The smart money's now on intelligent movies
Cleverness is making a comeback in film-making. From the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (school movie with some scary science), which opens the London Film Festival on October 13, to Eat Pray Love (chick-lit plus philosophy) and The Town (brainy Bostonian crime caper directed by and starring Ben Affleck), it seems we now have an appetite for genre films with added depth.
At the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month, a taste-maker for autumn successes, the phrase being used was "elevated genre". The idea is that clever is OK: a movie can be as profound as you like so long as it's still recognisable as being in a familiar genre. In terms of sales and marketing, it's crucial to be able to package your film simply.
Thinky thriller The Debt, out in the UK next February, is one such film, splicing between modern day Tel Aviv and post-war Berlin. Helen Mirren plays a grandmother with a distinguished record of service in Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, who in her twenties helped track down a notorious Nazi war criminal.
However, says director John Madden (director of Mrs Brown and Shakespeare in Love), to see The Debt as a mere thriller, smart or otherwise, is to miss the point. Like all good thrillers, "the film has very gripping narrative", he says. "But it wouldn't have the same charge without the emotional, psychological and moral complexity."
So a "thriller-plus", then.
It may sound neat, but not all movies can be marketed like burgers, argues George Hickenlooper, director of the Edie Sedgwick biopic, Factory Girl, whose new film, Casino Jack, features Kevin Spacey as a disgraced White House lobbyist. "Cinema is getting more commodified and that is having a corrosive effect on storytelling," he says.
Far from being grateful for more substantial mainstream movies, we ought to be worried that good films aren't getting made unless they are easy to sell. The increasing tendency to see films as commodities is squeezing the life out of the artform.
Film-making has become so uncertain, says Hickenlooper, that "film-makers try to brand themselves". He says Casino Jack is "a dramatic comedy with elements of satire. Try selling that." And as for elevated genres: "We might be saying Oh, this cheeseburger is a little more cheddary this time,' but we're still talking about a Happy Meal."
