It’s not by accident that screenwriters Shane Connaughton (“My Left Foot”) and Kerry Crabbe have the Playboys’ ham actor manager (Milo O’Shea) perform a scene from “Othello”: the depth of the sergeant’s jealousy, in Finney’s impressively dangerous performance, is scary to behold. Yet such is director Gillies Mackinnon’s control that the melodrama never goes over the top. Without missing a stride, the movie is able to weave in the IRA, smuggling, the advent of television, ’50s rock and roll and the often funny competition between the theater and the church for the town’s attention. And not least the love story between Quinn and the radiant, feisty Wright gives off great heat.
Adapted from the novel by William Wharton, Keith Gordon’s World War II movie balances a keen sense of rage with the hushed, almost dreamy style of a fable. We’re in the snowy Ardennes forest at Christmastime in 1944, with the six surviving members of what was once a 12-member reconnaissance squad, led by the sensitive, inexperienced 19-year-old Will Knott (Ethan Hawke), our narrator. The group is sent on a dangerous mission to an abandoned chateau to locate the enemy, but from the start they are greeted with peculiar signs-like the frozen figures of a German and an American soldier seemingly locked in an embrace. When a small squad of Germans are finally sighted, the enemy sends strange messages: calling out to the Americans to “sleep well”; hurling snowballs instead of opening fire. They seem to want a meeting, not a fight.
This central section of the movie- mysterious, funny, tragic-is hauntingly told, and delivers the film’s antiwar message with fresh power. What follows in the third act isn’t bad, but the movie has already peaked, and its emotional impact gets diluted. Still, Gordon’s spare, lyrical filmmaking casts an elegiac spell. An actor himself (“Dressed to Kill,” “Christine”) making only his second film (he also did the adaptation), Gordon’s loaded with talent, and he certainly knows how to work with actors. Hawke, Gary Sinise and Arye Gross make the strongest impressions, and fine work is done by Peter Berg, Kevin Dillon and Frank Whaley. Only John C. McGinley strikes a heavy-handed note as their vile commanding officer. “A Midnight Clear” may not fulfill all its high ambitions, but its surreal atmosphere, and its sadness, linger a long while.
This is, among other things, the least sentimental movie ever made about a blind man. The hero of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s intelligent, edgy first feature has been blind since birth and is so well defended against pity-his own or anyone else’s-that he wears his pride as a porcupine wears quills. Martin (Hugo Weaving) is an amateur photographer. No matter that he can’t see his own photographs–they exist as proof, confirmations of a reality he can’t perceive. And being a supremely untrusting soul, he uses them to test whether people lie to him.
He meets a young dishwasher named Andy (Russell Crowe) whom he does trust, and gives him the job of describing his photos. This enrages Martin’s housekeeper Celia (Genevieve Picot), a smart, masochistic woman whose passion for Martin is met with contempt. The stage is set for a Strindbergian triangle of sexual gamesmanship, betrayal and emotional revelation as Celia sets about undermining Martin’s friendship with Andy. Moorhouse is a cool, precise chess player (and funny, too), but “Proof” is anything but heartless. It’s about a man who holds the world to inhuman standards, cutting himself off from his own humanity in the process. It’s about learning to trust. Martin’s blindness implicates us all.
