Review: "Byzantium"

I think it's pretty clear to most observers that the whole vampires-as-passionate-lovers shtick is about played out. So it's curious to see director Neil Jordan, who helped kick things off with the 1994 film version of "Interview with the Vampire," making a movie that plays out like a high-minded twist on the "Twilight" flicks.

"Byzantium" boasts Jordan's signature stylistic flourishes and sexual undercurrents. A favorite recurring theme of his, the mysterious stranger with a game-changing secret, is here represented by Eleanor. As played by Saoirse Ronan, she's over 200 years old but perpetually caught in adolescence after being turned into an immortal blood-drinker by her own mother, Clara (Gemma Arterton).

Arterton and Ronan are only a few years apart in age, and indeed their characters identify themselves as sisters to avoid suspicion. They've been traveling the world for two centuries, on the run from the brotherhood of vampires that views them as outlaws.

While Eleanor is smart, cultured and finely mannered, Clara is a low-born trollop -- literally. After being turned to prostitution at a young age and giving up her baby to a convent, she's never been able to shake her bent toward sexual exploitation. She makes an itinerant living as a stripper or prostitute, and is always scheming up a new con job.

While Clara kills wantonly and sometimes for pleasure, Eleanor only feasts upon people who know they want to die -- usually the old and lonely, with whom she shares a few intimate moments before exchanging need for need.

Their past catches up to them, and after a gruesome encounter they flee to an unnamed beach resort town, the sort of place populated by cheap carny workers and musty retirement residents. Clara quickly latches onto a sad sack (Daniel Mays) who inherited an old hotel, and soon they've set up shop there.

The story plays out in a mix of high and low concepts. Flashbacks to their origins have a novelistic feel, a tragic tale of woe amid the petticoats and arrogant noblemen. The modern sequences, though, have a moody feel and a sleek visual look. They're joined by a framing device in which Eleanor writes out her forbidden story, longhand of course, and tosses the pages into the wind.

Ronan, whose liquid blue eyes and bland prettiness tend to steer her toward passive roles, displays an impressive range of moods and emotions -- even scaring the wits out of a nosy teacher who asks too many questions. Arterton has a swashbuckling verve as the libidinous Clara.

I quite enjoyed the performance of Caleb Landry Jones as Frank, a shy boy who notices Eleanor and begins to gravitate toward her. A sickly young man, Frank is perpetually hunched and peering, and Jones croaks out all his dialogue as if he's ashamed of the words he has to utter. It's a stylized but affecting performance, and we feel Frank's sense of estrangement from the world around him, and how he would see Eleanor as a kindred soul.

"Byzantium" builds up to some fairly predictable plot turns, so the movie didn't hold many surprises for me story-wise. But it did make the idea of the eternal undead living amongst us seem fresh and even a little sexy again, which I didn't think possible. When you don't treat them as fare for teenybopper fantasies, vampires can actually seem cool.

Review: "Made in Dagenham"

Sort of a British "Norma Rae," "Made in Dagenham" is a well-acted tale about female auto workers demanding equal pay in the late 1960s. It's a classic underdog story whose outcome is never in doubt, where the lines between the good guys and the bad are practically marked onscreen in highlighter pen.

Sally Hawkins plays the Sally Field role of the low-key worker who rises up to become a respected leader of the union. As Rita O'Grady, Hawkins has a slightly awkward sort of beauty, the sort of woman who has to be told what a gem she is before she believes it herself. Hawkins used this quality to full effect in "Happy-Go-Lucky" a couple of years ago.

Director Nigel Cole brings the same sort of energy he did to 2003's "Calendar Girls" about another group of plucky women who discover they're a lot more capable than anyone gave them credit for. William Ivory's script, though, follows the diagram of a screenwriting class to a T, so we know the progression of the gals' struggle before it happens.

For example, Rita's husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) will be fully supportive at first, getting a kick out of seeing his wife photographed in newspapers and on the telly. But then there will be growing discord as he's forced to take up more of the cooking and cleaning at home, followed by a big spat when his own job is imperiled, culminating in rapprochement where he tells her how proud he is.

The story also tends to treat the other women as scenery rather than distinct individuals. There's the slutty one (Andrea Riseborough), the cute one who wants to be a model (Jaime Winstone), and so forth. Only Connie (Geraldine James), the steadfast older shop steward, is given anything like another dimension, including some trouble on the home front.

I didn't care for the wife of one of the company managers (Rosamund Pike), who befriends Rita without even realizing they live in separate camps. An educated, smart woman who resents having to bury her talents beneath her husband's, she secretly eggs the working girls on. The whole thing is a little too pat.

The history lesson aspect of the film is certainly engaging, though. In the 1960s Ford was the largest auto manufacturer in Europe, employing some 40,000 workers in England alone. The gals of the machinists union in Dagenham, some 187 of them, were classified as unskilled laborers and paid considerably less than their male counterparts -- quite often, their own husbands and brothers.

Bob Hoskins plays Albert, a union organizer impressed by the gumption of the women during a relatively minor disagreement with management. He encourages Rita to strike for equal pay -- much to the consternation of the union bosses.

Miranda Richardson plays Barbara Castle, the first (and still only) female British secretary of state, who was tasked with tamping down the machinist strike and keeping Ford happy.

Richard Schiff shows up as a Ford exec sent over from the States to twist some arms. He bellows and rants: We can't pay these women the same as men, because then women all over the world will want the same thing!

Of course, Ford eventually acquiesced and become something of a pioneer on gender equality, and even cooperated with the making of this film. So even the bad guys turn out to be decent blokes.

Sally Hawkins is eminently watchable, but it's too bad "Made in Dagenham" feels like it rolled off another kind of assembly line.

2 stars out of four