MikePadgett.com

Most people remember John Savident as Coronation Street’s recently deceased butcher Fred Elliott.

Fred was a self-made man, a local personality, a mainstay at the Rotary Club. A character on the cusp of extinction in today’s Britain: part of the local Con club scene, part of the furniture along with the photos of once successful football teams and dusty plaques commemorating long forgotten charity events. Fade to brown.

Happily, unlike his character, the actor is still with us and though there are similarities between the affable meatman and the grumpy old cobbler, it was the welcome return of Savident as arch-thesp that made this production of Hobson’s Choice a prospect to relish.

Indeed other people - myself included - remember the actor as a scene-stealer extraordinaire in Remains of the Day and a fistful of other period dramas.

So John Savident was right here, treading the boards at the Sheffield Lyceum as Henry Horatio Hobson, widower, cobbler, father of three aspiring daughters.

Those who remember David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation may recall that Charles Laughton didn’t really play Hobson for laughs, but the stage script was rendered duly hilarious as soon as the starting gun cracked.

Savident’s Hobson rightly dominated the play despite appearing in relatively few scenes, with the unlikely pairing of assistant bootmaker Willy Mossop (an excellent Dylan Charles) and eldest Hobson sister Maggie (Carolyn Backhouse) gelling particularly well. The wedding night scene was beautifully and affectionately played.

Indeed, the performances were all superb, as The Stage pointed out, this was “a cast which never gives less than best” [1].

Brief Encounter, The West Yorkshire Playhouse

Noël Coward’s play Still Life (1936) formed the basis of the wonderfully restrained (or rather dry, depending on your sympathies) 1945 film Brief Encounter.

The film tells the story of Laura Jesson, a terribly middle-class, well-to-do sort of housewife who takes the train at Milford Junction to do a few chores. One day she meets the urbane, well-to-do sort of doctor, Alec Harvey. An impossible affair flourishes and dies in the anonymous privacy of the station café.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as housewife and doctor were delightfully repressed in the film, their furtive affair played out more in silences than in spoken words. And if we’re more used to seeing stage remade for screen, as an example of the opposite Brief Encounter seems a tough proposition.

But here the Kneehigh Theatre has done everything opposite.

As if a reaction to the monochrome movie, the play is full of colour, music and - shock horror - comedy. The stiff upper lip has curled into a knowing smirk. At times, the denizens of the cafe come perilously close to vaudevillian caricature, but the blossoming romance at the centre is wisely protected, retaining its naïveté.

The principal criticism must be that this stage Brief Encounter is rather uneven. When the wider focus of the first half - on character sketches in the station cafe - narrows significantly in the second, the play loses much of its rhythm and energy despite occasional recorse to scenes of light relief.

Nevertheless, the transformation from film to stage is successful. Even then the play does not entirely reject the overtures of cinema. Indeed, aspects of film are celebrated with film sequences projected directly onto the action and the action is choreographed in extraordinary detail.

• Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
• Germany, 2006
• 

Crass Hollywood remakes of European art film aren’t often successful. The big budgets, the bigger country and the biggest names tend to kill off every single cell of zeitgeist in the original. And I can see that happening here, when they get sad-jowled Nicolas Cage to emote all over this one.

A Stasi official instigates a surveillance operation on a successful playwright. Beginning with an implacable dedication to finding the evidence he needs to condemn his subject, the official instead grows to respect and perhaps envy him, with difficult consequences for both.

The Lives of Others is steeped in atmosphere, the performances are beautifully restrained and the material is worryingly relevant to our times. Top that, Weinstein. Or rather, don’t bother.

• Director: Bong Joon Ho
• Korea, 2003
• 

Korean cinema is alive and kicking, emboldened and naive like a headstrong teenager with something to prove. One driver is undoubtedly a gutsy brew of high melodrama and truthful acting. Another might be that uniquely Korean gift for all things epic: simple, emotive storytelling with a keen directing wit.

Song Kang Ho runs the whole gamut as a twitchy detective who finds a sort of nobility in Memories of Murder, elevated by the soul searching investigation of a series of killings. Together with out-of-towner Kim Sang Kyung, Song grinds painfully through crime scenes and suspect interviews, finding few clues yet finding himself. Based on a true story, the film plays it humble with excellent humour and fine performances but classic status seems assured within minutes.

