Dom Hemingway

The man. The myth. The legend. The cologne.

(2013) Crime Comedy (Fox Searchlight) Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, Demian Bichir, Emilia Clarke, Madalina Ghenea, Kerry Condon, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Jordan Nash, Jumayn Hunter, Samio Olowu, Hayley-Marie Coppin, Jeanie Gold, Glenn Hirst, Philippe Pierrard, Luca Franzoni, Richard Graham, Simeon Moore, Nick Raggett, Kaitana Taylor, Colette Morrow. Directed by Richard Shepard

Some people are just larger than life. They can get away with things simply by the force of their charm, no matter how serious the offense. Of course, they can’t always get out of the way of their own shortcomings just like the rest of us but we can forgive them the kinds of lapses that we ourselves would never get a second chance for.

Dom Hemingway (Law) fancies himself the world’s greatest safe cracker, a giant among men. His prowess with women is legendary and his reputation in the criminal underground of London is second to none. He is also a stand-up guy – he’s just being released from prison after spending 12 years there – many more than he would have spent if he’d ratted out his boss, Don Fontaine (Bichir), a Russian mafia sort living in the South of France now with his Romanian girlfriend Paolina (Ghenea).

Life has passed Dom by in many ways while he was away; his wife divorced him, remarried – one of his old mates, one Sandy Butterfield (Raggett) – and finally, passed away from cancer. His daughter Evelyn (Clarke) has been raised by another man and hardly knows her father at all. In fact, she doesn’t want to know him. After all, he chose a Russian mobster over his family.

Now that he’s out, he wants to make up for lost time. He stops off to pay Sandy a visit and express his disappointment – Dom has a bit of an anger issue. He meets up with his one true remaining mate Dickie Black (Grant) who in the interim had his hand shot off but is still Don Fontaine’s loyal man. After a few days of cocaine and whores, the two go off to see Fontaine.

Dom is on quite the bender. His employer is happy to see him and is ready to give Dom the payday he deserves – just under a million pounds. That’s not enough for Dom – he wants not just what he’s owed with interest but he also wants “a present.” He’s raging, a magnificent scoundrel who bellows his discontent at the universe and takes out his anger and frustration on his boss, never a good idea.

Dom in spectacular Dom Hemingway fashion loses his money and has to scramble, asking the son (Hunter) of his most hated rival for work. In between he is trying to reconcile with his daughter who now has a son (Nash) and a boyfriend (Stewart-Jarrett). Dom looks at his daughter and sees the life that could have been. Is the life he has enough?

This is definitely a character study and it all depends on the performance you get out of the lead actor. In this case, Law is more than up to the task, delivering one of the finest performances of a career full of them. Hemingway is a mesmerizing character, one any actor would love to sink his teeth into, and Law responds. Your eyes are always on him whenever he’s onscreen (which is almost the entire movie) and you’re never quite sure what he’s going to do next.

His banter with Dickie is priceless and Grant, known for different sorts of roles, holds up his end. Neither of these guys is particularly bright so much as they are clever. There’s a scene in which Dom is trying to crack a safe by apparently dry-humping it. It is comical but bizarre until Dickie explains what’s really going on.

The problem with a character and a performance like this is that nobody can really stand up against it. It’s like trying to do wind sprints into the teeth of a hurricane; all you can do is hope to stay standing but it’s unlikely that you will. The other actors mean well and do pretty well given the circumstances – Clarke (best known for her very different role in Game of Thrones) holds out better than most but in general it’s the Jude Law show.

And that’s fine – he’s given some excellent dialogue to work with even if the plot is of the been-there-done-that variety. I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing this again. It’s the kind of movie that I suspect will yield some rich depth once you get past being mesmerized by Law. Nobody is doing crime/gangster movies like the Brits these days and Dom Hemingway is a proper villain who will hold up with the creations of Guy Pearce and such classics as Sexy Beast.

REASONS TO GO: Jude Law is magnificent. Grant perfectly cast. Cockney criminal poetry.

REASONS TO STAY: Nobody else can really hold up to Dom’s over-the-top personality.

