The Raw, Poetic, Confessional Last Resort;The Bay of Pigs Comedy You've Been Waiting For
Movies rarely bother to connect with life anymore, and when they do, it's often a pose. But the British drama Last Resort?about immigrants in a seaside holding colony in Britain, awaiting visas or deportation?is the real deal, a lean, lyrical, tough drama about lost souls dreaming of home and stumbling toward happiness. It's not a great or perfect movie, but I don't care; in the week since I saw Last Resort, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
Every scene and every frame has truth in it?real apartments, real seaside buildings, real streets, populated by characters that look like people rather than movie stars, and reveal themselves to us a layer at a time, through physical actions and facial expressions rather than boring expositional dialogue. The vibe is gritty, funny, sexy, sad yet hopeful. It builds its power honestly, not through hammy emoting or jacked-up technical tricks, but the accumulation of simply observed details: the way characters look at each other, or walk down a deserted avenue, or eat lunch, or paint a wall. First-time dramatic filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, a veteran documentary director from Poland, has struck a balance between verite-style nonfiction filmmaking techniques, improvisational storytelling and social realist drama. The result is raw, poetic, confessional, musical. (Its blunt, unsentimental emotionalism reminded me of John Lennon's The Plastic Ono Band; I'm listening to it as I write this review.)
The heroine is Tanya (Russian star Dina Korzun), a young single mom from Moscow. She met an Englishman there, fell in love with him, accepted his marriage proposal, then packed up her nine-year-old son, Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov) and came to England to be with him. The film opens with Tanya arriving at the airport and looking for her rescuer. For some reason, he's not there. When she calls his apartment, she gets no answer?only a machine. Without a fiance to meet her, she'll be deported, so she makes up a desperate lie: she tells English immigration officials that she's seeking asylum as a political refugee. The officials take one look at Tanya and know she's lying, but by law, they can't send her back right away. So they send her and Artiom to cool their heels for a few months at Stonehaven, a once-thriving seaside resort transformed into a holding center for refugees whose futures have yet to be decided.
The film's first half-hour is extraordinarily absorbing. Pawlikowski's careful and consistent filmmaking style?devised with cinematographer Ryzard Lenczewski?mixes flowing, handheld closeups and nailed-to-the-floor long shots. The simple visual grammar tells us not just where we are, but what it sounds and feels like, painting a whole world in exact, unfussy strokes: the glassed-in airport waiting area with planes jostling for position on the runways outside, the tinny hiss of p.a. announcements, the bustle of tired bodies lined up before paper-pushers who've heard every sob story and are too businesslike to waste time passing judgment or doling out empathy. When Tanya and Artiom arrive at Stonehaven, with its crumbling old rides and prison-like apartments and dozen-deep lines to use the pay phone, the desolate grandeur of the place is almost overwhelming because it's been allowed to build gradually?in brief scenes comprised of short takes with tons of ambient sound and not much music.
Pawlikowski, who also cowrote the script with Rowan Joffe, doesn't push the drama because he knows he doesn't have to. He doesn't lecture; he makes lists instead. Which means the details of the immigrant experience feel spontaneous and journalistic rather than choreographed. We feel as though we're eavesdropping, in a place where happiness has been deferred and people have no choice but to wait, hope and survive. On paper, what happens to Tanya sounds depressing: she and her son try to escape to London to find Tanya's fiance, but discover that escape is impossible; an Internet porn entrepreneur (played by real-life English pornographer Lindsay Honey) sizes up Tanya as a beautiful, desperate woman and offers her cash if she'll agree to become voyeur candy; Artiom falls in with an ethnically diverse bunch of troublemaking immigrant kids. (In some ways, the boy is tougher and less naive than his mom.)
