Film reviews round-up: David Brent, Nine Lives, Swallows and Amazons, Childhood of a Leader

Kevin Spacey turns into a cat, the UK's worst boss hits the road, and a children's classic comes to the big screen

David Brent: Life On The Road (15)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Ricky Gervais, 93 mins, starring: Ricky Gervais, Oliver Maltman, Doc Brown, Thomas Kadman, Michael Keat, Carol Walton

It takes a special comic skill to make a film about mediocrity and disappointment that isn’t... mediocre and disappointing. Ricky Gervais just about manages the feat but Life On The Road, reviving the character of David Brent 13 years after The Office finished its British TV run, is still depressing viewing. Audiences are likely to squirm and cringe as much as they are to laugh at Brent’s misadventures and at his uncanny ability to misread any social situation.

In an American movie, when characters want to escape the rat race, they hit the open road. They have Jack Kerouac and Highway 61 Revisited as lodestars. In Britain, or at least in David Brent’s squeezed little middle England corner of it, the best that can be hoped for is burning rubber on the M25. Sidcup, Ipswich, Gloucester... the names of the towns invoked by Brent here don’t excite the imagination.

As first encountered here, Brent has a soul-destroying job selling personal hygiene products for a company called Lavichem. He is not even the boss anymore. When he walks into the office with that diffident smirk on his face, most of his colleagues groan and avert their eyes.

He wants to ingratiate himself but his office banter manages to offend or baffle his listeners. Only the kindly Pauline (appealingly played in low-key comic fashion by Jo Hartley), who unaccountably seems to have a crush on him, and his ever-optimistic friend Nigel (Tom Bennett), who shares his inane sense of humour, have any time for him at all.

Gervais’s performance as Brent is fascinating. We are never quite sure whether we should pity, despise or identify with him. He can be very appealing in his own baby seal-like way. One moment, there will be a please-don’t-club-me, Norman Wisdom-like, little-man-against-the-world pathos about him but the next he will say something ineffably creepy.

The conceit of the film is that Brent wants to be a rock star. A camera crew (never seen) is following him as he takes a sabbatical from his job and puts together a band. As he continually reminds us, Brent is paying for everything. His job as a rep may be grim but he has a nice car and his credit cards don’t bounce.

The band, Foregone Conclusion, perform a series of gigs in the Berkshire area. Brent’s songs cover a strange mix of topics, everything from the plight of “Native Americans” to a plea for tolerance for the disabled and an excruciating heavy rock anthem about a party that is going on in his trousers.

The band members clearly know how to play their instruments. Andy Burrows, formerly or Razorlight, is cast as the drummer and co-produced the soundtrack. Doc Brown is a talented rapper. Brent himself is a confident presence on stage, even if his songs are ridiculous.

It’s hard to know quite what point the film is trying to make. As a road movie, it stalls right at the outset. (It is one of the recurring jokes that Brent is never ever more than a few miles away from where he started.) As a film about the music business, it doesn’t have much oomph either. After each gig, Brent is left on his own in his dressing room, ruminating to camera and wondering where everything went wrong.

The only way he can find companionship is if he pays the band members to drink with him. In one of the film’s most grotesquely comic scenes, he picks up two floozies and takes them back to his hotel room. One binges on prodigious amounts of chocolate and champagne from the mini-bar. There is no romance at all as Brent sits quietly watching her, working out just how much he is paying for her gluttony.

There can’t really be a happy ending here. Brent isn’t going to turn into Keith Wood, win the battle of the bands or suddenly develop better social skills. He is trapped in his own mediocrity. Nonetheless, the longer he sticks around, the more people seem to warm to him and the softer and more sentimental the storytelling becomes.

At least, he has a dream to follow, unlike most of his vicious, back-stabbing office colleagues. By the final reel, characters who’ve spent the movie completely infuriated and exasperated by him are ready to have a pint with him – and this, in Brent’s world, is a triumph that justifies all the failures and humiliations that he has had to endure along the way.

Nine Lives (PG)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Barry Sonnenfeld, 87 mins, starring: Kevin Spacey (voice), Jennifer Garner, Christopher Walken, Robbie Amell, Malina Weissman, Cheryl Hines

This feline-themed comedy at least feels topical. Spacey plays Tom Brand, a businessman and property tycoon with more than a passing resemblance to Donald Trump. His only ambition is to build the highest tower in the world. He is so self-absorbed that he has been ignoring his cute little 11-year-old daughter who wants a cat for her birthday.