FAMILY VALUES: Lots of f-bombs and other colorful English language, graphic nudity and sexual content, a cornucopia of drug use and a fair amount of violence.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Jude Law gained 30 pounds for the role by drinking ten Coca-Colas a day in order to put on the kind of empty calories that Dom would consume through alcohol.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/21/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 59% positive reviews. Metacritic: 55/100.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

FINAL RATING: 7/10

NEXT: Locke

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New Releases for the Week of May 16, 2014

GODZILLA

(Warner Brothers/Legendary) Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston. Directed by Gareth Edwards

The king of all monsters returns to wreak havoc with coastal cities as well as to face malevolent creatures of human creation that now threaten our very existence. Judging on the reaction to the most recent trailers, this is one of the most anticipated films of the summer.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-Roll video here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard, 3D, IMAX 3D (opens Thursday)

Genre: Sci-Fi Action

Rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence)

Dom Hemingway

(Fox Searchlight) Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, Demian Bichir, Emilia Clarke. After being released from serving twelve years in prison, a safecracker with a larger-than-life personality sets out to make up for lost time. Setting out to reclaim an old debt, a brush with death leads him to try to re-connect with his estranged daughter but in his own inimitable fashion. This played at the recent Florida Film Festival and it’s single screening was completely sold out.

See the trailer, clips and a featurette here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Dramedy

Rating: R (for sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, some violence and drug use)

Locke

(A24) Tom Hardy, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Bill Milner. Like every working day, Ivan Locke left the office  for the drive home. Blessed with the perfect family, his dream job and a successful career, he should be at the high point of life. However in a 90 minute drive, it all comes apart and a single phone call will force him to put everything on the line.

See the trailer, interviews, a featurette and a clip here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Drama

Rating: R (for language throughout)

Million Dollar Arm

(Disney) Jon Hamm, Bill Paxton, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi. When a sports agent loses his biggest client to a rival agency, he knows that his business is in serious trouble. A chance viewing of a cricket match from India leads to the brilliant idea of staging a nationally televised competition of finding the first major league players in India. Two finalists are at last selected and as they are brought to America to learn the game, the odds are against them as cultural differences and an unfamiliarity with the game may prevent them from achieving their goal.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-Roll video here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)

Genre: True Sports Drama

Rating: PG (for mild peril and some suggestive language)

Only Lovers Left Alive

(Sony Classics) Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt. An underground musician, dissolute and discouraged over the deteriorating state of humanity, reunites with his enigmatic and more optimistic lover. Their romantic idyll is interrupted by the arrival of his wild and out of control little sister. Oh, and did I mention they’re all vampires? The latest from acclaimed director Jim Jarmusch.

See the trailer and a clip here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Horror

Rating: R (for language and brief nudity)

Florida Film Festival 2014

Last night, the Florida Film Festival announced their line-up for 2014 and it is another impressive one. The Festival will run from April 4 through April 13 this year and 170 feature films and shorts are on this year’s menu. While we won’t be previewing all of them, this is just a taste of some of the films you can expect to see.

Last year’s opening night film, 20 Feet From Stardom, went on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and opening night guests were wowed by one of the film’s stars, Merry Clayton (the female voice on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”) crooning a sensual and amazing version of Leon Russell’s “A Song for You.” While that set an awfully high bar, this year’s opening film has plenty of quality of its own. A Trip to Italy is the sequel to 2010’s The Trip and returns stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as well as director Michael Winterbottom. Once again Coogan and Brydon play versions of themselves, sent to write restaurant reviews but this time not in the North of England but in Italy. They kept audiences in stitches with their impressions and comedic routines but deep down there was a story that kept the interest of the readers. I can’t wait to see what they do in the sequel.

Ernest and Celestine netted an Oscar nomination of its own for Best Animated Feature at the recent Academy Awards and while it lost to Frozen this story about the unlikely friendship between a bear and a mouse is sure to delight children of every age. The British crime comedy Dom Hemingway stars Jude Law as a safe cracker newly released from prison who wants to reconnect with his daughter and settle his debts but that proves to be a proposition far less easy than it sounds. For No Good Reason documents artist Ralph Steadman’s remarkable career, his collaborations with writers Hunter S. Thompson and William Burroughs and of course his unsettling and iconic drawings. Johnny Depp hosts this passion project. 

Joe is the latest from director David Gordon Green and stars Nicolas Cage as a rough and tumble ex-con with a hair-trigger temper who falls in with a young boy whose life has been at least as hard luck as his own. The ex-con takes a liking to the boy who finds in Joe a father figure which doesn’t sit too well with the boy’s actual father. This is said to be one of Cage’s best performances in years and might just elevate him out of the poor reputation he’s had in recent years. The Double is a stylish modernization of the Dostoevsky novella in which a shy and abused young worker, played by Jesse Eisenberg, has his life taken over by a brash and manipulative doppelganger, also played by Eisenberg. 

