Morvern Callar
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Movie Reviews of Morvern Callar
Movie Review: Morvern is a hero most Americans won't appreciate--no spoilers review
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't get the negative reviews for "Morvern Callar." I can understand why many won't like this film--but I can't understand why they watched it. You can tell what kind of film it is right off the bat. Don't their DVD players have OFF switches?
Here's who should watch it:
(1) people who appreciate great acting--Samantha Morton is amazing;
(2) people who realize that the choices available to middle class, college educated Americans are not the choices available to lower working class Scots living in a stratified society where your accent is your destiny. Think "My Fair Lady" except Eliza Doolittle never met Professor 'iggins and had to make her way on her own, only set in the 1990s, only the UK hasn't changed that much in this regard;
(3) people who don't require Hollywood production values, special effects sequences, and artificially flavored happy endings;
(4) people who are prepared to admire Morvern for using everything at her disposal to cope with the rotten hand life dealt her.
I'd be honored to know someone like Morvern, inarticulate working-class bloke that she is. Her educated artistic boyfriend saw something in her that isn't obvious at the beginning--except that she's reasonably attractive. What's inside her is slowly revealed through the course of the movie, which will only seem aimless to those who want to be lead by the hand, like Hollywood is only too happy to do.
My spouse thoroughly disapproved of this movie and Morvern's life choices, and I haven't been able to change her mind. So I understand how appalled some will be at this movie, even some who have been exposed to hundreds of interesting films from all over the world. But though Morvern's no saint and doesn't pretend to be, I approve of her actions in the context in which they occur.
My own father only had a 7th grade education, so perhaps I'm in a better position to understand the working poor. There's so much we take for granted.
For me the high point of the film is a scene in which she's negotiating with two publisher's representatives. She's waaay over her head and bloody well knows it, but she's also plucky and resourceful, and watching her navigate these waters, continually at the brink of disaster, is both wonderful to watch and a wonder of magnificent, mostly wordless acting on Samantha Morton's part. This is a scene I'd show to acting classes.
I'd also use this if I were trying to teach people what "middle class" and "lower class" mean existentially.
Lastly, I know of no other film like this. It doesn't remind me of anything else except perhaps Kurosawa's version of "The lower depths." But that's a stretch.
See "Morvern Callar" if you're honestly prepared to visit the life of someone who absolutely is not from your world.
Movie Review: Haunting
Summary: 4 Stars
Supermarket clerk Morvern Callar's boyfriend commits suicide, leaving behind several different kinds of gifts. Literally, these include Christmas presents set beneath a tree that pulsates with red and green lights, the alternation of buzz/quiet introducing the reader to the strange dictotomy of noise and silence in this film. The boyfriend also specifically bequeaths Morvern a tape from his music collection that he has orchestrated for her and which forms the lyric background to this haunting film. But in a suicide note that Morvern finds on his computer, he also tells her that he loves her, whatever that means in the context of this grim world, and that a novel on the computer was written "for her." She "takes" this message and her lover's gifts in more than one sense.
The remainder of the film explores the effects of these various gifts. After first abandoning the body for days, partying in a kind of frenzy of denial, she then gathers herself, disposes of it, and forms a plan, which seems more improvisation than calculation. Morvern remains oddly kind and innocent, even as she dismembers the boyfriend and buries him on a bluff. She then sends off the boyfriend's novel to a publisher under her own name and uses his money to escape to Spain where she goes clubbing with her best friend Lanna, trying to blot out pain and create meaning in her life the only way she knows how. Her incorporation of her boyfriend's life signals her incorporation as well of his pain. Her actions seem less a desertion or desecration of his suicide than an embodiment of it.
Brilliantly natural acting, daring cinematography, and a precise director's eye (the award-winning Lynne Ramsay) make this an interesting but disturbing film. European youth culture, in particular, comes off as nihilistic and self-destructive.
Movie Review: Tough to Take
Summary: 4 Stars
"Morvern Callar," a film directed by Lynn Ramsey, is another very dark, very Scottish film made with the assistance of the Glasgow Film Board. It's a multiple prize winner:nominated for 14 awards, it took nine. It's based on a novel by Alan Warner, and might be considered another entry in the tartan noir school of filmmaking: just a bit bloodthirsty; more than a little graphic in its portrayal of young people going about their daily rounds of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
The highly talented Samantha Morton stars as Morvern Callar, a young woman without a future, working as a grocery store clerk in Oban, a picturesque town, full of retirees, on Scotland's west coast. It's a town where futures are not made. She awakes one morning to find her boyfriend has committed suicide. Her behavior then is not what we'd expect; it goes well beyond ordinary denial as we'd conceive it. She spends the funeral money he'd left her to get herself and her best friend from the store to a vacation in Spain; lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll to be found there. She also signs her name to the novel the boyfriend had written, and sets about trying to sell it as he'd instructed on his last disk.
