★★★★☆

Four Stars

Narrative makes sense of the things we cannot understand but fundamentally affect us. The coalition of 2010 was undoubtedly one such event: a happening that we cannot yet fully grasp. Like last time, it is probable no one will outright win the upcoming election; as such, politicians will spin their own stories to give a sense to this state of affairs. Recently, Channel 4 gave a non-politician, the chance to give sense to those fateful days.

Adopting a politically neutral perspective is easier said than done; unlike other stories, this is a political story, and what sense can (or cannot) be given, is perhaps intrinsically contestable. To his credit, writer Mark Gatiss is partially successful in maintaining neutrality.Sadly he pays too high a price for this feat. 

The coherence Gattis finds in the days between the election results and the coalition settlement is thoroughly apolitical. Indeed from Coalition, one gets the impression these events were not the result of conflicting ideologies and principles, but a result of conflicting personalities in the game of realpolitik. This interpretation avoids partisanship by reducing politics to power plays: everybody is tarred with the same brush. This neutrality inevitaby comes at a cost.

Gatiss claims that Coalition attempts to dispel the current cynicism towards politics. On one level he achieves this. Coalition takes us into the nitty gritty of impossible decisions burdened by unbearably high stakes as the country waits with baited breath. Correspondingly, all the characters are shown frantically trying to second-guess each other with none of them really getting it right. The duress of these circumstances goes a long way in humanising the participants by showing them in all their human fallibility.

Gatiss may be thus successful in combating the alienation between the public and the political class by giving us the opportunity to be sympathetic with the difficulty of their position. But on another level, a story of competing ambitions stokes the very fire of cynicism that it is trying to extinguish. What comes across is not a story of principles competing for representation in government, but a story of characters trying to dupe each other in a bid for power. Showing human fallibility seems to come at the price of showing political integrity. No matter how sympathetic and indeed non-partisan, this interpretation may be, it surely won’t make us any less cynical.

Indeed, the film not only presents an implicitly cynical view of politics, it also seems to endorse this cynicism. Most prominently we see this in how Clegg’s campaign is represented. From the outset, his predicament is described (to use the line scripted for him) as a conflict between his head and his heart: a flimsy deal with Labour versus getting into bed with the Conservatives. How this choice is presented is highly telling. We are constantly reminded how a deal with Labour would be the principled thing to do; Brown spends half his lines telling a skeptical Peter Mandelson the Lib Dems would never sell out, while Paddy Ashdown spends half his screen time looking despondent and conflicted as a tory deal looks ever more likely. The framework for the humanising dramatic conflict is thus the decision between power and principle.

The film’s cynicism is manifest in how it implicitly endorses the former. Take the presentation of Brown and Ashdown, the film’s two voices of political conscious. Brown is unflatteringly presented as an ideological caveman, yet he is also the figure who most strongly represents the idea of politics as a question of principle. We see him pathetically heaving down a telephone as he makes a desperate plea for Clegg to follow his heart, ditch the tories and pursue progressive reform. It is therefore telling that he should also be the tragic figure of the piece. His final scene shows him in melancholic resignation as he realizes he has no chance (a fact the film seems to assume). When Brown makes his impassioned ideological telephone calls, we are shown Clegg holding the receiver away from his ear with a look of exasperation.

It’s not just the characters that don’t take him seriously, the film itself makes an effort to make him look faintly ridiculous. At one point we are unnecessarily shown Brown spilling food all over his shirt. Paddy Ashdown, however, the other ideologue, follows an opposite path. Like Brown he feels the Lib Dems would be paying too high a price if they made a deal with the Tories. Unlike Brown, he is shown eventually coming to endorse the coalition.

Indeed when Ashdown is confronted with the crucial question of whether power is worth the sacrifice of principle, he answers, “fuck it” for it is more important that for the first time the Lib Dems actually “matter”. Campbell comes round to the film’s cynicism in accepting the exchange of principle for power as necessary. The grandstanding speech that marks his conversion is accompanied by uplifting string music and a posy of cheering backbenchers. Incidentally, at no point does the film present Campbell with embarrassing food related accidents.

The cynicism in Coalition both at the level of its character’s motivations and its overall view of politics is nevertheless dramatically effective. There are many engrossing and even humorous moments. Mandelson, played by Gatiss himself, steals most of his scenes by being comically Machiavellian. The appearance of other well-known figures like Balls, Milliband, Osborne and Danny Alexander make for some entertaining additions. Osborne in particular is played as a puerile smartass, while Ed Balls as a more obviously arrogant (and badly dressed) version of Osborne.

Ed Miliband makes a passing appearance eating what I think was a bacon sandwich in the background but oddly had no lines given the coming election. The most intriguing characters however were the conservative backbenchers. Though presumably fictional, one such character has an ominous chat with Cameron in the bathroom where he tells him that if he betrays the backbenchers, there will be “managed regicide”. If nothing else, a cynical view of politics makes it appear much more entertaining than it probably is.

All in all, Coalition is a fascinating addition to the pre-election hype. It betrays something of the character of our contemporary understanding of politics. By humanising politicians it aims to create a character-centered narrative that gives some sense to the momentous events leading to the coalition. It also aims to harness the power of dramatic conflict to reengage us with politics. But the very humanisation required for this reengagement is made possible against a view of politics responsible for this very disengagement: politics as a game for power devoid of principle and integrity.

