Films: All over the place in pursuit of a perfect home

Away We Go
Birdwatchers
Chevolution
The Firm
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Je Veux Voir

Away We Go confirms a long-held suspicion of this critic’s. Some screenplays, like some houses, are sold as fixer-uppers. The script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida – Mr and Mrs Hip Contemporary US Literature – was reportedly snapped up by director Sam Mendes during post-production on Revolutionary Road. Mendes must have read it and said: “The roof is falling through on this, the walls don’t stand up properly. But goshdarnit” – or whatever gone-native Limeys say in Hollywood – “it has vivacity and a message.”

It certainly has. I am still picking them out of my hair. This comedy about a penniless couple flitting around America to find the right place to deliver their first child rains funkiness and unstable lovability like ceiling plaster. It needs these hints of chaotic amiability, since the structure is gimcrack and the supporting characters irritating beyond belief.

We feel medium-safe with stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, the one a genial bearded lamp-post who resembles Italy’s Nanni Moretti, the other a crisp scatterbrain out of television’s Saturday Night Live. But their un-royal progress across the US has them colliding with characters who seem designed purely to be obnoxious, a sort of Empsonian seven types of objectionability. Among those prompting the unspoken response: “We’re certainly not going to have our baby here,” are Rudolph’s former work boss (Allison Janney), a potty-mouthed banshee rearing two kids in Arizona; Krasinski’s childhood girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Wisconsin, living in New Age out-to-lunchness with the stoner who shares her belief that children must be exposed to sexuality from the womb; two old college friends, the girl miscarriage-prone, who are raising a barnful of adopted kids in Montreal . . . 

So it goes on. Potentially poignant stories are presented with the same caricatural brusqueness or dispassion as the stories of people who are plain stupid. At the end, the placeless pair find their ideal home and the film’s latitude suddenly, belatedly switches from cancerous humour to Capra-esque corn. The moral? Don’t buy a fixer-upper script unless you are prepared to spend time fixing it up. (Rating 2/5)

Marco Bechis’s Birdwatchers had a deserved success at last year’s Venice Film Festival. Who better than a culture-hopping writer-director born in Chile, with subsequent work spells in New York, Paris and Milan, to make a film about intercultural meltdown on the Amazon? We know the moral of this river’s recent history. If you pull the ecological plug in a major river basin, you get a descant of gurgling doom followed, eventually, by a vortex of conflict.

Ambrosio Vilhava plays out Amazonian conflict in ‘Birdwatchers’

Weary of dispossession and a rising suicide toll among their young, a band of Guarani Indians leaves its reservation to camp defiantly on the edge of the white planters’ deforestation zone. The “birdwatchers” of the title are the tourists boated along the river to see exotic fauna, including Indians – those more obediently colonised – who take pay to pose as natives and shoot desultory arrows from the river bank.

Never mind the ancestral kitsch, Bechis urges, pay attention to the modern reality. Today’s dress code among Guaranis is grimy jeans and T-shirts, while the default setting of their minds is a smouldering discontent. Do not let the flicker of romance between a young tribesman and white fazañero’s daughter deceive you: this film is not Romeo and Juliet. Instead, the pessimism crackles away, charring a path towards a showdown in which each side says to the other: “You show me your worst demonic weaponry, I’ll show you mine.”

Which will win – the machetes and macaw screams of the indigenous or the guns and threats of the intruders – is left open till the end or indeed beyond. Bechis bequeaths us a landscape scattered with enigmas, jigsaw pieces for us to complete our own picture. A blond-haired Guarani hanged from a forest tree; a “crop-spraying” plane that seems intent on genocide more than pesticide; a white folks’ poolside villa visited by a semi-naked Indian giving out bird-like shrieks, like an unnerving, uninvited shaman who has mugged the party conjurer. (Rating 4/5)

Revolution is always with us: this week’s guerrilla documentary, watchable and well-researched, is Chevolution. Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff narrate the rise of the Che poster image, from an accidental snap at a 1960 Castro rally taken by commercial photographer turned compañero Alberto Korda, to the global diaspora of that leonine-messianic face. By 1968, Che’s features had spread like a birthmark, appearing on every T-shirt, tea mug or spare tattoo space on the bodies of young Cubanistas (whether in Cuba, California or across the compass).

Ziff and Lopez scan the iconographic impact zone and then explore the sociocultural fallout. The Che effect on commercial trinketry; the Korda family’s attempt to retrieve the image’s copyright; the disaffected Cubans’ disgust at the glamorisation of a rebellion that hardened into Marxist tyranny. It is right that the magical appeal of the face itself is never quite explained, even if a voice or two might have been drafted in – Umberto Eco? Noam Chomsky? – to try. (Rating 3/5)

Nick Love’s The Firm is a sleek, if superfluous, remake of the TV football-hooliganism drama, written by Al Hunter Ashton and directed by Alan Clark, that raised hairs and hackles back in 1989. Twenty years ago the subject was fresh and scary. Were parts of sports-loving Britain really like this? (Answer: yes.) Today, we are all too familiar with the brutal side of the beautiful game, though there is still a momentary frisson at the double life of the film’s antihero – by week-day a smooth-talking estate agent, by weekend a Hannibal of the hammer wielders – and an admiration for newcomer Paul Anderson’s steely-eyed, head-butting performance. (Rating 3/5)

I have lost the ability to relate to 3D children’s films. I get a sense of dread as soon as I don the spectacles. What will I be hit by first? A giant jelly, a giant octopus? Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is based on a kiddies’ bestseller. An invention that turns water to food runs amok and causes a rainy season of pies, hamburgers and candies. The film continues in meal-monsoon mode for 90 minutes with scant variation. But for young foodies that may be the dream of a lifetime. (Rating 2/5)

In the documentary Je Veux Voir Catherine Deneuve asks to be driven on a tour of Lebanon to appraise the aftermath of war. The result is a weird exercise in celebrity empathy, or a French superstar’s stab at it. Here is Deneuve suffering at the sight of a bombed town, Deneuve making awkward conversation with war survivors, Deneuve dozing off for a moment in the car’s passenger seat, Deneuve wondering if they should turn back. The idea is misconceived, the execution gets closer and closer to the danger zone of embarrassment. (Rating 1/5)