At the last minute, Spacey heads off to a mysterious pet shop run by a cat whisperer called Felix (Christopher Walken) to buy a cat. A few twists of the plot later, his human body is in a coma and his personality has somehow been trapped inside the cat.

Spacey enjoys himself voicing the fat moggie, who is named Mr Fuzzypants. He is sneering and sardonic as he contemplates a life eating cat food – it makes him retch – having kids scratch his ears and doing his business in a cat litter. In its darker moments, he laps up malt whisky from a saucer and gets himself sozzled.

Walken is in eccentric form as the shock-haired pet shop owner, a mystic who can somehow talk to cats. The shareholders are threatening to steal Brand’s company from under his paws and to go “public.” His new skyscraper isn’t likely to be the tallest one either. The very trite lesson Mr. Fuzzypants needs to learn is that family comes before business. His wife (Jennifer Garner) has been having an affair but after a few days as her pet, he realises she still loves him.

In its own feeble way, Nine Lives is quite fun. It’s enjoyable to see actors of the calibre of Spacey and Walken pitting their claws against one another in a low-grade kids’ movie. There’s an enjoyably louche and over the top turn from Cheryl Hines as Brand’s alcoholic, money grabbing first wife. The sub plot about the takeover of Brand’s company plays like a patchy old episode of Dallas. It is a mystery, though, why Barry Sonnenfeld (director of The Addams Family and Men In Black) and his cast were drawn to such skittish material.

Swallows & Amazons (PG)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Philippa Lowthorpe, 97 mins, starring: Andrew Scott, Kelly Macdonald, Rafe Spall, Jessica Hynes, Harry Enfield,

This new adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s novel evokes a long-lost era in which kids didn’t just spend their days searching for Pokémon or playing Call Of Duty. Instead, they had rip-roaring adventures in sailing boats and camped on remote islands.

The film is very evocatively shot, recreating 1930s rural England in loving Hovis-ad fashion, complete with tweed caps, cardigans and idyllic villages that always seem to be full of bunting. A rousing musical score and lively performances from the young actors also help.

The downside is the tweaking to the plot. For no apparent reason, the filmmakers have grafted on a John Buchan/Alfred Hitchcock-style spy story to proceedings. Rafe Spall plays the secretive and curmudgeonly Jim Turner, who has a houseboat on the lake and whose gruff behaviour scares the children. Andrew Scott is the mysterious outsider who is tracking Turner.

The film is at its best when the adults are kept at bay. Comedians Jessica Hynes and Harry Enfield seem strangely cast as farm folk, Mr and Mrs Jackson. Kelly Macdonald has a thankless role as the long-suffering mum, Mrs Walker.

Where the film really takes wing is when the Swallows and Amazons are trying to steal each other’s boats, making expeditions by moonlight or are planning just what they’re going to eat after dropping their provisions in the lake.

The Childhood of a Leader (12A)

★★★★☆

Dir: Brady Corbet, 116 mins, starring: Tom Sweet, Berenice Bejo, Liam Cunningham, Robert Pattinson, Stacy Martin

Corbet’s very striking directorial debut is a study of a young brat who turns out to be a fascist leader in the making. The film, partly inspired by a Jean-Paul Sartre story, is set just after the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson was attempting to bring peace to Europe. Prescott (Tom Sweet) is a young American boy whose father (Liam Cunningham) is a US diplomat working for Wilson in negotiations toward signing the Versailles Treaty.

He is a golden-haired child who looks beatific but whose behaviour is monstrous. (The staging points in the plot aren’t chapters but his various tantrums.) He antagonises priests, gropes his governess (Stacy Martin) and drives his long-suffering mother (Bejo) close to despair.

In his own warped way, he is perceptive and disciplined – and always aware of the weaknesses of others. When anyone tries to punish him, he resists ferociously. In a battle of wills with his mother, there can be only one winner. He is a far more effective and brutal negotiator than the politicians around him.

Most of the film is set in the murky old European country house where the boy’s family is staying during the negotiations. Scott Walker’s magnificent, often very strident orchestral soundtrack adds to the feeling of mounting unease. Corbet doesn’t offer glib psychoanalytical explanations for the boy’s behaviour. He doesn’t try to root the boy’s perversity in his parents’ treatment of him or to attribute it to the turbulent political climate in which he is growing up.

At times, there are longueurs. This seems more of a case study than a drama. Certain characters are very sketchily developed. (Robert Pattinson plays two roles but is still seen only fleetingly.) Nonetheless, the film, shot in very dark hues, has a sombre power and twisted humour about it that is only accentuated by its elliptical narrative style.