Miscast American remake is downhill all way
Downhill is a good example of a well-regarded foreign language film that translates badly as an American remake.
It’s always problematic to take a well-regarded foreign language film and transform it into an audience-friendly American version. Sometimes it works, but more often it doesn’t. Downhill is a good example of this; directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, it’s a self-described “riff” on Force Majeure (2014), a Swedish film made by Ruben Ostlund, and for much of its length it follows the original fairly closely.
Peter (Will Ferrell) and Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) have come to the Austrian Alps with their sons, Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford), for a skiing holiday. To begin with, everything seems to be going rather well, except that Peter irritates Billie by constantly checking the messages on his mobile phone. Billie is also mildly annoyed that Peter has booked them into a hotel that caters for couples, rather than opting for the family-oriented establishment down the road.
On the second day, after spending some rewarding hours on the ski slopes, the family is having lunch on the terrace of a restaurant with a spectacular view of the snow-capped mountains, when a serious “incident” occurs. An avalanche — deliberately started to reduce the amount of snow high on the mountain — gets out of control; for a moment it seems that a disaster is unfolding before them. Peter’s automatic reaction is to grab his phone and run, and when the dust/snow settles and he returns to his family, nobody comments on his apparent act of selfish cowardice.
But the more Billie thinks about what happened, the angrier she becomes, while Peter gets more and more defensive. When Peter’s younger business colleague (Zach Woods), who happens to be in the area with his girlfriend (Zoe Chao), visits their hotel, Peter is humiliated when Billie lets her pent-up animosity come to the surface.
Ferrell is miscast as Peter. He is capable of playing a rare non-comedic role, but the nuances of the character defeat him and his forced good humour fails to convince. Dreyfus is more successful as the increasingly outraged Billie, but the film strikes a false note with the character of a European man hunter, played to the hilt and beyond by Miranda Otto.
Ostlund didn’t seem certain how to conclude Force Majeure, and though the final scene here is completely different, it’s not entirely satisfactory either. In the earlier film, the role of the business colleague was played by Kristofer Hivju; he shows up again here playing the head of security at the resort. In the film’s best scene he gives short shrift to Billie’s complaints about the “dangerous” avalanche. He feels authentic in a way that many of the film’s other characters don’t.
Downhill (M)
Limited national release
★★½
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BEE-ON-THE-WALL TALE SWEET AND SAD
We don’t often see films from Macedonia, but the arrival of the feature documentary Honeyland, a film festival favourite last year and one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Feature Documentary last month, is extremely welcome.
The film, made by Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, takes us to a remote and seemingly abandoned part of Europe. In the mountains outside Skopje is a crumbling, almost abandoned village. Hatidze, a woman in her 50s, who cares for her sickly, bedridden, octogenarian mother, lives in a ruined house with no electricity or plumbing.
Hatidze survives by keeping bees. Her hives, some of them no more than holes in the rocky cliffs accessed by narrow paths over steep gorges, are carefully, meticulously tended. Hatidze rarely wears protection when she extracts the honeycombs, and the bees don’t sting her. She takes the honey to town where she earns enough money to keep herself and her mother in basic supplies.
This fragile lifestyle is interrupted by the arrival in the village of a noisy Turkish family, squatters who move into an abandoned house. They bring with them a few cattle, but it isn’t long before the head of the family decides that beekeeping would be more profitable. Whereas Hatidze is possessed of infinite patience, the Turks are in a hurry to earn cash and, in so doing, they impact the fragile ecology of Hatidze’s little world.
As fly-on-the-wall documentaries go, Honeyland is a particularly fine example. There is no narration: the rather sad, but enveloping, story is told in purely visual terms, and the photography is outstanding.
Honeyland (M)
Limited release
★★★★
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BITING ON A BUDGET
Writer-director Storm Ashwood’s Escape and Evasion is a tough little movie about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on an Australian combat veteran. In the role of Seth, the sole survivor of a special ops mission to Myanmar, Josh McConville gives a convincing and strongly emotional performance.
Haunted by terrible visions and nightmares, Seth is living alone since the breakdown of his marriage to Sarah (Natalie Rees). He has access to his young daughter, Lizzy (Jessi Robertson), but sometimes, when he’s tormented by demons from his past, he scares her.
Seth is approached by Rebecca (Bonnie Sveen), an investigative journalist whose twin brother, Josh (Hugh Sheridan), was one of the men killed on the mission. She wants to know what really happened in the jungles of Myanmar, and flashbacks gradually reveal how, when ordered to “take out” a rogue Australian ex-soldier, Carl Boldi (Steve Le Marquand), Seth and his three-man team found themselves under heavy fire from Burmese military.
The basic story is strong, so much so that Ashwood didn’t really need the rather unconvincing romance between Seth and Rebecca. The precise details of the mission — which seems to have been inspired by Apocalypse Now — and Boldi’s role as an unhinged mercenary, remain somewhat murky, but despite these flaws the film has many strengths. The jungle scenes, shot in Queensland, are well staged and genuinely suspenseful and McConville’s performance is impressive. The film was clearly made on a modest budget, and, taking that into account, it is pretty impressive.
Escape and Evasion (MA15+)
Limited release
★★★½
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PERFORMANCES ANCHOR TANGLED PLOT
Undertow, the film debut of Geelong-raised writer-director Miranda Nation, is a melodrama about a young woman with a faithless husband.
Claire (Laura Gordon), in an advanced stage of pregnancy, is at home alone when she realises she is about to deliver.
Her husband, Dan (Rob Collins), is out, supposedly with his mates, when their child is stillborn. Some time later, when driving past a motel, she sees Dan in the company of Angie (Olivia DeJonge). When she challenges Dan about this he explains that he was attempting to help his mate, Brett (Josh Helman), Angie’s boyfriend. Claire and Angie form an alliance.
The plotting is convoluted and the motivations not always clear, but the film gets by on the strength of some solid performances and the attractive photography by Bonnie Elliott.
I couldn’t help thinking, however, that if a man had directed Undertow he would have been criticised for the surprising amount of nudity — some of it full-frontal — none of it essential, involving the long-suffering heroine.
Undertow (MA15+)
Limited release
★★★