| this week's Tribune reviews : OUR DAILY BREAD and IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH [both 6/10] |
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| Sunday, 20 January 2008 | |
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Our Daily Bread Austria 2005 Director : Nikolaus Geyrhalter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In the Valley of Elah USA 2007 Starring : Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron Director : Paul Haggis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OVER two years have elapsed since Our Daily Bread won the Special Jury Award at 2005's Amsterdam International Documentary Festival, but it could hardly have obtained commercial UK release at a more opportune juncture. With the issue of battery poultry - thanks to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, among others - emerging as a major issue over the last couple of weeks, the documentary's subject-matter could scarcely be more topical. Viennese director/cinematographer/producer/editor Geyrhalter spent two years going around Europe visiting a wide variety of places where food is prepared. These range from silent, expansive crop-fields to the noisiest of abbatoirs, taking us into places - many of them strikingly bizarre in their complexity and scale - that the average member of the public simply can't normally access. There is no overt editorialising - this is an austere, detached, stately, slightly Kubrick-esque enterprise without music or narration of any kind, the only "dialogue" coming from the intermittent chatter of the workers who toil in the food-production industry. Geyrhalter is careful to include numerous sequences of these employees, often during their break-times, though their opinions are never elicited. Despite the theoretical neutrality of Our Daily Bread's calm rigour, it's hard to interpret proceedings as any kind of celebration of industrialised, mechanised, 21st-century food-production. The cumulative impact recalls William Burroughs' explanation of his most famous novel's title, The Naked Lunch: "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork." It's been widely commented for many years that people prefer not to consider how their dinner ends up on their plate - and a film like this, deliberately difficult to watch at times, leaves very little to the viewer's imagination. Indeed, so harrowing are several of the scenes involving livestock it comes as a considerable relief when Geyrhalter switches his attention to apples, vegetables or salt. It may not create a generation of vegetarians a la The Smiths' 'Meat Is Murder' ("the flesh you so fancifully fry / is not succulent tasty or kind), but nevertheless constitutes a welcome addition to an increasingly urgent debate. ANOTHER week, another New-Mexico-shot thriller, starring Tommy Lee Jones as a veteran lawman bewailing the modern world's declining standards as he investigates the violent aftermath of cross-border drug-trading. But while the Coens' No Country For Old Men rides high at the North American box-office, collecting prestigious gongs on its way to a golden night at the Oscars, In the Valley of Elah has been one of the more conspicuous belly-flops of "awards season." On paper, much was expected of writer-director Paul Haggis' follow-up to his Best Picture winner Crash - especially as the inspired-by-actual-events plot, in which former military policeman Hank Deerfield (Jones) investigates the murder of his Iraq-veteran son (Jonathan Tucker), touches on hot-button topical/political subject-matter within the contours of a page-turning thriller. But, perhaps dissuaded by the title - a biblical reference to the supposed location of the battle between David and Goliath - the American public stayed away. While no masterpiece, the film deserves to do better over here: it's a cut above Crash, both in terms of the gripping linearity of its storytelling and its avoidance of melodrama and heavy-handedness, although the final moments (including an Annie Lennox ballad over the credits) do show Haggis at his hand-wringing worst. Jones, crucially, has arguably never been better: the film (not much of a whodunnit) works best as a character-study of this steely individual - now employed, aptly enough, "hauling gravel." His commanding presence compensates for some cumbersome scriptwriting touches which propel the plot along at crucial stages. On a wider level, meanwhile, Haggis never quite makes the connection between Hank's personal character-flaws (he fumes at "wetbacks" during one violent outburst) and the mindset which led his government into the Iraq quagmire; nor does the David/Goliath properly come into focus.. But Haggis is clear-eyed about the brutalising impact of war on young men - the credits end with website-links to "combat-stress" organisations - and deserves credit for showing how the current geo-political situation can lead to an unexpected kind of "terror", right there in the American family heartland. Neil Young  OUR DAILY BREAD : [6/10] : Unser taglich Brot : Austria 2005 : Nikolaus Geyrhalter : 92 mins (ICA timing) : seen on DVD in Sunderland, 14th January 2008 IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH : [6/10] : USA 2007 : Paul HAGGIS : 121 mins (BBFC timing) : seen at 'Wired' screening-room, London, 29th November 2007 (press show)
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