Winterbottom, Michael

MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM:  PROLIFIC, PROTEAN, AND PROVOCATIVE

1961: Born in Lancashire, England.                   . 
1996: Jude.                                                           
1997: Welcome to Sarajevo.                               
1999: Wonderland.

2000: The Claim.                                                 
2002: 24 Hour Party People.                             
2002: In This World.                                             
2003: Code 46.                                                     

2004: 9 Songs.                                                       
2005: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.
2006: Road to Guantanamo.

2007: A Mighty Heart.

2008: Summer in Genoa.
2010: The Trip.

2011: Trishna.

2012: Everyday.

2013: The Look of Love,

2014: The Trip to Italy.

More than any single project, the amazing thing about Michael Winterbottom is his relentless process, throwing himself fearlessly into situations of risk and creating feature films that take a quasi-documentary approach to reality, whether past or present, at home or abroad, in the warzone or in the bedroom.

Wherever Winterbottom’s career may take him, you can confidently predict that his work will be radical (not for nothing is his production company called Revolution Films) -- far-reaching and profoundly unsettling in its embrace of complicated realities.  His work is so disparate that it took a while for me to realize that he was the connecting link to a number of diverse but surprisingly good films.

For Jude, the attraction was Thomas Hardy’s novel and Kate Winslet as Sue, but if you go in expecting a Masterpiece Theater adaptation, you are in for a surprise. There is no romantic haze over the dire doings of Hardy’s world, no flinching from his grim fatalism.

Welcome to Sarajevo is another open-eyed look at very bad things happening, this time the war in Bosnia, seen through the eyes of a group of English-speaking journalists. Based on a memoir, the film mixes in news footage and you-are-there re-creations to make reality present and pressing.

Back in contemporary London, Wonderland brings a sense of lived reality to its intertwined stories of three sisters and their romantic travails. If the scene called for a sister to be working in a Soho restaurant on a Saturday night, it was shot in a Soho restaurant on a Saturday night, with genuine customers as extras.

The Claim returns to Hardy in its transposition of The Mayor of Casterbridge to an authentic-seeming Gold Rush West, and with Winterbottom’s biggest budget to date, deserves praise for holding its own in comparison to its obvious model, Robert Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

But 24 Hour Party People is something completely different.  If like me, you’ve never heard of Joy Division or the Manchester rave scene in the 80s, do not be put off. This is an extremely smart and funny film, a fractured fairy tale of real life, with Steve Coogan brilliant in the lead role (watch with subtitles!).

In This World literally follows two Afghan refugees trying to make their way to England. Winterbottom did not even understand the language of his nonprofessional actors, but just caught their simulated plight on the fly, through Iran to Turkey and into a container ship bound for Britain, on a tightrope walk between reality and representation.

Code 46 conjures a plausible sci-fi future out of contemporary Shanghai, Dubai, and India, which prove well-suited to Winterbottom’s on-the-fly filmmaking. Tim Robbins is not however, though Samantha Morton does go with the flow, as they play two quasi-Oedipal lovers prohibited by regulations against incest in a world where cloning and in vitro reproduction are common.

His 9 Songs achieved notoriety, if little distribution, for being the first non-porn film in which the actors are not just simulating sex, though I suspect his impulse was more documentary than pornographic.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is an appropriately cockeyed adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century eccentric classic novel. Wild and woolly, yet seamless in its rapid-fire ricochet through time and levels of reality -- depicted, acted, “real” -- this adapts both the spirit and the letter of the delightfully convoluted book, while also being a classic movie about the making of a movie, plus a backstage reality-tv sit-com.  Steve Coogan is great, as usual, but the whole cast of familiar and unfamiliar faces works beautifully together.

Road to Guantanamo is equally convoluted and destabilizing, as it enacts in semi-documentary form the story of three young British Muslims on a pre-nuptial lark who cross over from Pakistan to Afghanistan and get sucked into events after 9/11, which eventually lands them to Guantanamo.  Without depicting overt torture, the film shows how dehumanizing treatment debases captive and captor alike, once the Geneva conventions are thrown away. When the “Tipton Three” were released from Guantanamo after two years of incarceration, they were held for less than a day by British police, since their alibi was fully confirmed.  Painful viewing, but a must-see.