Gabrielle is a French-Canadian romance about a developmentally challenged woman’s quest to assert her independence. Obvious Child tackles the controversial subject of abortion as a young stand-up comedian finds her life turned upside down by an unexpected pregnancy. Before I Disappear chronicles a despondent young man’s attempts to commit suicide marred by his responsibility to babysit his niece. In Words and Pictures stars Clive Owens and Juliette Binoche play teachers of English and Art who in an effort to inspire students who couldn’t care less declare a war between words and images. Cheatin’ is the newest animated feature by Oscar winning animator Bill Plympton – ’nuff said. 

Crimes Against Humanity pairs a woman whose pet rabbit has died and who has been hospitalized with frequent nosebleeds with a pompous boyfriend whose investigation of sexual escapades at the university he works at becomes an obsession. In I Believe in Unicorns a woman with a vivid imagination falls for a skateboarding punk and chooses to run away with him, leaving her disabled mother behind. Doomsdays covers two slackers who convinced the apocalypse is just around the corner take to squatting in vacant Catskills vacations homes until the food runs out or they are chased off. The addition of two other would-be squatters changes the dynamic irrevocably. This year’s Audience Award winner at Slamdance was Copenhagen, a voyage of discovery of a young man who journeys to the Danish capital to discover his last living relative and finds love instead. Last I Heard stars Paul Sorvino as a mob boss who returns from prison to find that his gang has become inconsequential and the world a far different place than he left it. 

No No: A Dockumentary follows the fabled career of Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Dock Ellis who famously pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD in 1970. How he overcame his addictions and reached out to help others in similar straits is one of baseball’s great untold stories. Levitated Mass is a fascinating look at artist Michael Heizer’s monumental task of transporting a 340 ton boulder from a Southern California quarry to the L.A. County Museum of Art and creating a media and social sensation in the process. American Jesus examines the pervasive Christianity in all it’s different forms and effects on American culture as seen through the eyes of a Spaniard. 

Mail order brides is the subject of Love Me as the documentary filmmaker follows several relationships that were established in that manner and discovers that they aren’t all you might think. Mission Congo details the abuses of an American televangelist in the Congo following the Rwandan genocide under the guise of humanitarian aid. The Sacrament is the latest from horror auteur Ti West and covers a filmmaking crew’s descent into the hellish secret of a Utopian religious cult during a documentary shoot. The Babadook was one of the films at this year’s Sundance that got a great deal of attention; in it a single mom reads to her son from a mysterious storybook which prompts strange and frightening occurrences in their home.

Chu and Blossom stars Ryan O’Nan, Mercedes Ruehl and Melanie Lynskey in a story about  a unique Korean exchange student adjusting to life in the United States. After Winter, Spring is a loving tribute to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing – the French family farm. Led Zeppelin Played Here looks into a mythic concert that may or may not have taken place. 

In addition to new movies, there are some classics that will be available at the Festival this year including the Oscar-winning murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express with an all-star cast, The Big Lebowski which is one of the Coen Brothers’ classics, the Italian thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and the James Bond classic Goldfinger. 

There are usually celebrities involved at Film Festivals and the FFF has had their share. Not all of the celebrity attendees have been confirmed at press time but two who are on the list for 2014 include Paul Sorvino who will be in attendance on Friday April 11 for the screening of his new film Last I Heard and Giancarlo Esposito for a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing in celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary.

That’s just a rundown of some of the films that will be on the docket for this year’s Festival. There are also panel discussions and of course the legendary parties that the Festival throws every year.Ticket packages and passes are on sale now at the website (just click on the logo above to go directly there) and individual film tickets will be on sale Saturday, March 15th. 

This promises to be another memorable Festival and if you’ve never been, you owe it to yourself to go and experience it firsthand. Words can’t describe the experience but it is fun, engaging and unforgettable. Filmmakers and celebrities rub elbows with film fans at the Festival and you never know who you will run into while grabbing a drink at the Eden Bar at the Enzian. It might even be me.

As always, movies from the festival will have the Festival logo above attached to the review to mark it as a proud participant in the 2014 Festival. Cinema365 will cover the Festival from beginning to end and beyond – last year we posted over 50 reviews of Festival films and related events and we should be in the same neighborhood this year. This is one event that I look forward to all year long and as we get closer to opening night, the excitement is building exponentially. This truly is one of the great Film Festivals in the country – it has been ranked as one of the 50 best in the entire world by IndieWire and the top 25 coolest in the country by MovieMaker magazine. That isn’t by accident; while I do tend to gush about the Festival it is really a unique event. If you love movies – and even if you don’t love ’em but just love to socialize – this is your event. Get your tickets now – you’ll thank me for it later.