MORGAN SPURLOCK is standing in the marble foyer of a “No Smoking Please” restaurant, a large balloon of red wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other. His tipsy grin is as wide as a split pumpkin. You’d have thought that the American director of Super Size Me would resist these louche festival habits rather than embrace them quite so heartily. After all, this is the man who pummelled his liver and strangled his arteries by eating nothing but McDonald’s happy meals for a solid month. To say his film is the talk of the town is something of an understatement. The corporate giant has been buying entire pages of national newspapers to warn unwary Edinburgh punters about the dangers of Spurlock’s documentary. This is red meat to media-savvy bulls.
The British distributors of the film (Metro Tartan) are biting back with a cheeky scam to release Super Size Me in Strasbourg when the infamous McLibel trial (starring our very own burger warriors Helen Steel and Dave Morris) finally crawls into the Court of Human Rights. These eco butterflies, crushed and sued for their anti-McDonald’s pamphlets, have already set the record for the longest trial in British legal history. Spurlock’s big idea is simply to eat the evidence.
There is something of the Michael Moore about Spurlock’s documentary that is wildly impressive, and it’s clearly not the girth of the budget. Made for a meagre $50,000, this documentary manages to process more facts about the American food industry into 98 minutes than anyone could possibly digest. It’s a quintessential slice of Edinburgh flan. What starts off as a light-hearted quest to explore the nutritional credibility of the world’s largest fast-food chain rapidly turns into a life-threatening marathon that alarms doctors and terrifies Spurlock’s vegan girlfriend. It’s left to the audience to decide whether the film is an act of philanthropy or an act of sheer madness.
As we totter around the foyer, it strikes me that the eccentric director is a shameless opportunist in the mould of reality TV’s Peter (Big Brother) Bazalgette. And there’s an almost schoolboy glee about dishing the dirt that percolates into the splashy comic strip style of their work.
Spurlock’s cut and paste charts, and photos of suspect politicians, are expertly shuffled with images of obesity and liposuction that don’t just put you off food, but life itself.
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The wafer-thin drama is whether our hero will live long enough to spill the beans on his McTrip across America. Day One he is a super-fit guinea pig. He is prodded, weighed and complimented on his general health. By Day 15, his squadron of doctors is pleading with him to stop the madness and avoid the inevitable collapse of his internal organs. Spurlock’s liver is starting to bloat like a chronic alcoholic’s. His weight has shifted from 185lb (84kg) to 210lb. He has chest pains and bouts of depression that spookily evaporate only after his McDiet fix. (The food is apparently addictive.)
“But the horrific, long-distance point,” insists Morgan, “is the way McDonald’s is marketed and packaged for children. Fast-food franchises aren’t some sort of liberal dream; they are the American way of life.”
And the influence is global and ubiquitous. My own children know more about Ronald McDonald than they do about Jesus Christ. Super Size Me makes that point with an eloquence that would be laughable if it weren’t so horribly true. I can almost hear the words of Jean McBrodie tumbling down Edinburgh’s cobbled streets: “Give me a hungry young child at an impressionable age and she’s mine for life.” My fear is that Ronald has got there before her.
This festival has been a vintage year for British film, and it’s difficult to know where to start. Richard Eyre’s period romp, Stage Beauty, has all the intelligent ingredients of a class Restoration act, but I worry about its grip. Who could possibly care about a backstage romance that pitches a cross-dressing male star (Billy Crudup) against the woman (Claire Danes) who arranges his wigs? Eyre obviously does.
Like Shakespeare in Love, the film pokes rude fun at the gender-bending antics of heroic thesps, sozzled aristocrats, and opportunistic impresarios. But lurking a mere pentameter under the surface is a far more astute exposé about back-stage treachery and the crude politics of the entertainment biz. How times haven’t changed.
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Neither has Edinburgh’s appetite for cruelty. The visceral thrills of Shane Meadows’s new film, Dead Man’s Shoes, provide some of the festival’s most shameful cinema pleasures. The simple plot is awful and farcical. Paddy Considine returns home to the rural Midlands after an absence of seven years to pay his bloody respects to a drug baron who has shattered his life. The modest settings belie the Jacobean guignol. But council house humour constantly knifes the revenge. It’s the saving grace. Considine’s professional hate, and his adversaries’ cowardice, bookend a film that is angry to the point of bitter.
“You end up feeling quite sorry for the villains,” says Meadows from the plump luxury of a Sheraton armchair. The 31-year-old director is still slightly amazed about how comfortably the film fraternity wear their concerns in Edinburgh, and frankly I don’t want to disillusion him. It’s rare to corner so much homegrown promise in a single place.
It’s also rare and bracing to see actors venting their concerns about a film as gripping as My Summer of Love. Pawel Pawlikowski’s tale of schoolgirl infatuation and obsession is a thing of wonder. Not least because the two female leads (Natalie Press and Emily Blunt) are still arguing about what it all means in question-and-answer sessions that are conducted like impromptu Fringe shows for desperate old men. Yet again, Paddy Considine plays an ineluctable force of nature (bastard) in a film that wears its mysteries like Picnic at Hanging Rock. It pitches a working-class girl from a local village into the path of a manipulative, rich fantasist to trembling effect. It’s a film about observation rather than drama. But there’s enough of each to go round.