A Mighty Heart is much the same.  Angelina Jolie admirably avoids the trap of a vanity project in this telling of Mariane Pearl’s story, from the time her husband Danny (reporter for WSJ, and formerly the Berkshire Eagle) was kidnapped in Pakistan, till Islamic extremists sent a video of his beheading. Once again Winterbottom brings his you-are-there style of filmmaking to an arena of urgent interest.

Summer in Genoa was released in the U.S. only after Colin Firth received his Best Actor Oscar.  Here he’s the father to two girls, who were with their mother when she was killed in a car accident.  Old friend Catherine Keener gets him a teaching position in Italy, and he feels that getting far away is best for the girls and himself.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The film casts a real Don’t Look Now vibe over the narrow alleyways of the medieval city, which are penetrated by Winterbottom’s travel-light style of filmmaking.  

The Trip reunites Winterbottom with Shandy co-stars Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden, friendly rivals or rivalrous friends, who are thrown together on a commissioned tour of the lovely stone-fenced lanes of the Yorkshire Dales, to write reviews of upscale restaurants, which serve art on a plate rather than anything recognizable as food.  Their competitive impersonations of Michael Caine (and many others) or ABBA duets, over meals or in the car, are the peaks of a continuous back-and-forth improvised from their own established characters.  As boiled down from a six-part BBC series, this Trip is one to take, both hilarious and touching in its ongoing clash of personae.  Beside the comedy of antithetical personalities thrown into intimate contact, and the risible food, suggestive parallels are developed in their visits to Coleridge and Wordsworth heritage sites.  The film has much to say, in its own Brit way, about “men of a certain age.”  It’s enough to make you think while you laugh.

Always restlessly productive, Winterbottom next returned to Thomas Hardy for Trishna, an adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles set in contemporary India.  As usual he mixes the familiar and the exotic, with location shooting in Rajasthan, Jaipur, and Mumbai.  Ever the avid absorber of divergent cultures, he works in a lot of Bollywood scenes.  It’s not entirely clear that Freida Pinto can act, but ye gods, she’s so beautiful one is happy just to watch her stand or walk, rather like Nastassja Kinski in Roman Polanski’s Tess, another interesting point of comparison to this adaptation.  The story’s two principal male characters are combined in one, which makes for a bit of muddle and some arbitrary shifts in personality, and the final third of the film lacks tragic conviction, less the relentless hand of fate than the forced hand of the screenwriter.  So the film peters out instead of rising to climax, but is well worth watching along the way.

I’m not sure whether Winterbottom intended to jump the gun on Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, but he did something like that with Everyday, casting four real siblings and filming them intermittently over a period of five years.  Their mother is played by Shirley Henderson, and their imprisoned father by John Simm.  As a working single parent of four, the mother’s life is an everyday grind as she waits out her husband’s sentence.  And yet there are glimmers of satisfaction, maternal and otherwise, in her troubled, relentless life.  She’s hard-pressed but not crushed, surviving each day until the long-sought reunion of her family, which of course brings its own problems.  Very much a kitchen-sink story, told in a documentary, caught-on-the-fly style, I found it highly watchable, in the vein of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach.

The Look of Love was not up to the standard of 24 Hour Party People, but did profile another major figure in British popular culture.  Paul Raymond leveraged strip clubs and titty mags into massive holdings of Soho real estate, and one of the greatest fortunes in the UK.  Citizen Kane this is not, though it tells a parallel tale of the emotional emptiness of public success.

Since then, Winterbottom has undermined my heading for this survey by going back to the well with Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden for The Trip to Italy and The Trip to Spain, still enjoyable but with diminishing returns.  Perhaps The Wedding Guest in 2019 will mark a return to form.