Mark Kermode's film of the week

"The Favourite"

The Favourite review – Colman, Weisz and Stone are pitch-perfect

Yorgos Lanthimos’s tragicomedy set in the court of Queen Anne boasts daring performances from its three female stars and lashings of lust, intrigue and deceit

‘Simply superb as the miscast monarch’: Olivia Colman as Queen Anne in The Favourite. Photograph: Allstar/FILM4 

 

A trio of pitch-perfect performances from Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone drive Yorgos Lanthimos’s spiky period drama – a tragicomic tale of personal and political jealousy and intrigue in 18th-century England. Set in the court of Queen Anne (the last of the Stuart monarchs), it balances foreign wars with home-grown tussles in often uproarious and occasionally alarming fashion. Written by Deborah Davis (whose original script dates back to the late 90s) and Tony McNamara, this boasts razor-sharp dialogue which at times reminded me of Whit Stillman’s deliciously acerbic Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship – albeit with more sex and swearing.

Colman is Queen Anne, overweight and depressed, riddled with gout, and plagued by suicidal thoughts. An unconfident ruler, she relies upon the advice of her friend and lover Lady Sarah Churchill (Weisz, with whom Colman co-starred in Lanthimos’s The Lobster). Her bedchamber is filled with rabbits that she calls “the little ones”, and her sore-covered legs are in constant need of attention from the massaging hands of Sarah, who also tends to Anne’s other fleshly needs.

At Sarah’s bidding, the Queen is considering doubling land taxes to fund the war with France, in which Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss) is scoring victories. But Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, a preposterously bewigged and painted hoot) leads a vociferous opposition demanding a peace treaty to “save money and lives”.

Into this enclave comes Abigail, (Emma Stone), Sarah’s penniless cousin who has “fallen far” (she arrives face down in the mud) and now seeks employment. With a blend of pity and misjudgment, Sarah sends Abigail to the palace scullery to earn a crust. But soon, the interloper has made her way into Anne’s bedchamber, where she soothes more than the Queen’s aching legs. “I like it when she puts her tongue inside me,” Anne teasingly tells Sarah, prompting a power struggle for the Queen’s attentions. Meanwhile, Harley closes in on Abigail, spying a route to the ear of the monarch who seems more interested in racing lobsters than running the country.

With its mix of corseted intrigue and lusty double-crossing, The Favourite occasionally resembles an unlikely mashup of Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract and the Wachowskis’ Bound, all beautifully dressed by the great Sandy Powell. Yet despite the nominally historical setting, this has none of the staid distance of a costume drama. On the contrary, it feels cruelly, deliciously contemporary, shot through with a sense of modernist absurdity that can be traced back to Greek director Lanthimos’s international break-through feature, Dogtooth.

That absurdist element is emphasised by Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, which uses wide-angle lenses to bend the corners of the world in a manner that is part dream, part nightmare. Prowling and floating from one unexpected vantage point to another, Ryan’s cameras offer a punch-drunk view of palace life, a hermetically sealed reality disconnected from a specific time and place. There’s a touch of Alice in Wonderland weirdness to Anne’s royal domain, as if we were peering down a rabbit hole. This bedchamber farce may have global consequences, but the wider world outside remains just that – outside.

Amid such strangeness, the central performances keep us grounded. Colman is simply superb as the miscast monarch, combining childish pathos with queenie cantankerousness, and a palpable sense of pain. Amid whisperings of tragedy, we learn that Anne grieves for 17 lost children (“Some were born as blood, some without breath, and some were with me a very brief time”). In one particularly moving scene, having become upset by the sight of children playing music, Anne grabs a baby from the arms of a courtier before almost collapsing in disoriented terror. For all Colman’s perfectly timed comedy, it’s these moments of Anne’s existential angst that really strike home.

As Sarah, Weisz is the embodiment of steely resolve, a fearless presence who keeps her enemies close, on the understanding that she may shoot them at any time. A scene in which she throws the contents of a bookshelf at the upstart Abigail is magnificently physical. Stone is excellent too, negotiating the shift between apparent innocence and determination with subtlety.

A soundtrack that lurches from the lush strains of Handel, Purcell and Vivaldi to the experimental edginess of Anna Meredith via Elton John’s harpsichord adds to the off-kilter atmosphere, keeping the audience on their toes – alert, unsettled, and hugely entertained.




https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/dec/30/the-favourite-review-olivia-colman-emma-stone-rachel-weisz-yorgos-lanthimos

The Favourite - Trailer

The True Story of “Hidden Figures,” the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

A new book and movie document the accomplishments of NASA’s black “human computers” whose work was at the heart of the country’s greatest battles

By Maya Wei-Haas

smithsonian.com
September 8, 2016

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-black-women-mathematicians-who-helped-win-wars-and-send-astronauts-space-180960393/

As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

Melba Roy led the group of human computers who tracked the Echo satellites in the 1960s. (NASA)

“These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. The book’s film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, is now open in theaters.

“We’ve had astronauts, we’ve had engineers—John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft,” she says. “Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn.

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects—Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn’t set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly’s own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. “They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs,” she says. “And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley.”