Bong Joon Ho here deserves a place on the growing list of talented directors to emerge from the peninsula during the last decade. He deals sensitively with provocative content and provocatively with scenes of rural Korea: it’s a subtle, successful contrast like the perfect balance embodied in the national flag. This is a beautiful film about the preservation of humanity in the face of inhumanity and it’s a triumph of style and substance.

• Director: Paul Haggis
• United States, 2004
• 

Paul Haggis is one of those people who was obviously born to make movies. Already a decorated screenwriter of note, his mainstream directorial debut landed Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Editing at the Oscars.

Choosing Los Angeles to tell a series of interrelated stories (see also: Magnolia, Short Cuts), Haggis’ defining theme is the cause and effect of racial prejudice.

Some characters and their stories are less effective than others: Chris Bridges’ Anthony is rather too glib, Brendan Fraser’s Rick Cabot is simply there to glue a couple of stories together and his wife (Sandra Bullock) leaves it very late to make a useful contribution to the narrative. On the whole though, Crash is an emotionally powerful ensemble drama and hopefully a precedent for Paul Haggis as a director.

• Director: Stephen Frears
• United Kingdom, 2006
• 

If before seeing The Queen you caught the two-part television drama Elizabeth I, then you probably admired Helen Mirren’s preface to her glorious turn as our current monarch.

The Queen paints an intimate portrait of Elizabeth II during the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997. Any portrayal of the private activities of the Royal Family is mere conjecture, of course, but there’s something direct and sympathetic about Mirren’s stoical, wise and occasionally vulnerable figure. It’s a performance well deserving of a 2007 Oscar and the same might be said of Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair, which wasn’t nominated.

Even if its audience disdains the monarchy or our present joke of a government, The Queen somehow manages to transcend all that and deliver something truly sympathetic and humanistic in its characters.

• Director: Ron Howard
• United States, 1989
• 

My brother will probably back me up on this: Parenthood was one of the first VHS movies we ever saw as kids. Which probably explains why it surprises me fifteen or so years later as an adult: Father Of The Bride this ain’t. Instead, it’s a well written, well acted ensemble piece for everyone who’s ever got married, had kids or simply grown up.

And what an ensemble: a veritable family photo, if you will. Steve Martin and Rick Moranis do good straight turns. My heroine Mary Steenburgen, and Dianne Wiest holding it together. Jason Robards, the eternal Cheyenne, grumbling away.

And look at that layer of young stars there, in the next row: Keanu Reeves still stuck in the second gear of Bill and Ted, cranky Martha Plimpton, Joaquin (Leaf) Phoenix as a messed up kid who has definitely never heard of Johnny Cash.

• Director: Christophe Honoré
• France, 2004
• 

Pierre has too much time on his hands. He’s a sullen, truculent, overweaned, morbid youth who spends his inordinate amount of spare time writing miserable prose and pulling faces at his elders. Ma Mère is all about Pierre and it’s as indolent, ignorant and insolent as he is.

Based on some novel or other, the film wastes two of the slowest hours of your life playing out some Oedipus-meets-Coming-Of-Age melodrama whose shock-bore pacing sputters like some diabetic geriatrix.

And it’s the dénouement that clinches it: if it’s too hard to empathise with a mother whose jaded sexual appetite requires her to corrupt the flower of Europe’s bored, rich youth, then listless Pierre won’t score with you either, as he jacks off over her dead body in the morgue.

• Director: Stephen Gaghan
• United States, 2005
• 

Syriana is a literate and highly engaging story of cause and effect in the global oil industry. It has a self-propelling pace similar to the one that moved Michael Mann’s The Insider.

Clooney here is magnetic in his downbeat role as the ex-CIA agent Bob Barnes, whose life has been spent in the perpetual twilight of serving his country’s interests in the Middle East and now struggles with changes he can no longer control. Barnes’ story is one of several, the others being connected directly to the oil business, but each influencing the others.

Syriana is a portentous statement that’s already strikingly relevant given the Western foreign policy of our current era, but the film’s wider message should spread well beyond that.