Film reviews

Das Boot
The Director’s Cut

The following are film reviews from Neon magazine [EMAP]

Fifteen years after its success surprised even its makers, the story of German WWII submarine U-96 gets not only a director’s cut but a full restoration. The film launched several careers and, although director Wolfgang Petersen has gone to Hollywood – In the Line of Fire, Air Force One – Das Boot clearly remains his first love. Sifting through a million feet of film, 5oo sound tapes and the film’s haunting musical score, Petersen and his team have finally finished one of cinema’s most authentic experiences of war.
Das Boot follows a U-Boat mission through the eyes of novice war correspondent Lieutenant Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer). But patriotic fervour turns to despair when Hitler’s naval command uses its submarines to play cat-and-mouse with British destroyers. Camaraderie and discipline are pushed to new limits – and so is the boat itself.
The added footage – nearly an hour and a half – allows Petersen to flesh out the human drama. Jürgen Prochnow’s masterful central performance as the jaded skipper now has more space to develop, and the everyday intimacies of crew life serve to emphasise the central horror of warfare in the only type of boat specifically designed to sink. Submarine movies generally sanitise the experience of riding underwater in a 70-metre metal coffin, but the effects on the U-96 crew as they move from early-mission high spirits to brooding neuroses reveal frightened young men longing for homes and families.
But where most director’s cuts simply add footage, this is also a restoration as painstaking as George Lucas’s recent work on the Star Wars trilogy. Technology unavailable during production allows a new, superior print, a remastered soundtrack and a remixed score – technical niceties elsewhere, but central players in Das Boot. Cinematographer Jost Vacano – who recently shot Starship Troopers – uses the limitation of constant, gloomy interiors to give a full sense of this constrained existence. Again, where submarine movies generally restrict themselves to bridge, deck and torpedo tubes, Das Boot shows the claustrophobic whole, with men crammed into the spaces left between provisions. Just as vital is the atmosphere provided by the Oscar-nominated soundtrack. With no visual link to the outside world other than the limited periscope, the crew of a submarine relies on what it can hear, and with every creak of the hull or ping of the sonar, the tension rises as the submarine sinks.
But it is still the submarine itself which dominates Petersen’s now-classic film. As the U-96 descends below safe levels, each depth charge and blown rivet makes this the most gripping and visceral of war movies. At over three hours, it’s not for the faint hearted, but there are few war movies to equal Das Boot.

Note: The sentence ‘The most gripping and visceral of war movies’ was used as a pull-quote on the video trailer.



The Rainmaker

Neon magazine

With the courtroom showdown as firmly installed in cinema consciousness as the Western's high-noon shootout (and each of his new novels doubling as a screenplay), the John Grisham industry rolls on. The 'rainmaker' is Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon), a rookie Memphis lawyer whose first shot at litigation comes via the fantastically sleazy Bruiser Stone (Mickey Rourke). Baylor's ideals are the first casualties as he enters a world of jury tampering, stolen evidence, embezzlement and fraud. And that's just the lawyers.
His first case representing the family of a boy dying from leukemia takes Baylor in over his head, and along with ambuance-chasing partner Deck Schiflett (Danny DeVito) he finds himself taking on the might of a corrupt insurance company, their pack of attorneys - led by a perfectly cast Jon Voight - and falling for a woman (Claire Danes) whose husband beats her with a baseball bat. So far, so predictable; fresh-faced innocence takes on corrupt exerience and everything is running to form in GrishamWorld.
But The Rainmaker has substance, and a heightened sense that today's idealist will be ground down into tomorrow's Jon Voight, whose dapper exterior and rotten heart makes for a stock Grisham character. The pet sharks gliding insidiously across the title credits speak volumes; the film's comedy revolves around the scavenging deviousness of the lawyers themselves. In a sense, The Rainmaker is one big lawyer sketch. DeVito's chummy behaviour belies his smarmy opportunism; he offers a poor black kid with a broken arm a stick of gum, then follows it up with his business card.
Where A Time to Kill made the viewer's moral choices for them, The Rainmaker shows ethical ambivalence at the heart of the American legal system. Leukemia victims and domestic violence make for standard emotion-tweaking, but no matter how black and white Grisham's worldview may be, there are still grey areas and a line that Baylor knows he will cross.
Though it's Grisham's film more than Coppola's, the direction makes for a swinging narrative and provides a trademark visceral, flat-trashing fight scene when Baylor confronts the wife-beater. But it's the murky morals of a questionable system that propel the movie. Predictable morality tale? Yes. Scathing, satirical indictment of America's legal system? Tell it to the judge.