the car chases, the ticking time bombs and so on.

The story picks up more or less where Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011) left off. With Hunt and his fellow IMF agents blamed for reducing the Kremlin to rubble, new CIA director Alan Hunley (a twinkling Alec Baldwin) moves to shut down the covert group. Hunt, however, is determined on a final mission: to uncover and destroy the Syndicate, a no-good shadow network of former government agents from around the globe.

The Syndicate is the rogue nation of the title. Hunt believes it is behind catastrophes that could be timely ripped from the headlines: the downing of passenger aircraft, banking col­lapses, environmental disasters. It’s headed by former British agent Solomon Lane (an excellent Moriarty-like Sean Harris). But Hunley declares the Syndicate is a figment of Hunt’s imagination and orders him brought in, making him a rogue operative.

So Hunt goes after Lane, and Lane goes after Hunt. And Hunley goes after Hunt. Hunt is helped by IMF comrades William Brandt (a wisecracking Jeremy Renner), Benji Dunn (an excellent Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and by a beautiful British agent deftly named Ilsa Faust (Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson, who is impressive). That we are often in doubt about the allegiances and motives of all, especially Faust, is as it should be.

The near non-stop action takes us through Vienna, Casablanca and London. Cruise is so reliable in this role, a bona fide action hero who, like James Bond, can see the funny side. There are lots of good jokes, including one that jabs at Cruise’s vertically challenged physique. Another, perhaps unintended, comic moment comes with Hunt’s reaction to Faust’s offer of a romantic bargain: in this regard, 007 he is not.

This is a thoroughly satisfying action adventure spectacular that, like the recent Terminator: Genisys and Jurassic World, proves there is loads of life in old dogs (and dinos) yet.

Far From Men (M)

4 stars

National release

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (M)

4 stars

National release