It seems that today, a ‘realistic’ depiction of politics means an unfavorable view of politicians. How justified this is, is perhaps a question for another day. But by setting up a dramatic conflict that makes power mutually exclusive with principle, the film unwittingly commits itself to making drama mutually exclusive with political optimism. Are these but false dilemmas in the in the interests of television? I certainly hope so. But then again all fiction also has a kernel of truth. On the 7th of May, perhaps we will at least know what the public regards as true.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

“You shall not go to the ball!” Cate Blanchett’s evil stepmother wags her pointed finger in Cinderella’s disheartened face, and for a moment all seems hopeless. Except, of course, that we know that she will go to the ball. It’s a tale as old as time. Ever since Charles Perrault penned his definitive version of the tale in the late seventeenth century, and since Disney first immortalised the tale back in 1950, modern audiences can’t escape from the simple, universally-acknowledged truth, that Cinderella does go to the ball; that her wicked stepmother and stepsisters get their just deserts; and that she lives happily ever after. This is the hurdle Kenneth Branagh’s live action version constantly tries to stumble over: how to re-vamp the action and keep his audience guessing in a story everybody knows like the back of their hand.

Jumping on the bandwagon of Disney’s quasi-feminist movement following the unparalleled success of Frozen last year, Cinderella isn’t so much going for an action heroine of the likes of Elsa, or even Merida in Brave; it’s not about a woman capable of fighting like a man, it’s about a woman capable of holding her own – of not succumbing to the will of men or women, of carving her own destiny by way of her own qualities and achievements. In many ways, Cinderella is not remarkably fussed with reshaping or unraveling the classic fairytale to appeal to a modern audience – it’s often proudly old-fashioned and fiercely admirable of its animated predecessor. It takes Disney back to its centuries-old folklore origins, steeped in a semi-medieval and semi-fantastical world that has its own set of rules and regulations.

Downton Abbey’s Lily James is Ella, whose habit of sleeping by the dying embers of the fireplace for warmth prompts her dastardly stepfamily to coin her eponymous nickname. James is effortlessly amiable and vulnerable as the sugary centre of this fairytale, and she carries the weight of the picture quite spectacularly. Against brutal odds, Cinderella’s “kind and courageous” mantra is saved from becoming at times too sickeningly sweet by James’ grounded performance. Though her scenes are often exploited for sentimentality, she never patronises the material; she extrapolates its emotional core and manages to forget that she’s in a fairytale.

Of course, in the spiciest scene-stealing role, Cate Blanchett as wicked stepmother Lady Tremaine does threaten at times to sweep the film from beneath Cinderella’s feet, but Miss James is more than capable of rising to the challenge, and their final scene together is a terrific showdown of acting chops. Screenwriter Chris Weitz is wise to unpick Lady Tremaine beyond the point of two-dimensional villainy. As Helena Bonham Carter’s narrator tells us, “she too had known grief”, and we see flashes of a woman broken and dispirited in her own tragic way. Does it justify the way she treats her stepdaughter? No. But it does add a layered sense of motivation for her: namely her growing concern for securing the futures of her ugly (on the inside) stepdaughters, emphatically played with great comic effect by Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera.

From the moment she meets her dashing prince (Richard Madden) in the forest, we know that Cinderella is just a headstrong “country girl” looking for her happily ever after. Prince Kit, who is anxiously “apprenticing” his father’s role as King, is suitably charming, and the filmmakers have wisely sprinkled him with more than a handful of modesty to make up for the character’s inherently handsome exterior, though he’s still a little dull. Thankfully, Branagh-regular Derek Jacobi is on fine form as the dying King who learns to bestow upon his son the greatest gift he possibly can: the ability to choose a bride for himself – for love, and not for power – and Stellan Skarsgård is a welcome addition to the tale as a scheming and conniving duke.

Academy Award winner Sandy Powell graces the film with lavish costume design so vivid that the colours almost burst through the screen and strangle us. Every ball gown, corset and royal robe (including Richard Madden’s ludicrously tight trousers) has been stunningly stitched to perfection. The stepsisters’ nauseatingly flowery garments are a particular highlight, and one can’t forget Cinderella’s famous ball dress, pimped and furnished by the Fairy Godmother from something you might have found on Strictly Come Dancing into a luxuriously prim piece of princess-wear. The ball scene itself is a marvel of cinematic splendor. No expenses have been spared on recreating a flamboyantly regal palace, with meandering camerawork and elegant ball-dancing choreography to boot.

Cinderella is without a doubt a visually rewarding film. The famous transformation from plump pumpkin to golden carriage is fantastically creative, with the actors playing the metamorphosed anthropomorphic goose and lizards providing ample comic fun. The CGI mice test audience patience with their incessant squeaking, but their transfiguration into big-eared horses is equally wonderfully inventive. All this of course is owed to Helena Bonham Carter’s wonderfully brief Fairy Godmother – something of a cross between the sweet simplicity of Glinda in The Wizard of Oz and a tipsy Julia Child – who oversees Ella’s evolution from dirty servant girl to the most beautiful maiden in the land.

The final act is where the film feels a little deflated and rushed, in what should have been the point at which Weitz and Branagh chose to expand the story the most. We know how the search for the owner of the glass slipper will pan out, so a few more surprises would not have passed unwelcome. It would have been satisfying to see the stepmother and her daughters receive their comeuppance, but the family-friendly Disney motto prevails, and perhaps they need no greater punishment than to witness the ultimate futility and failing of their ill-intended labours. That is justice enough. What’s important to Disney is not that their antagonists are bound for hell, but that their good-hearted heroines and heroes are bound for prosperity.

The biggest problem is the disappointing deficiency of ambition and originality here. What happened to that classic Disney magic and flare? Branagh stays a little too safe. He’d have benefitted from listening to Ella’s empowering words, “just because it’s what’s done, doesn’t mean it’s what should be done”. The original – and quite literal – rags to riches story makes for a feel-good live action romp with visually resplendent set pieces, but it lacks the kick of more ironic and self-conscious endeavours at the fairytale genre demonstrated so aptly by Enchanted. It’s certainly never uncomfortable viewing, but the glass slipper is by no means a perfect fit here.