ENTERTAINMENT
cinema Reviews BY JOHN CAMPBELL
DAVID BRENT: LIFE ON THE ROAD This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s mockumentary from 1984, first came to mind when I saw the trailers for this, but it is a different kettle of fish altogether. It’s as laugh-out-loud funny, and even more cringeworthy in its depiction of the self-deluding, wannabe rock star, but Ricky Gervais’s new movie is also poignant and warm-hearted in a way that Reiner’s never attempted to be.
BEN-HUR
Reprising David Brent from TV’s The Office, Gervais has his gormless alter ego take two weeks’ leave from his job as a sales rep to hit the road with a band of less-than-enthusiastic hired musos. A camera crew accompanies David throughout and he regularly speaks to you, the viewer, as do the guys in the group and his fellow office employees. Unfortunately for David, who has sunk all of his savings into the venture, nobody takes him seriously, and worse, he can’t draw a crowd to any of the gigs. None of which appears to have any impact on David’s commitment to the dream or on his brittle vanity. But reality eventually takes its toll, as it does on all of us. Gervais is so good at the awkward, socially inept personality – you feel for him at the
same time as you squirm at his tackiness.
The songs he writes, and that he feels compelled to explain before every rendition of them, are lyrically excruciating but side-splitting in their un-PC humour – ‘Don’t be unkind to the disabled’, performed before a handful of stunned drinkers, is brill. He annoys but gets under your skin, for there is something of Everyman in the David who passes out in the chair while having ‘Berkshire’ tattooed on his arm – unable to continue, he leaves it as ‘Berk’. All he wants is to be liked and accepted, but he hasn’t got a clue about how to achieve that goal, so when a sweet and subtle romance unfolds, despite his blinkered appraisal of those around him, you rejoice at David’s emotional salvation. The last shot is gold.
The first question was always going to be, ‘Will the chariot race be as good?’ To which the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’ The second question, ‘why would they bother to make another version of William Wyler’s 1959 classic?’, is more problematic. On IMDb, this movie has rated a paltry 5.4 among 3,000-odd voters, and my companion dismissed it as ‘hokey’ – but I thought it was better than that, notwithstanding the forgettable performance of Jack Huston as the eponymous hero and a wooden Toby Kebbell as his adopted Roman brother, Mesalla. As a caveat, however, there is a pretty decent and relevant story being told, so who needs another granite-jawed Charlton Heston mugging the screen with the superstar’s persona? The message, unheeded as it has been for millennia, is that resentment, hatred and violent reprisal do nobody any good, as Jerusalem’s princely Judah Ben-Hur loses all, is thrown into slavery, redeemed in the arena and ultimately finds rapprochement with the estranged Mesalla. Ancient Rome never gets a good rap at the cinema, despite it bringing civilisation to half the known world (more people wanted to be inside the Pax Romana than not), so it is a given that when Mesalla joins the legions he will return as a jackbooted son working for oppressive masters. The voice in the wilderness, preaching love and peace, is that of Jesus (Rodrigo Santoro, who looks exactly like the Nazarene), but Russian director Timur Bekmambetov sensibly only makes him an incidental character in the tumultuous passing parade. Morgan Freeman turns up as a wise old dreadlocked Bedouin who actually says ‘okay’ at one point (surely his next role will be as God), while Pilou Asbæk is an unlikely Pontius Pilate, but the pièce de resistance, rather than the chariot showdown, is a fantastic battle at sea, with Judah chained to an oar in a Roman galley. Reluctantly, I also concede that, as a lifelong atheist, the crucifixion at Golgotha affected me in a way that it never has done before in film.
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The Byron Shire Echo August 31, 2016 43