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In 1969, Rupert Murdoch buys the British newspaper The Sun and appoints the unscrupulous Larry Lamb as editor. Determined to outsell rival The Mirror, Lamb a...
Of all the British directors who emerged in the 1990s, during those few years when the myth of Cool Britannia took hold, Danny Boyle established himself as the most talented and the best equipped to capture the Zeitgeist of the period: turbulent, exhilarating, ephemeral. His very first film, Shallow Grave (1994), already revealed an extraordinary ability to create caustic, cynical, dark atmospheres, while blending them with an audacious, highly stylised approach. Here was a director who loved immersing himself in plot, dwelling with calculated cynicism on its more deviant aspects, and forging a trademark based on an acute awareness of his own technique and a constant succession of twists. Boyle seemed destined to become the foremost representative of a cinema that was very much a product of its time, shaped by uncertainty, speed and a fascination with surface. Two years later, Trainspotting confirmed this vocation and made it visible to the entire world. The lives of a group of friends devoted solely to feeding their addictions, against the bleak backdrop of Edinburgh, although the film was shot largely in Glasgow, were portrayed with a raw cynicism and detachment that are key to the film. Trainspotting soon became a cult movie capable of exposing the superficiality and false optimism of Cool Britannia, the image that Blair, Oasis, the Spice Girls and Hugh Grant were busy projecting onto the world’s imagination. Then something happened that is difficult to explain, perhaps because Boyle’s awareness of his own formidable technical mastery began to prevail over any other consideration in his choice of projects.
In 1969, Rupert Murdoch buys the British newspaper The Sun and appoints the unscrupulous Larry Lamb as editor. Determined to outsell rival The Mirror, Lamb a...
We are not talking about failed films, but rather about striking and recurrent changes of direction from one project to the next. Boyle began alternating genres, thrillers, sci-fi, comedies, zombie movies, biopics, Bollywood-inflected cinema, as well as scales of production, working with stars or unknown actors, on large and small productions, moving between successes and failures. The result is an uneven, fragmented filmography, alternating major flops with box-office triumphs, with one characteristic that, in my view, can be identified: the more Boyle adopts an indie approach, with smaller budgets, almost amateur digital equipment and relatively unknown actors, the greater his commercial success tends to be. This is true of 28 Days Later, 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, which grossed $380 million on a budget of $15 million, and Yesterday, which imagines a world that has suddenly erased the Beatles from its collective memory. Conversely, a film as close to perfection as Steve Jobs was a flop, though certainly not because of its director. It should also be remembered that Boyle won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, and all the criticism levelled at the film, legitimate as some of it may be, including accusations of poverty porn, of making a spectacle of the misery of Mumbai’s slums, cannot erase the fact that the film is a masterpiece of kinetic energy, blatant directorial virtuosity and audacious balancing between the seductive power of its plot and the restless energy of its style.
At Venice, Boyle presents Ink in Competition, set in 1969, when Rupert Murdoch buys The Sun and turns it into Britain’s most influential tabloid. Another change of direction for a filmmaker who, after more than thirty years in cinema, continues to move between genres and formats, returning this time to British society and the mechanisms that shape its collective imagination.
What if this were Boyle’s finest film, permeated throughout by a cynicism still free of affectation and sentimentality?
With the exception of Four Weddings and a Funeral, almost all British cinema of those years, from this cult classic to The Full Monty, from Loach to Leigh, feels like a full-scale assault on the heart of Cool Britannia.
Boyle makes an indie film using consumer-grade digital cameras, with a still-unknown Cillian Murphy in the lead and a tiny $8 million budget: it would go on to earn more than ten times that amount at the box office.
A perfect screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, built around the brilliant idea of dramatising the half-hour before each of three landmark Jobs presentations: Macintosh, NeXT and iMac. Boyle’s direction is taut and breathless, and Fassbender delivers a superb performance. And yet the film was a flo
Written by Richard Curtis, the Grand Vizier of British comedy (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary). What would happen if the world suddenly forgot that the Beatles had ever existed? Another huge box-office success.
