High Hopes: WILD ROSE and THE AERONAUTS

The year 2019 turned out to be a big one for British director Tom Harper. Previously best known on these shores, if at all, for 2015’s perfectly agreeable modern Hammer horror effort The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, his output this year encompasses two major prestige efforts. At least, that’s how their American distributors have positioned them. The films themselves wear their prestige qualities lightly, and, though they hail from dependably Oscar-y sub-genres and have the glossy handsome look of respectability about them, there’s a generosity of tone and humanity of spirit that enlivens what could be predictable, and makes imminently watchable works. The more successful of the two was this past summer’s small sleeper hit Wild Rose, a film about a scrappy Scottish woman (Jessie Buckley) and her quixotic dream to be a big American country star. It may seem an improbable dream, especially once you see she’s a single mom just out of prison with two kids waiting for her with her mother (Julie Walters). Immediately, a cynical viewer might start slotting the potential storyline into a conventional mode. If she can’t make steps toward her goal, we’re looking at kitchen-sink social realism. If she can, we’re looking at a sentimental rags-to-riches. But Nicole Taylor’s sharp and entertaining screenplay is wiser than that, imbued with a sense of specificity and heart that never steps wrong. It has both heartbreak and hardship, every success hard-won, every setback painfully felt. The result is a movie as warm and wise and true as the best country story songs. Buckley plays the lead as determined, optimistic yet realistic, sparkling and spunky and, yes, a helluva country singer. (The music is wall-to-wall and excellent.) We can see her dream should become true, even if others can’t. She’s charming and talented, but only a half-step ahead of sadness or despair. She’s falling behind fast — bills to pay, kids to raise, an ankle monitor that limits her ability to take advantage of a fluke of good fortune, let alone take a gig. That her mother sternly advises her to give up feels as kind as it is cruel; but so, too, is her wealthy employer (Sophie Okonedo) as she advises her to go for it. There’s no easy answer. Here’s a movie that is an unusually warm and clear-eyed look at what so often becomes behind-the-music cliche or pat blindly-follow-your-dreams foolishness. It understands with poignant, matter-of-fact clarity how difficult in can be to accept a lucky break and turn it into something bigger when you’re starting from a place of such disadvantage. The quotidian struggle, the painful mistakes, and the missed opportunities make the glimpses of success all the more powerfully bittersweet in a movie this vibrant and full of life. It earns every ounce of its uplift.

Harper’s other film of the year, opening just in time for the holidays, is the shallower and yet more visually striking The Aeronauts. It’s a based-on-a-true-story period picture whose commitment to the true story ends with the fact that there was an important hot air balloon experiment in 1862 England. The film really is as simple as it sounds: a pilot (Felicity Jones) and a weather scientist (Eddie Redmayne) want to see how high they can take a hot air balloon. It goes up really high, which, as you might expect for the first time such a thing has happened, gives them all kinds of wonderful views and terrifying complications. It gets cold. There are storm clouds. And how does one land this thing? This is the full extent of the film’s present-tense action, with the characters’ backstories filled in with studious flashbacks that pad out the runtime and give some emotional scaffolding to the awe-struck imperiled figures adrift in the skies. With such a thin story structure, Harper is free to demonstrate a true This is Cinerama or even L'arrivée d'un train level of simple visual power. It’s a case of a wow, look at that thing go! conception executed well, expertly realized and utterly convincing in its blend of practical and computer effects. When on the ground, George Steel’s cinematography has fine, overfamiliar, burnished period piece style, shot in scope with all the finest frippery of mid-1800’s detail in the costuming and production design. But get it up in the air, and the frame opens to full IMAX height, conjuring the most vertiginous filmmaking this side of Zemeckis’ skyscraper tightrope The Walk as they lean over the edge or, worse still, climb up the rigging. It thus builds great tension out of the mere height of the thing, gaping in wonder as the balloon passes through clouds or drifts above a town, or gripping tight as the characters must scramble around the balloon. Because Jones and Redmayne are capable at playing charm and vulnerability, it’s always evident that they’re one wrong decision away from plummeting and they do enough to make one hope not to see such a thing. They hold their own against the immense backdrop of this spectacular view. From such a simple idea comes a movie that’s captivating enough, capable of reminding one that a relatively simple story’s ability to be told on a scale of this enormity is one of the reasons we go out to the movies.

