Three arts visits in as many days. Thank goodness I like to talk about this stuff eh Constant Reader?
On Saturday we went to see ATONEMENT. I had wanted to see the film soonish as - having never read Ian McEwan's book - I just *knew* the plot point that turns the film would be revealed to me before I saw the film. I had been tipped off roughly what the deal was but the story still held a few surprises.

As you all probably know now, on a rich estate in 1935 13 year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) witnesses an incident between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the housekeeper's son Robbie (James McAvoy). Robbie - whose Cambridge education was paid for by the girls' father - later on entrusts a letter to Briony to give to her sister. However he has given Briony an earlier draft of the letter in which he says graphically what he wants to do to her sister. She reads it but still gives it to her sister. To make matters worse, Briony then catches the couple in the library in a state of undress. Her secret crush for Robbie in ruins, she later accuses him of raping her cousin in the grounds although she knows the real culprit was a friend of her brother. Robbie is arrested and sent to prison for three years.

1940, Robbie and Cecilia meet briefly, realise they still love each other but he is on his way to France. Meanwhile an older Briony (Romola Garai) is now training to be a nurse but is unable to forget the misery her lie caused. The three characters come together again but as before, Briony's view of things is radically different to the truth, this being finally revealed by her in her 70s (Vanessa Redgrave).

For the longest time I waited to be engaged by the film, the opening 1935 segment certainly suggesting the enervating boredom caused by a hot day in the gardens of the big house with an unspoken tension slowly building. The trouble being that couple who we are being angled to invest our sympathy in are totally unsympathetic. The library scene should be a moment of great release for these two lovers who have both denied their feelings for so long but James McAvoy and Keira Knightley give off no heat at all. For the life of me I cannot understand the Keira Phenomenon. Here she gives us Kristen Scott-Thomas but with the brittleness whacked up to 10. She stands out like a sore thumb against her fellow actors - and not in a good way. I will admit she tones it down a touch in the middle section of the film.

It is not helped that she has to appear with actors who are simply more interesting - McAvoy shines whenever he is away from her stultifying presence and Saoirse Ronan is excellent as the young Briony, a real talent to watch. Romola Garai had the difficult bridging role of the 'middle' Briony but her grave presence made this character even more intriguing.

Thanks to Garai the film started to interest me also thanks to a nice performance by Michelle Duncan as her fellow-nurse and seemingly only friend. By the time that Vanessa Redgrave appeared as the 70-something Briony I was fully emotionally engaged for a small but telling reason. In the film, WWII Briony sneaks into the society wedding of her cousin and the man who had raped her. Although you only see the actor playing the Vicar in a longshot my ears pricked up when I heard the voice. What I was seeing was the last screen role of my actor friend John Normington who died in July. I had no idea he was in the film so to see and her him was a total shock.

Bearing this in mind, when Vanessa Redgrave appeared as the dying Briony I soon had a bit of a trickle running down my cheek. She gives a wonderful performance in this small but all important role. There are few actresses who would allow the camera so unflatteringly close but it allows you to look into her watery blue eyes and concentrate on the devastating tale she has to tell, a monologue which she delivers sparingly but which finally gives the film it's emotional depth. I hope she is remembered next year for the Academy Awards.
So all in all I enjoyed it particularly the script by Christopher Hampton which is as masterly as any he has done before. Joe Wright's direction has had the world falling over itself but I found it unnecessarily showy at times. In particular during the Dunkirk episode there is a vaguely irritating tracking shot which goes in forever, following James McAvoy as he walks around and around the beach, in between soldiers. around a roundabout, up and around a bandstand etc. etc. for no other reason than to draw attention to itself.

So what is the perfect antidote to an over-reaching director? To spend some time with one who could never over-reach himself as he never had a budget big enough usually to try! On Sunday lunchtime we went to see the hilarious documentary film of John Waters giving a lecture to a group of film students THIS FILTHY WORLD. It's being given a lamentably tiny release - showing at Brixton Ritzy at 1.30pm each day - but hopefully this means that a dvd release will be soon in the offing. We had to sit for ages while the projectionist worked out the proper ratio for the digital screening, get it wrong, then start all over again. So imagine the collective hoot of laughter when Waters suggested that cinema audiences should be more bold - like attacking a projectionist who can't show a film properly!

Filmed with no frills by Jeff Garlin, Waters ostensibly takes us on an anecdotal journey through his life in film but stops every so often to give us his take on the gay world, tabloids, guerrilla film-making, parents, children, growing old disgracefully, role models, Michael Jackson and lame excuses for not giving autographs "Jodie Foster says "They won't let me" - who? Who's they?? The autograph police??" He is pissingly funny, no more so than relating things he has overheard on his travels, such as the little boy asking his father on a Baltimore Street:
Son: "Dad why is Mommy crying?"
Father: "'cos you're an asshole!"
Try to catch it - it's 80 minutes of trashy joy!

And on the subject of dysfunctional families... tonight we saw Clifford Odets' AWAKE AND SING at the Almeida Theatre. I can't say I have ever been keen to widen my knowledge of this writer having only ever seen GOLDEN BOY and THE COUNTRY GIRL on stage previously and I don't think this production is going to change that.

The Berger family live squashed in a Bronx apartment, their lives and dreams curtailed by the sheer relentlessness of life. Three generations constantly rubbing each other up the wrong way, from Grandpa Jacob to his matriarch of a daughter Bessie married to the under-achieving Myron and the stymied grown children Ralph and Hennie. Bessie pressures Hennie into a loveless marriage with a recently arrived Russian immigrant Sam after she gets knocked up by a disappearing lover. When Ralph's love affair with a girl Bessie says is beneath them all seems lost until an unexpected event offers a possible release.

I had been looking forward to seeing this but I was left slightly underwhelmed by it all. Try as I might to keep in mind how ground-breaking it was to see a 'normal' family on stage in 1935 I couldn't really connect to it. Whether it was Michael Attenborough's workmanlike but uninspiring production, the predictability of the play itself or the sheer relentlessness of the "You want I should shut up?" "I should go to the kitchen for this?" venacular, I don't know. I just kinda sat there watching the playwright's wheels go round.

The delight of the evening was the performance of Stockard Channing. I suspected we wouldn't get the stock over-bearing Jewish mother from her and I was right as she gave a performance of Bessie as an exhausted but cunning woman, rueful and jaundiced at her under-achieving family while still attempting to instill in them ideas they were above most of their neighbours and friends. Her final speech allowing her children a quick glimpse of her own crushed dreams was particularly fine.

She was ably assisted by Jodie Whittaker (see left) who made the most of the perminantly disatisfied Henny, trapped into marriage but with an eye on the door and Nigel Lindsay as her longtime admirer and eventual lodger in the house. There was also an eye-catching performance from John Loyd Fillingham as the put-upon and put-up-with son-in-law Sam (see right) - possibly the only genuinely sympathetic character in the play. Sadly the role of Jacob the Communist grandfather was played by John Rogan who once again baffled me as to why he is cast in these sorts of plays as his accent slipped from Tipperary to Vladivostock by way of Flatbush.