And Shallow Grave was where you made your start.
With Irvine Welsh, you made smack look inviting,
And that was when, was when you won my heart.
And where you lead, there I shall always follow,
If not to multiplex, then DVD,
Though I found Slumdog rather hard to swallow,
The Oscar board would beg to disagree.
If you don't pay up, next week I'll write another verse. I would strongly advise you not to wait the full six weeks.
A Life Less Ordinary was Danny Boyle's first attempt at making it big across the pond. It meant enough to him that he turned down a crack at the Alien franchise, instead returning to the UK to seek out the finance he needed. It was everything we've come to expect from a Danny Boyle movie - visually striking, slightly surreal and unlike anything else he'd ever done before. The critics, however, were unsure, leading Boyle to eventually state in an interview for Film4 that the movie was one of his favourites purely because it wasn't anybody else's.
As might be expected, this one isn't easy to summarise. At heart, however, it's a romcom, albeit rather a twisted one. When Ewan McGregor's down-at-heel dreamer Robert finds himself sacked from his cleaning job and dumped by his girlfriend on the same day, desperation compels him to confront Naville, his former employer. Unfortunately, when he does so, he finds Naville already confronting Celine (Cameron Diaz), his twentysomething daughter and threatening to cut off her inheritance. It's a messy situation, culminating in a kidnapping where it's not entirely certain who's abducting who.
Meanwhile, there's unrest in Heaven, caused primarily by a supreme being who doesn't like the high rates of human heartbreak and divorce. He orders Gabriel to send O'Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo) down to Earth to do something about it, threatening them with permanent exile unless they succeed.
The good
A Life Less Ordinary is that rarest of cinematic beasts: a romantic comedy that I'm capable of watching without wanting to gnaw off my own arm. I suspect what I like most about it is how defiantly weird it is, juxtaposing naive idealism with surprising levels of violence. Make no mistake, this isn't a nice film - well, except for the parts where it is.What makes it work, I think, is the casting of a bunch of Hollywood's most fundamentally likeable people. Ewan McGregor plays the same good-natured, clueless ingénu he would later harness in Moulin Rouge. Cameron Diaz, meanwhile, has a more complex job with the spoiled and slightly psychotic Celine, but mostly succeeds in convincing us of her basic good intentions. Most importantly, neither of them are averse to making themselves look undignified on camera - a song and dance sequence set to Bobby Darin's Beyond the Sea is a joy to behold, but much of the pleasure of it comes from listening to their defiantly off-key singing.
On the celestial side of things, Holly Hunter is as charming as you'd expect, and Delroy Lindo provides a beautifully gentle foil for her hard-boiled antics; a short scene mid-credits leaves us wondering precisely which couple God was trying to matchmake. Dan Hedaya, too, makes for a wonderful Gabriel, harried and world-weary but always with an eye for his subordinates' welfare.
Every shot, of course, is beautifully lit and composed - this is something we take for granted in Boyle's work. It is in the fantasy scenes, however, that he really comes into his own. Heaven, for instance, is portrayed as an office block of blinding whiteness, the only definition provided by the hands and faces of the angels as they go about their business, while a recurring dream sequence sees McGregor tied to a wheel of fortune made from multicoloured fluorescent tubes. It's absolutely lyrical, helped in no small part by a soundtrack that alternates thumping, pounding techno with sweet Motown gold.
The bad
Let's start with a disclaimer: this is one of my favourite films, and any negativity on my part is purely due to my assuming the role of devil's advocate. That said...Maybe, if I'm totally, utterly, one hundred per cent honest with myself, I can kind of sort of maybe see why the critics thought it was a bit of a mess. Boyle himself has said that he originally envisioned a far more violent film, with the implication being that it was toned down to keep the US sponsors happy. As a result, the tonal shifts are fairly stark - the angels in particular alternate between being comedy gumshoes and genuinely threatening figures.
If anything at all bugged me about A Life Less Ordinary, though, it would have to be one of my least favourite tropes - the one where any act perpetrated by a cute enough girl becomes cute in and of itself. This reaches its nadir early on in the film, where Celine shoots a suitor in the head and it's played for laughs. This is not the behaviour of somebody charmingly idiosyncratic, it's the behaviour of a dangerous criminal, and at least some minor recognition of this fact would have been much appreciated.
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