FROM THE BUCKET REVIEWS ARCHIVE
Review: Capules: Griff the Invisible & Senna
Danny Baldwin · August 28, 2011
It’s the first week of my final semester of college, so I’m short on writing time. But while I’m tied up in other things, you are probably still curious about the two art-house offerings this weekend, the Aussie take on the amateur-superhero movie, Griff the Invisible, and the racing documentary Senna. Here are capsule reviews…
Griff the Invisible / |
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Ryan Kwanten stars as a wannabe-superhero of a questionable mental state in Griff the Invisible.
- It’s an established movie convention: characters who are more than a little ‘off’ serve as hyperboles for the outsider in all of us, and we root for them as an expression of this. The first two acts of Griff the Invisible, a new film from Australia starring “True Blood”-actor Ryan Kwanten as the title character, thrive on this convention. Griff is a lovable loner, harassed by his co-workers, who moonlights as a caped crusader at night, saving his neighborhood from crime. He invents an invisibility cloak by–who woulda thunk it–using the recipe for invisible ink. For a solid hour, the movie coasts on its farcical charms and Kwanten’s endearing characterizations; while not especially original, it’s a welcome cinematic sugar-high. But then, it makes a befuddling storytelling choice in its final act. Griff finds himself a girlfriend in Melody (Maeve Dermody) and, through her perspective, we learn that the invisibility cloak doesn’t make Griff invisible and he is actually imagining his hand-to-hand combat with criminals. But let him have his fun, she thinks, whimsically falling for Griff even further as she helps him stake out a crime scene. If this isn’t a direct glamorization of mental illness, I don’t know what is. For most of Griff the Invisible, we can accept Griff’s exploits as symbols within the make-believe land of a movie. But once writer/director Leon Ford establishes, without a doubt, that Griff is a schizophrenic and encourages his delusions, the movie becomes borderline offensive. It’s a strange, unfortunate turn for a film that is initially quite the charmer.
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Griff the Invisible (2011, Australia). Produced by Jan Chapman, Scott Meek, Belinda Mravicic, and Nicole O’Donohue. Directed and written for the screen by Leon Ford. Starring Ryan Kwanten, Maeve Dermody, Marshall Napier, Heather Mitchell, Patrick Brammall, and Chan Griffin. Distributed by Indomina Releasing. Rated PG-13, with a running time of 90 minutes.
Senna / |
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Ayrton Senna, the subject of Asif Kapadia's Senna.
Senna is a movie without an apparent audience. It’s a documentary about the eponymous Formula 1 car driver, whose crash-death sent shockwaves through the community in the early-‘90s, so one might naturally assume it would appeal most to racing fans. But being that Senna is assembled entirely from archival footage of races that fans have likely already seen–I know my F1-enthusiast brother and father have–what they will get out of it besides 106 minutes of idol-worship is limited. I’m sure director Asif Kapadia acquired some rare clips (pre-race discussions between the drivers and F1 leadership come to mind), but most of the movie appears to be taken from races taped off of television. And while Kapadia’s tight focus on his larger-than-life subject fosters a narrative as tight as that of a fiction film–every scene in the movie features Senna; talking-heads are only heard through VO–it never transcends established sports cliches to become of interest to non-fans. Kapadia’s approach, though ambitious in its footage-constraints and sheer aesthetic ugliness, seemingly only allows for familiar beats — Senna was a man who excelled in his craft, became a symbol of national pride in his home-country of Brazil, and despite his frequent cockiness was very philanthropic. Even though we spend plenty of time with Senna, we don’t really get ‘inside’ of him past these obtuse characterizations because we sense he had a wall up in the source footage. If only he were still alive… then Kapadia (a talented filmmaker at heart) could have interviewed Senna and gotten more out of him. But had it not ended in a tragic, dramatic death, one senses that the racer’s story would have been nowhere near as enticing as a film concept.
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Senna (2011, UK). Produced by Tim Bevan, Liza Chasin, Eric Fellner, James Gay-Rees, Victoria Gregory, Debra Hayward, Kevin Macdonald, and Manish Pandey. Directed by Asif Kapadia. Written for the screen by Manish Pandey. Distributed by Producers Distribution Agency (PDA). Rated PG-13, with a running time of 106 minutes.