JUDE LAW seems determined to make the autumn film season his own. He’s part of David O. Russell’s neurotic ensemble comedy I Heart Huckabees, which closes The Times bfi London Film Festival on November 4. The film comes five years after Russell’s Gulf War heist film Three Kings. It’s more akin to his earlier farce Flirting with Disaster. It features two existential detectives who help clients look into their troubled lives and relationships. The stellar cast includes Naomi Watts and Dustin Hoffman.
Alfie sees Law stepping into the Michael Caine role of the Cockney womaniser, still talking to the camera but relocated to New York with a trendy new moped. The original’s chauvinism has been softened considerably — he doesn’t “pull birds”, he loves all women, including Susan Sarandon — but be warned, gone too is the chastising bittersweet ending.
Law also appears with a pre-motherhood Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, an uncertain mix of trendy expressionist art direction and very old-fashioned adventure. He gets obsessively entangled with Julia Roberts in Mike Nichols’s faithfully wordy adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play Closer. Law even pops up as Errol Flynn in Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes film, The Aviator, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner.
Scorsese’s Art Deco cornucopia of a film is part of a clutch of imaginative biopics, starting with Kinsey, which sees Liam Neeson wheeling out an American accent to play the pioneering author of such books as Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male.
Johnny Depp gets to try out his Scottish accent as J. M. Barrie in Finding Neverland. Kevin Spacey goes one better by doing all the singing in his Bobby Darin project, Beyond the Sea.
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Oliver Stone’s life of Alexander the Great, Alexander, faces two major hurdles. 1) Colin Farrell is using his Dublin accent to play the leader of the Greek army. 2) His leather skirt and surfer-dude hair couldn’t look more gay if they had been styled by the Queer Eye team. The subtext may be historically accurate, but this is a potential camp classic.
DreamWorks follows Shrek 2 with Shark Tale, a broad mafia comedy relocated to the sea bed. More interesting is Disney/Pixar’s The Invincibles, which receives its European premiere at The Times bfi London Film Festival, about a suburban family of superheroes in which Dad is over the hill and struggling to fit into his costume.
One can’t avoid sequels. Meet the Fockers adds Dustin Hoffman and a permed Barbra Streisand to the cast of Meet the Parents. And foreign remakes are still Hollywood’s big thing. Shall We Dance?, starring Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere, is a glossy redo of the joyful Japanese comedy about a husband who takes dance lessons to woo his wife back, only for her to think that he’s having an affair.
The big theme in the art houses is the May-to-December romance, only this time the women get to play the older lover, including Being Julia with Annette Bening as the “mid-life crisis” who sleeps with her son’s best friend. P.S. stars Laura Linney as a teacher who dates a student who resembles her old, dead, high-school boyfriend.
Julianne Moore tries her hand at the tremulous horror heroine in The Forgotten, playing a grieving mother who suspects her memory has been erased. This means either she is mad, or there is one very silly conspiracy to be explained in Act III. (She’s not mad.) Two intelligent, quirky comedies catch my eye. Sideways is from Alexander Payne, who made About Schmidt, and features another lost soul meandering to a wedding. This time it is a failed novelist played by Paul Giamatti, who was the sadsack in American Splendour.
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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is Wes Anderson’s follow-up to The Royal Tenenbaums, with Bill Murray an oceanographer taking on the Gene Hackman role of troubled patriarch amid lovingly assembled eccentrics. Just the character names alone evoke Anderson’s gently askew world view — Klaus Daimler, Ned Plympton, and one Drakoulias (played by Michael Gambon, no less).
RELEASE DATES
Alexander (US: Nov 5; UK: Jan 7)
Alfie (US & UK: Oct 22)
The Aviator (US: Dec 17; UK: Dec 26)
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Being Julia (US: Oct 15)
Beyond the Sea (US & UK: Nov 26)
Closer (US & UK: Dec 3)
The Forgotten (US: Sept 24)
Finding Neverland (US: Nov 12; UK: Oct 29)
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I Heart Huckabees (US: Oct 15; UK: Jan 28)
The Incredibles (US: Nov 5; UK: Nov 19)
Kinsey (US: Nov 12)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (US: Dec 24; UK: Feb 18)
Meet the Fockers (US: Dec 24; UK: Jan 28)
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P.S. (US: Oct 15)
Shall We Dance? (US: Oct 15; UK: Feb 18)
Shark Tale (US: Oct 1; UK: Oct 15)
Sideways (US: Oct 22)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (US: Sept 17; UK: Oct 1)