Once the central plot kicks in?Tanya's halting romance with Stonehaven's arcade manager, a tough, handsome, native-born loner named Alfie (Paddy Considine), who moonlights as a bingo caller?you might fear an unwelcome injection of predictable romance, with accompanying nonsense about the pure hearts of the working class. But Pawlikowski's style, coupled with the naturalistic performances of his cast, which devised most of the dialogue and situations in rehearsal, helps him steer clear of the predictable moment, the easy solution. You know Tanya's going to give in to the pornographer's cash offer, yet when the moment arrives, it's presented not as a fall from grace, but an acknowledgment of reality?a mother choosing survival over pride. When Artiom discovers mom's sideline, he's not tearfully judgmental, but merely disappointed and confused, for reasons he can't quite articulate.
The burly owner of a local fish-and-chips place (Marcus Redwood) makes an unpleasant impression at first: a broad-shouldered bull who yells at his sad-sack customers and has no patience for special pleading. But he's human. Rather than calling the cops on a customer he knows stole utensils from him, he tells the man to bring them back first chance he gets. And when he informs Tanya he has no work for her, there's a nonsexual, almost brotherly tenderness in his voice?an empathy born of working in a hard place and paying attention to what happens.
When Tanya and Alfie go out, it's not a movie date. It's a date people trapped in bad circumstances might actually go on. Tanya watches Alfie call a bingo game, getting progressively drunker and more emotional, after which they gamble and make small talk and dance and then confront the possibility of sex. Their attraction transcends the language barrier without obliterating it. A marvelous scene has Alfie yammering happily while Tanya, who barely speaks English, stares at him, moony-eyed, digging his sexiness. It's not merely a realistic acknowledgment of chemical attraction, it's also a sly comment on the roots of movie romance: in a good movie, if the lovers click, it really doesn't matter what they're saying.
Pawlikowski's film runs off the rails in its final third, when the drama's kitchen-sink origins begin to show too obviously. The final 10 minutes feel especially rushed and poorly thought-out, as if the film crew was running out of shooting days and realized, "Holy cow, we've got to figure out some way to end this thing." But the performances carry the day; the near-familial triangle of Korzun, Considine and Strelnikov generates tremendous goodwill. You root for these people, you understand their fears and desires, you feel what they feel and want them to be happy. Deep down, isn't that why people go to movies in the first place: to look at a big screen full of unfamiliar faces and see themselves reflected back?
It's a dated story told in a dated satirical style (think The New Yorker in the 60s), full of supposedly wry jokes that might be funny if you don't go to movies much and have no interest in anything that happened after, say, 1970. "At last, a comedy about the Bay of Pigs!" trumpets the faux-CIA memo that opens the film's presskit, as if acknowledging a central shortcoming was the same thing as neutralizing it.
Cowriter-codirector?star Douglas McGrath?whose last film was the similarly cutesy and overdetermined Emma?joins forces with filmmaker Peter Askin to tell the sporadically funny story. It's about a smarty-pants grammar teacher named Allen Quimp (rhymes with Wimp) who lies about being a CIA agent, then is asked to join the agency after helping a young Russian ballet dancer (Ryan Phillippe) defect. Which is to say, it's a wiseass Secret Life of Walter Mitty (the Danny Kaye film version, not the James Thurber short story) with geopolitical one-liners.
The whole thing is narrated during a hearing that follows the Bay of Pigs. As the most powerful senator on the committee, the great character actor Jeffrey Jones is wasted once again, asked to do little more than roll his eyes and sigh while McGrath narrates the audience into a stupor and ceremoniously trots out allegedly marvelous lines like, "I knew a little Russian? He worked out at our country club" (never heard that one before), and, "A country that understands the proper use of objective pronouns is a country with the proper objectives."
Sigourney Weaver has a couple of funny scenes as Quimp's greedy, narcissistic, henpecking wife, who wants to write a bestseller, "like Peyton Place or the Bible." And some of the based-on-history details, like the CIA's plot to make Castro's beard fall out, are all right. But the whole enterprise has a beard much longer than Castro's. I suspect the story of how McGrath and Askin convinced people to fund this movie is a lot more interesting than the movie.