Review
THE STATEMENT
Starring Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Rampling
Directed by Norman Jewison
Opens Friday, January 9
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The Statement is this season’s big Canadian movie gambit, backed by a number of this country’s media power-brokers and calculated to not really look Canadian at all. It’s the kind of film that feels obviously made by committee – a shallow, visually undistinguished, high-minded tale that only excels at being boring.
A fictional story inspired by true events, The Statement follows Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine), a Nazi sympathizer under the Vichy government living under asylum via the Catholic church who suddenly finds himself persecuted by both a crusading judge (Tilda Swinton), under the auspices of crimes against humanity laws, and a rogue group of Jewish vigilantes out to avenge their dead relatives. The Statement has been praised for its humanist point of view, but as a film it’s sorely lacking in realistic detail.
Norman Jewison is a talented director and skilled storyteller who can usually wring deep human emotion out of seemingly banal tales (see the underrated Other People’s Money), but at the same time he can easily fall into the kind of journeyman filmmaking that easily acquiesces to story over personal vision.
The Statement is rife with expository dialogue, including an excruciating sequence using Brossard’s heart attack as a simplistic device to essentially inform the audience of how he plans to relieve himself of the mess he’s in.
While Caine delivers a fine performance, his asshole with a heart of gold is the kind of role he can play between breaks from his instructional acting videos. No one in the cast really seems to be excited by what they’re doing. Even Swinton, who has yet to deliver an uninteresting performance, seems lost and scattershot. The film feels oddly choppy and piecemeal, and characters sometimes seem to exist only to push the story forward.
Unfortunately, this may have a lot to do with the film’s subject matter. The persecution of Jews during the Second World War is an issue that will continue to haunt us for quite some time, but only so many films can be made on any subject without redundancies, and The Statement often feels simply procedural.
What makes The Statement most difficult to watch is what it implicitly says about Canadian cinema. With Telefilm Canada given new guidelines and objectives about what kind of films should be made in Canada, fewer personal films seem to be able to break through in deference to crowd-pandering efforts. Films like The Statement and Mambo Italiano are now indistinguishable from anything pumped out by the Hollywood mini-majors. It may take the failure of a heavily invested film like this to convince the film industry’s power elite that Canadian films are best nurtured as individual projects, rather than products from a monolithic entity. |
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