House Haunters: WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is not a particularly outstanding horror film, but it’s a welcome sight nonetheless. For one, it’s not found footage or zombie, the two subgenres well exhausted as of late. It’s simply a handsome chiller, an old-fashioned period piece ghost story that, like its predecessor, continues the revival of Hammer horror. That’s the most welcome sight here. Hammer, a British production company famous for its midcentury monster movies with literary(ish) inspirations and pretty production design – most notably, its series of Dracula movies featuring Christopher Lee – had been dormant for decades. But, with 2012’s The Woman in Black, last year’s The Quiet Ones, and now a sequel to the former, they’re back in the game, putting ghostly happenings in creepy houses filled with British ensembles in period costume. Even if the actual films aren’t all that yet, it’s nice to know a venerable tradition marches on.

Actually, I quite liked the first Woman in Black. It starred Daniel Radcliffe as a turn-of-the-20th-century lawyer sent to a dilapidated mansion isolated in the English countryside. Holed up settling the estate of its last occupant, he was stuck in the house as tides daily turned the marshes into a moat. There, he was terrorized by tropes of the haunted house kind – thuds, scrapes, flickering lights, footsteps, slamming doors, apparitions and screams. It worked, enough that a return visit to the mansion didn’t seem too bad a prospect. Besides, the hook of Angel of Death is pretty great. It takes place decades later, during World War II. A group of children are sent away from London bombing to a makeshift orphanage in, surprise surprise, the very same house that scared Radcliffe so. It’s the perfect opportunity to exploit dread with children in danger, vulnerable people fleeing violence and pain heading straight into the heart of paranormal activity. Creepy stuff.

The kids are staying with two women, volunteers from the city who’ve agreed to travel along and keep them safe. The older woman (Helen McCrory) is a military wife, no-nonsense, completely unwilling to listen to the younger woman (Phoebe Fox) as she insists there’s something not quite right with this place. There are mysterious footsteps in the cellar, creaking floorboards and opening doors, and the younger woman has unpleasant dreams of a bombed out maternity ward full of spectral nurses and flickering bulbs. Not even the hunky pilot stationed nearby (Jeremy Irvine) can help her. One serious, silent, lad (Oaklee Pendergast) has taken to staring intently at the cracked ceiling of the bedroom, and at peeling wallpaper in a grubby old nursery full of crumbling antique toys. It’s unsettling.

The whole thing gets by on suggestion, director Tom Harper and screenwriter Jon Croker providing a feeling of unsettling wrongness, that something horrifying is just off screen. It’s all very pleasingly reminiscent of Val Lewton in its low-tech, non-explicit creepiness. A mix of World War II anxieties and childcare concerns create the chills here. Children are continually in peril, sometimes hurt badly. Threat of wartime injury – no lights after dark for fear of bombing – infects the more ethereal worry. There’s an overwhelming sense that nowhere is safe. It’s a ghost story with historical heft, underlined by the serious, handsome production design that recreates the mansion’s details in a similarly crumbling freakiness. It’s a place dense with bad vibes and jump scares.

What I’ve been describing sounds like a pretty good movie, and indeed it is a largely agreeable and watchable one. But it’s an “almost” movie, with its heart in the right place, an ensemble up to the task, a look rich in detail, long on atmosphere and thick with mood. But it’s short on characterization and incident, leaning a bit too heavily on jumpiness and portent. I sat there almost scared, almost involved, almost caring. But it’s a film that settles for almost. It’s striking at times, and quite satisfying on all technical levels. But there’s nothing distinguished or exceptionally worthwhile about it, either. I was pleasantly diverted, but never affected in any way. It plays in one pitch, without much variation, worthwhile only for fulfilling its modest aims for those who enter with low expectations. I liked being back in a Hammer horror world, but it’d be better if something happened within it I could worry about more than superficially.