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Best of British
Evening Standard 4 Feb 2008
The judging panel for the Evening Standard British Film Awards had an array of riches in 2007 to choose from. Despite government indifference and a lack of tax breaks, British film-makers continued to make exciting, challenging, beautiful and moving work at home and abroad.
The sheer variety of movies shot here - from the splendour of Joe Wright's Atonement to Anton Corbijn's evocation of monochrome 1980s Macclesfield in Control - was boggling.
As well as their work at home, British writers, composers and actors proved irreplaceable in international work. It's hard to imagine There Will Be Blood without Daniel Day-Lewis's crushing central performance or Jonny "Radiohead" Greenwood's intense score. Helena Bonham Carter proved her versatility in the California-set Conversations with Other Women and in a London story written and directed by two Americans, Sweeney Todd. And we have Canadian director Sarah Polley to thank for wooing Julie Christie back to the screen for the heartbreaking Alzheimer's drama Away From Her.
The panel of judges - made up of the Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm and Charlotte O'Sullivan, James Christopher of The Times, Catherine Shoard of The Sunday Telegraph and Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph - had some tough decisions. This is how they did it.
BEST FILM
Control, Anton Corbijn
The ease with which the jury whittled down the main contenders to a pair of chalk and cheese films speaks volumes about the strength of British film this year. Atonement put up a vigorous fight - but Anton Corbijn's debut film, Control, about the miserable life of Ian Curtis, was not to be denied. It is a brilliant snapshot of a doomed talent. The lead singer of Joy Division died at the age of 23 by hanging himself from a clothes horse nailed to his kitchen ceiling, and Sam Riley plays the punk-rock poet with the passion of a council-house Hamlet.
The fresh smell of black-and-white nostalgia is a thrilling pleasure. The camera work is astonishing. The years really do roll back to a golden age of shabby garage bands and sweaty pub gigs. Music is anger management for the gangly young hero, and Corbijn's concert footage of Riley fronting the original Joy Division anthems is absolutely electric. The actor leans into the microphone as if his life depended on it. His shirts are soaked with sweat. His robotic dances are mesmerising. His epileptic fits make you feel shocked and helpless. The energy and intensity of this film is mesmeric. A thrilling winner.
James Christopher, The Times
BEST ACTOR
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Daniel Day-Lewis, son of the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, is not an actor who takes any part lightly. He is known for his in-depth and often exhaustive preparation and for the intensity of expression that is the result. So much so, in fact, that he complains it sometimes takes years to put a role properly to rest. He strives for his own version of perfection and has said that he often feels he could have gone further and "jumped higher". Those who have seen him in My Beautiful Laundrette, My Left Foot (for which he won the Oscar as Best Actor), In The Name of the Father and certainly as the oilman Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood would say that he couldn't have jumped much higher.
In this, for which he wins our Best Actor award, he makes an almost Biblical figure of the self-invented entrepreneur who is also a kind of visionary. An American critic has compared the character to tycoon Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, adding that Day-Lewis seemed to have Orson Welles in his sights. Whether that is true or not, he certainly illuminates an epic film with one of his greatest performances, and one which surely illustrates his ambition only to be involved in work that is "utterly compelling, regardless of the consequences".
Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard
BEST ACTRESS
Helena Bonham Carter, Conversations with Other Women/Sweeney Todd
Helena Bonham Carter is currently singing for her supper in cinemas up and down the land in Sweeney Todd, directed by partner Tim Burton. She plays Mrs Lovett, the sympathetic cook who resourcefully turns all those corpses slung out by her upstairs neighbour into fresh meat for her ailing pie shop. It's a potentially rather thankless role - the deluded fishwife, forever slopping about in the basement with old bits of finger or mooning over a man (Johnny Depp) still hot for his dead wife. But Bonham Carter, skin as white as Persil, smudgy badger eyes brimming with longing, is the bruised soul of the whole film.
What secured her the Evening Standard Best Actress award, though, was that she's given two knock-out performances this year, the other in a much-less-seen movie, Conversations with Other Women. Directed in split screen by newcomer Hans Canosa, she and Aaron Eckhart play two attached people who meet at a wedding and talk each other into a one-night stand. But as the evening progresses it becomes evident these two have history. Lots of it. Frisky banter soon sours into something much more loaded. Bonham Carter is brilliant: rueful, funny and wrenchingly believable.
Catherine Shoard, Sunday Telegraph
BEST SCREENPLAY
Matt Greenhalgh, Control
In Control, screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh had to avoid the tortured-artist clichés that have always dogged the music biopic genre, while finding a way into the career of a man whose legacy in the popular imagination was founded on those very clichés. Greenhalgh's solution was to leaven the grim life story of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, quite brilliantly, with moments of deadpan humour. When Belgian mistress Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara) looks straight into the eyes of Ian (Sam Riley) and says, "Tell me about Macclesfield", it's as good as anything Frank Cottrell Boyce cooked up for 24 Hour Party People. The other contenders on our shortlist - Christopher Hampton's crisp adaptation of Atonement, and Paul Laverty for Ken Loach's It's a Free World ... - produced their own distinctive work but Greenhalgh's script had an unprepossessing subtlety. What could have been trite, unilluminating or overblown offered a basic core of understanding for the actors and crew to build on, prompting all the creative leaps that made Control as incisive, nostalgic, painful and unexpectedly funny as it was.
Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph
MOST PROMISING NEWCOMER
John Carney, writer/director of Once
In a year of sprawling genre statements and imposing landscapes, we found an exquisite miniaturist exception in John Carney's Once, with its tiny cast, louche Dublin locations and meticulous commitment to every detail of its characters' lives. In short, there was nothing else like it. Musicals may have found their footing at the multiplexes but none had a playlist more lovingly crafted, or one that told a story so succinctly through lyrics and vocals and left nothing to be said.
Carney has some experience as a director and screenwriter of little-seen Irish features, but this was his breakthrough, and the picture's plangency and economy left us wondering why we hadn't heard of him before. Some striking debut performances were considered for this category - Sam Riley's febrile intensity in Control, and Saoirse Ronan, the precocious young heroine of Atonement - but it was to Carney's achievement that we kept returning, not just because he had marshalled lovely turns from Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglov·, or shaped the script to near-perfection, but because he found purity and great heart in a no-budget labour of love that could very easily have vanished without trace.
Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph
BEST FILM SCORE
Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood
The director Paul Thomas Anderson has always had an ear for the batty soundtrack. But while those clangs and bangs in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) were a bit too bluntly a gloss on Adam Sandler's mental state, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's fabulously cracked score to There Will Be Blood turns a great movie into a masterpiece.
The opening half-hour alone tells you it's one of the best soundtracks yet: all massive electronic glissandos that reach an almost unbearable volume and intensity, driving the action, deepening the mystery, amplifying the awful promise of the film's title.
Later on, there's a double-bass theme as taut as anything Bernard Hermann ever knocked out, a spiky string quartet riff, even some maracas. It's spare but lush, avantgarde yet symphonic, as bubbling and rich as the oil Daniel Day-Lewis's psychotic prospector drills from the earth. Hearing it is incredibly exhilarating; just thinking of it afterwards gives you a real buzz.
Catherine Shoard, Sunday Telegraph
TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
Seamus McGarvey (cinematographer), Sarah Greenwood (production designer) and Jacqueline Durran (costume designer), Atonement
All three recipients of this award are well known within the industry. Seamus McGarvey snagged an Evening Standard Film Award for his contribution to The Hours, while Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Durran are already Oscar nominees thanks to Pride and Prejudice. Yet the trio's collaboration on Joe Wright's post-modern period drama tops anything they've done before.
Everyone remembers Keira Knightley's flaming white swimsuit, the jungle-like fields of Surrey and the enveloping library shelves. These craftsmen also whisked us to central London, Dunkirk and Balham, all plausible locations with a slyly fantastical edge.
So McGarvey, Greenwood and Durran offer tricks, as well as treats, yet perhaps the most impressive thing about this film's "look" is that it was achieved on a total film budget of £15 million. Look on, ye mighty Hollywood crews, and despair.
Charlotte O'Sullivan, Evening Standard
THE ALEXANDER WALKER SPECIAL AWARD
Julie Christie, her contribution to film
Not many screen actresses even aspire to as long a career as Julie Christie. Quite deliberately, she turned away from films such as Billy Liar, Darling and Dr Zhivago that made her an icon in the so-called Swinging Sixties in favour of the sort of films that many stars would not even consider because they would do nothing for their status at the box-office. Christie has never cared for what she has called "commodification by the movie industry" and admitted that all the concentrated adulation accorded to stars is "terribly corrosive".
Having received one Best Actress Oscar, and now surely in line for another, she regards awards with a certain healthy cynicism. Al Pacino, who has never acted with her - much to his regret - has called her the most poetic of actresses. Distinguished directors such as Robert Altman, with whom she made McCabe and Mrs Miller, and François Truffaut, who directed her in Fahrenheit 451, have sung her praises as a performer who gives herself unstintingly to her roles.
This was especially true of last year's Away From Her, in which she played one of the most difficult roles of her life as a victim of Alzheimer's disease who puts herself into a home to avoid ruining her husband's life. Our career award is overdue and exceptionally well-deserved.
Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard
Control will be released on DVD on 11 February (Momentum)
There Will Be Blood will be in cinemas Londonwide from 8 February
Sweeney Todd is currently in cinemas Londonwide
Conversations With Other Women is out now on DVD (Revelation Films)
Once will be released on DVD on 25 February (Icon)
Atonement is out now on DVD (Universal)
Away From Her is out now on DVD (Metrodome) and will be rereleased in selected cinemas from 15 February.
