I had a free Village pass to the movies which expired tonight so went to see Wah Wah. I don’t recommend it – but then again it’s not bad. Like a lot of movies these days it has excellent acting. It’s consciously serious and ‘art house’ rather than going for the ratings. It’s about a disintegrating British family in Swaziland at the time of independence.
I found the film very moving in parts – particularly regarding the suffering in silence of the young boy in the story. But nothing really hung together emotionally and the plot was – to borrow from Henry Ford’s description of history ‘one damn thing after another’.
The young boy who you see aged from 11 to 14 cops all the abuse dished out to him without putting up much of a fight – that didn’t ring true to me. And all the characters go through their various dramas, but it’s not too clear what’s driving them, or why they relate to each other as they do.
But it’s well acted. So go see it if you want, but don’t bust a gut. As the movie review site rotten tomatoes summed it up “The ensemble cast is strong, but they get overpowered by the muddled stew of melodrama.”
Haven’t seen the film, but I am aware that it is meant to be a semi-autobiographical rendering of the childhood of the actor Richard E. Grant’s (Withnall & I, The Player), who also wrote the script. I did see an interview on BBC Hardtalk Extra with Grant and from the conversation it did come across as more than your average actor-writes-script-vanity-project (I believe Grant has also written a diary of the production process – it is also the first feature filmed in Swaziland).
I guess having Emily Watson in itself is a big drawcard for me. But I’ll probably wait and see what I hear about this one, as Ralf de Heer’s new film and Winterbottom’s playful intertextual take on Sterne’s “Life and Times of Tristam Shandy: Gentleman” look like they definitely require definite trips into town.
I’ve subsequently discovered that Richard E Grant is an actor who I remember from various roles including Withnail and I. Someone dragged me along to that film telling me it was just the kind of thing I’d love. I was still in my twenties or early thirties and I guess I thought it was funny, but I also remember thinking how juvenile it was. It is really comedy as formula. If you want to go downmarket, comedy as formula involves toilet jokes. In the undergraduate upmarket it’s the endless assertion that being drunk and juvenile and revelling in it is inherently funny and/or worthy of admiration.
I read (I think in the SMH news review yesterday) a pretty juvenile op ed piece by Richard E Grant on his busy life selling his new movie. It was just the same – juvenile, think and boring. Still in hunting for it, I found this write up of an interview with him which is much more interesting and substantial.
[The link doesn’t seem to have worked in this comment – it’s here:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/white-mischief/2006/06/08/1149359884764.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2 ]