Friends & Crocodiles

Stephen Polliakoff's films are always interesting, even when they're not actually very good, because Polliakoff himself is interested in things that few other contemporary writers and directors are: time (he likes to tell his stories slowly) and space (they unwind in beautiful and unusual places). Unfortuantly, the specific content is often less interesting than the way that he explores it: the world he paints is aesthetically delightful, but sometimes doesn't resemble the real world very closely; 'Friends and Crocodiles', for example, is not his only film about a rich man surrounding himself with eccentric friends, in a way that seems more necessary for the purpose of the drama, than it does plausible. And this particular film is also let down by some clunky expositional dialogue (for example, when the heroine gets a new job, someone feels the need to explain that her new firm is "one of the country's largest companies"), a paper-thin satire of modern business practices, and the lack of chemistry between her character and her millionaire patron. Alan Rickman, who played a similar millionaire in his earlier film "Close My Eyes", had the charisma to pull the role off; Damian Lewis, by contrast, is flat in this movie. One weakness of both stories in the Polliakoff's tendency to centre his dramas on false (or at least, irrelevant) dichotomies, particularly that between new technology and aristocratic artifacts; but both his worlds are unreal, gorgeous and belong to the moneyed elite; I find it hard to draw any meaningful lessons from their pseudo-conflict. I suppose you don't watch Polliakoff for pure social realism, rather for the imagery as striking as shafts of light. But light has to illuminate something: in this film, it's not that clear what that something is supposed to be.

Friends and Crocodiles follows the career of Paul, a brilliant entrepreneur who has made his fortune from retail. As well as being talented, he is also feckless and unstable. We open in 1981, when Paul is the owner of a beautiful country house set in a vast estate (echoes of Richard Branson's purchase of The Manor near Oxford a few years earlier). We then follow Paul's volatile career, which becomes intertwined with that of Lizzie, a talented manager, whom he recruits as his PA from a local estate agent. She brings order to the chaos of the house, which Paul has filled with an assortment of freaks who are all expecting to make it big in something. Lizzie storms out of his employment after a stunt at one of Paul's parties puts people in danger and as the years progress their paths cross at intervals, their relationship slowly mutating into one of grudging mutual respect. Despite the chaos he creates around him, it is his judgement that she ends up respecting, against the entrenched wisdom of the whole business establishment.

The film is a sharp, accurate and very involving tour of Britain over the last quarter century, through the high noon of Thatcherism, the wobbling confidence of the Major years, the dot com boom and the subsequent meltdown, through to the present. The lunacies, the technologies, the pain and the silliness. Maybe you had to live through it and suffer with it for Friends and Crocodiles to work. But even without that it's a vision very difficult to ignore.

Nowhere on television have I seen colour used as it is here. Almost every shot is a work of art, which of course makes it sound pretentious. It isn't pretentious on screen -- just a succession of startling, highly unusual and often very beautiful images. In some ways reminiscent of Fellini's movies, but more rooted in the everyday.

Underpinning it are the expert performances of Damian Lewis as Paul and Jodhi May as Lizzie, which are crisp, sharp and utterly believable.

This film starts off with a great flourish, with Damian Lewis doing a perfectly tuned & on-target portrayal of a calm cool feral madman entrepreneur of the 1960s or 1970s, Paul Reynolds, surrounded by a collection of pretentious sycophants whose archetypes range back to the early Roman era. They party & posture amid Paul's palatial estate when Lizzie strolls in. Straight & serious Lizzie, for whom Paul develops an inexplicable attraction that ultimately leads to his & the film's doom. Lizzie, fresh from secretarial school, is hired by Paul as his personal assistant, although she never displays any sign of business or political aptitude. Given the task of organizing Paul's large collection of notes & papers into some kind of accessibility, she proudly shows him her accomplishment: everything's been prettily packaged & shelved in four color groups of boxes, no labels in sight, apparently interpreting her duties to be interior decoration.

As played by Jodhi May, Lizzie splits her emotive energies between the coy tilted head smirks teenage girls give dad when they want $80 for new jeans and hysterical outbursts that make you wonder if this takes place in an alternate universe without the benefits of psychotherapy.

There are other problems in placing this film in a known universe, although it tries hard to represent specific points in time. Early on, Paul dreamily says to Lizzie, "Computers, you should get into computers, that's where the future is. Women used to prevail in the field of computers but now the the guys are taking over." Oh yeah?

The film becomes increasingly choppy & episodic as it proceeds. I began to feel as though I were watching a version of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead" (sans Shakespeare or Stoppard) as done by Ed Wood, i.e. all the real action taking place in another universe.

Vague generalizations substitute for plot movement, grand statements about corporations being hippos & the future of business being in telecommunications & the internet, not vacuum cleaners. Unh hunh. No mention of laptops or cell phones.

Too bad. The first 20 minutes on Paul's estate & the ideas driving Friends & Crocodiles had a lot of promise. Great title, too. But the title's explanation, like the rest of the movie, are a terrible letdown.

I honestly thought that this was one of the greatest films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. Is it just me or are the general public getting less intelligent as I get older? It is true that in this film not everything is handed on a plate to the viewer, however, for me, this is what makes it a complete breath of fresh air. I'm quite bored with having every intricate detail of stories and characters in modern films served up to me as if I was completely mindless. This film leaves the viewer to do some thinking for a change and as part of the process it challenges their perspectives and values. We are then left with questions not only of the film but also of ourselves, which is exactly where we are supposed to be. It is is original, thought provoking and takes us back to the old art of story telling at its best.

Adam

Though handsomely produced and fairly diverting, this is ultimately a rather silly movie. Characters rise and fall and undergo drastic transformations at the whim of its simple-minded plot. (Mike Leigh's two-hander "Career Girls" seemed similarly unrealistic, but its characters were so endearing that it didn't matter.)

The biggest problem with "Crocodiles" is that it has a high school freshman's idea of what the workaday business world is like. The heroine's ascent is never believable, nor are the emotional changes she goes through. The three bosses we see -- a fussy, posturing little fellow played by Allan Corduner, a ruthless corporate CEO played by Patrick Malahide, and some pushy, fault-finding fat guy at the beginning -- are all ridiculous caricatures. The office Corduner presides over resembles a kindergarten class. The Damian Lewis character is treated by everyone there with inexplicable deference and indulged for months in ways no real-life company would put up with. (In fact, his character's imperturbable smugness throughout the film is increasingly hard to take.) And in light of what's happened in the real world, his success in establishing a string of old-fashioned bookstores seems sadly ironic.

The movie also forces us to watch too many long, lavish parties, and it's a reminder that -- for me, at least -- there's nothing more boring (although they were probably fun to stage).

On the other hand, Jodhi May remains fairly breathtaking in just about anything; and considering all the closeups and screen time she gets, I have the impression that Poliakoff was as enamored of her as I am.