Director Ramsey, in this movie, follows the maxim "Show, Don't Tell." It's intense, frequently color-saturated, particularly in the Spanish scenes, and moves fast. No spoon feeding of what to think, no backstory, no voiceovers, just a close up,unblinking eye on Morvern and company. Her first film, "Ratcatcher," also set in Glasgow, was almost unwatchable in some unbearably dark scenes;evidently she doesn't believe in going easy on her audience.
Movie Review: read the book, it doesn't translate well as a film
Summary: 3 Stars
Fortunately I read Morvern Callar in one sitting before exposing myself to the film. The film isn't bad, it just doesn't translate well. Translation is one of the problems, the characters accents are so thick at times that it's very difficult to follow what they're saying. I was hoping for a subtitle option in the extras menu. Morvern Callar deals with how Morvern copes or rather doesn't cope with the suicide of her boyfriend by working during the day and drinking, drugging and partying during the night while her boyfriend's corpse decomposes on her kitchen floor.
It's easy to get into a completely character driven, nearly plotless novel dealing with a character coping with grief but I found after the first 40 minutes of watching the film, it didn't capture my attention. The party scenes are expertly filmed, the director does a incredible job of capturing Morvern's sense of despair and the soundtrack is excellent. However, the overall feel of the novel was lost. Even the end is different. Morvern returns to Spain to party some more in the film but in the book, Morvern disappears to a tiny fishing village on the coast of Scotland after discovering she's pregnant with what may or may not be her boyfriend's baby. That ending certianly does give the story a different feel.
Read the novel, skip the film. An interesting adaptation of a really good book. 2 1/2 stars.
Movie Review: Blank pages.
Summary: 2 Stars
"Morvern Callar" was a film destined to cause some trouble, for a number of reasons. Of them:
#1- A movie adaptation that plays loose and fast and false with the book is often going to cause trouble.
#2- Whereas many high-minded films and their critics have decided subtlety is a wonderful thing, this movie has decided "If some subtlety is good, more subtlety must be doubly as good!"
#3- People who watch the movie are caught between their frustration with the film'd deliberate inaccessibility and their fear of appearing ignorant when rendering judgement. Thus, you have opinions that hang around on the poles of the extremes, with very little in the middle.
#4- This is not really a dog on the movie itself, but you do have to wonder about the kind of people who write reviews and get on message boards that sneer "If you don't like this movie, go watch The Fast and The Furious." As if anyone who does not like this movie is a wifebeater-wearing, greasy cinema Philistine.
#5- The idea that this movie is superior because it does not, quote "spoon-feed you" all the answers. I would venture that there is a difference between "spoon-feeding" answers and being purposefully evasive and disingenuous to the movie audience.
#6- Samantha Morton is in this movie. That's cause for a lot of trouble, for you see Samantha Morton is a talented actor (I just learned two months ago we're not supposed to use the word actress anymore) who has amassed a cadre of "devoted" (re: rabid) fans who believe that anything she touches turns to gold. Morton has definitively proved her acting chops in movies like "Jesus's Son," "Sweet And Lowdown," and "Code 46" but went really awry in the saccharine "In America" and the sputtering "Minority Report." Morton is a good actor, she's even a good actor for what she's given in this movie.
Unfortunately, that's not enough. This movie gives her too little, or perhaps too much, to work with. There is too much subtlety to this whole movie. Blank pages for the audience to ascribe what they think to them. You can either decide that look means she's torn up inside or not. You're given so little to work with, you can't say either way. Anyone who claims to have the definitive keys to this movie I would be suspicious of as a fraud out to elevate their standing.
This movie doesn't give you a key, or a lock, and nowadays that's supposed to be something to be proud of. It's not. You can make a movie in this fashion, but it needs... for lack of a better word, "meat" to it. People go and walk and do things and mess around and party but they don't truly seem to interact with each other or their environment. Emotions that I think were meant to seem complex and multidimensional seem to be totally ignored. A feeling of numbness and even inability for release would be nice, but the audience is not even given that. Halfway through the film we begin to suspect that we're being strung along, and the ending confirms that suspicion.
Stranger still, this movie gives off a very anachronistic feel to it, the film quality and setting looks like it was made in 1988 or some time.
In short, I don't care for this movie. Morton did a good job with what she had to work with, but in the end this film just did not do enough, confront enough, or accomplish enough. The way this movie has been structured, I believe the reviews on here tell more about the reviewer than the movie. This movie is blank pages. Stare at them, try and figure them out. Make of them what you wish. Just don't attempt to pass any of it off as gospel truth.
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