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women’s work. “It wasn’t until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized,” she says. “That way is not necessarily the norm”

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

Katherine Johnson at her desk at Langley with a “celestial training device.” (NASA)

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. “My investigation became more like an obsession,” she writes in the book. “I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end.”

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women’s lives. “It was a lot of connecting the dots,” she says.

“I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there,” she says. “Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957.”

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; “in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory,” Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

But life at Langley wasn’t just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. “That was incredible courage,” says Shetterly. “This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes.”

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

“History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis,” says Shetterly. “We think of capital “H” history as being these huge figures—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King.” Even so, she explains, “you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures.”

The book and movie don’t mark the end of Shetterly’s work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life’s work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures—a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life’s work to light. “Not just mythology but the actual facts,” she says. “Because the facts are truly spectacular.

Fried Green Tomatoes

The film that makes me cry: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Rebecca Nicholson took some time to figure out the true meaning of this sentimental story of female strength and love – and then she wept even harder

Rebecca Nicholson

Mon 16 Mar 2015 09.07 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 16.30 EST

‘Love is love, and true happiness, however brief, is always possible’ … Mary-Louise Parker as Ruth Jamison and (right) Mary Stuart Masterson as Idgie Threadgoode. Photograph: ITV/REX 

When my mum moved house recently, for the first time in years, she handed me a box of junk and asked me to either bin it or take it back to London with me: excruciating teenage poetry, letters from my first summer away from home, postcards of Green Day, Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, and a few promotional film posters that I used to get from the video shop in town. Along with The Craft and 10 Things I Hate About You, I found Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, a southern story so unapologetically sentimental that even the soft-focus women’s-mag artwork brings a tear to my eye. Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), in her post-makeover power suit, leans on the shoulder of Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), and is carried through her menopausal breakdown by the love story of Ruth Jamison and Idgie Threadgoode, who smile behind them, not yet ripped apart by the cruellest cancer in cinematic history.

When I was 12, Fried Green Tomatoes was my favourite film. To prove my devotion I almost wore out the VHS that I had taped from a late-night Channel 4 screening. My mum said she didn’t know how I could watch it so often. Years later, I found the answer. When I was 19 and at university, I made one of my housemates watch it with me. He informed me that I loved it because it was the gayest film of all time.

“What? No! Shut up!” I said, when he pointed it out during a scene in which Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker) go for a platonic picnic, and there’s a pointed close-up of Ruth dipping her fingers into a pot of honey. I was doing an English degree at the time, which is remarkable, given my failure to grasp basic subtext. From then on I watched it with open eyes. The food fight on a hot, sweaty afternoon, in which they smear fruit across each other’s mouths then collapse onto the floor? Ah. That drunken peck on the cheek while they literally dip their toes in the water? I see. (In 2006, a documentary called Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema got to this point more quickly than I had, explaining that the source novel was explicitly about a romance between Ruth and Idgie, and that the film had toned it right down to inference, in order to give it more of a family appeal.)

I loved them when I thought they were just very good friends who had chosen to open a cafe together (and live together and raise a child together and be together forever), but I loved them even more when I realised that I had been growing up with a sneakily non-heteronormative portrait of romantic happiness. Towards the end of the movie, it looks as if everything is going to be OK. Ruth’s abusive husband, who had brought the Ku Klux Klan to town, has been murdered (which we fully support, because he is horrible), and Big George and Idgie are cleared of the deed in a court of law, so there’s a happily-ever-after in sight. “Till that fall, when Ruth lost her appetite …”

On any typical viewing, by this bit, I have already cried at Buddy Sr getting run over by a train, at Evelyn being ignored by her sports-slob husband as she tries to revive their marriage by means of an innovative use of clingfilm, at the story of Ninny’s love for her now-deceased disabled son, and at that scene where Evelyn is sworn at in the supermarket by a rude young man and then her bags rip open. But I am never too wrung out to resist the huge, all-encompassing sobs that take me over when Ruth finally shuffles off this mortal coil, as Idgie tells her a silly old story about geese taking a frozen lake with them all the way from Alabama to Georgia. “Miss Ruth was a lady, and a lady always knows when to leave,” says Sipsy, as she draws the curtains, at which point I can no longer see or breathe. Idgie, the bee charmer, has lost her soulmate. Who will appreciate her fashion-forward dungarees, no-socks, boxy shirts look now? (An important note: in its final shot, the film implies that Jessica Tandy’s character is Idgie, which annoys me, because earlier, she clearly states that she married Idgie’s brother and I feel like it’s a con that takes advantage of the more casual viewer.)

 

I’ve cried at a lot of films since – notably Stepmom, Steel Magnolias and the first 15 minutes of Up – but no movie death has ever come close to causing the devastation I still feel when Ruth croakily asks Idgie to tell her one last story. I can’t imagine I will ever get over it. But I am grateful to them both for the message, more implied than explicit, that love is love and that true happiness, however brief, is always possible.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/mar/16/the-film-that-makes-me-cry-fried-green-tomatoes-whistle-stop-cafe-kathy-bates-jessica-tandy