Friends & Crocodiles

While looking and feeling like big production TV from the BBC the central question marks are really the pivot points of Friends and Crocodiles.

Set initially in the a multi-millionaire's world of bizarre parties and meaningless hedonism it is a timeless journey into one man and one woman's counterbalancing act. He wild. She composed. He unorganized. She overly so etc;

The Eighties in Britain were a time of an implosion of time and security, and rapidly followed by immense greed. On the flip-side of this was a vast sub-culture spawned by the rejection or denial of access to the success of Thatcherite policies.

But this is not a film about politics, or even economics, and it has a strong surreal edge to it - it is definitely worth viewing for the juxtaposition between the work ethic - protestant, bourgeois, uptight - and the new entrepreneur - free-wheeling, charismatic, and mesmerizing.

Largely successful Poliakoff writes a great visual script and directs in sweeping tranches of panoramic vistas - this is largely a film based on ken Russell's sensibilities of what make film work - it is bold, and fun, but for my taste at the end of the day - a bit like the Eighties themselves - had loads of style but the substance is obscure...

It works best in the unreal world of parties and we thought it fell apart when the parties ended. Brilliant first half. Weaker second.

The rise and fall and redemption are too commonplace - here the acting should have had power rather than a footnote to the parties - and we were left wondering if,like the Eighties, it was all a bad hangover and a fitful night.

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.

This piece seems to have divided the audience and critics. We have seen and heard more negative reviews than positive ones.

We thought it was a very interesting and enjoyable piece. As so often with Poliakoff, he creates characters who don't behave as you expect them to. They infuriate and they surprise you.

In this epic piece, spanning some 20 years (early eighties to early naughties)Poliakoff examines themes of business, friendships and survival in a fast-changing world.

Crocodiles are an interesting metaphor for survival and coping with change/trauma.

So are friends, both the loyal and the relatively fair-weather variety. Both types are on display here.

Drama about business is usually horribly infuriating because the playwright has little or no insight into how business really works. Similarly technology. Poliakoff understands business and technology far better than most writers.

Of course the piece simplifies and takes positions on these issues - who wants a 20 parter on such subjects - but the piece works excellently well as a sub 2 hour film for TV.

Several critics said that they "just don't get it" with this piece. I feel sorry for them if that is really the case. Perhaps most critics, like most writers, have little understanding of business and/or technology.

The acting is excellent - Damien Lewis (everywhere these days) and Jodhi May predictably good. A few cameos for old favourites too.

The cinematography is just stunning - Poliakoff is probably now at the very top of his game in this aspect of his work.

It's big canvas stuff, it is truly beautiful to look at and it leaves you plenty to think about and talk about afterwards.

We need more of this quality of stuff on TV and cinema please!! And this piece will last. Some of those who "don't get it" just now will, in a few years time, be hailing it as a classic and repeating it for decades to come. It's that sort of piece.

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.

One of Stephen Poliakoff's most interesting films, I was very glad to catch up with it recently (via Netflix DVD).

He manages to not only present a most unusual variation on screen love stories, this one about a deep but platonic relationship among co-workers but also encapsulates the key societal changes in recent decades in novel fashion.

Most impressive to me was how Poliakoff zeroed in on technological changes on society and the strange but made understandable social trends of late. The hippy era thinking that has since been replaced by right-wing emphasis on selfishness/materialism is beautifully shown in many of the characters, principally Damian Lewis's anarchic business whiz. The current turmoil of "creative destruction" and how it affects one's job security is brilliantly analyzed.

Even technological progress and fads are cleverly shown, as in the Shark Tank styled pitch session for "electric books", pre-Kindle. All that's missing in the auteur's prognostication is the smart-phone mania that has set in just a few years after shooting in 2004.

One side note is how Damian Lewis's madman in business character presages his current starring role in TV's "Billions" -quite a different character, yet this BBC TV Movie certainly could have served as his audition for the later role.