Film reviews round-up: Patti Cake$, God's Own Country, Una, Stratton

A rags-to-riches tale, Yorkshire's answer to Brokeback Mountain, a tense stage adaptation and a cheesy actioner

Patti Cake$ (15)

★★★★☆

Geremy Jasper, 109 mins, starring: Danielle Macdonald, Bridget Everett, Siddharth Dhananjay, Mamoudou Athie, Cathy Moriarty,

“I’m 23 and I ain’t done shit,” Patti “Dumbo’ Dumbrowski (Danielle Macdonald) laments early on in writer-director Geremy Jasper’s rousing tale about a young would-be rapper. This is a feel good movie that comes dressed as a dirty, realist urban drama.

Patti is an overweight young white woman, leading a dead-end existence in the New Jersey suburbs. Her mother’s an alcoholic. The family has medical bills they can’t afford to pay. She’s working in a bar and her only chance of career advancement is getting a part-time job waitressing at weddings and parties.

The filmmakers go out of their way to emphasise Patti’s underdog status. One of our first glimpses of her is of her brushing her teeth. She looks awful – bloated and sallow-skinned. She may fantasise about sharing the wealth, power and adulation enjoyed by her favourite hip hop artists, but everything about her life is oppressive.

Patti, though, has an unlikely talent. She is a rapper with an ability to improvise quickfire rhymes that puts Eminem to shame. Every aspect of her life is a struggle – except when she is performing. When we hear her making up obscene limericks with her beloved but ailing grandmother Nana (Cathy Moriarty), we realise her way with words.

It’s a skill that Geremy Jasper shares. One of the pleasures here is the barrage of acerbic, foul-mouthed and very witty dialogue. All the main characters, from the local cop to Patti’s mother to her best friend and fellow hip-hop devotee Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay), express themselves in very vivid and salty language.

Jasper doesn’t ignore the incongruity of a Jersey girl from a white Protestant background trying to immerse herself in black music and culture. Patti risks sounding phony. There’s an excruciating scene in which she tries to prove herself to one of her hip-hop idols, at whose palatial home she is working as a waitress.

She has just made him a cocktail. “Stick to the drinks, white girl,” he dismisses her rap. Her mother Barb (Bridget Everett) is equally scathing. Barb is a bluesy singer with a Janis Joplin-like voice who, in her sober moments, when she is not vomiting in the lavatory, still dreams of becoming a rock star. “You don’t have a musical bone in your body,” she sneers when Patti reveals her own ambitions.

Plot wise, Patti Cake$ is straight from the Rocky or Cinderella playbook. The more that Patti is knocked back, the more inevitable it is that her talent will finally shine through. There is a lot of self-indulgent pathos as she is rejected again and again.

“I fucked up real bad. I thought I could be someone,” she says late on as she begins to succumb to self-pity. The moment she starts rapping again, though, the sentimentality is immediately curbed. Macdonald plays her in utterly winning fashion, capturing her indomitable spirit, her fieriness and her heroism, as well as her occasional tendency to feel very sorry for herself.

In spite of the rough, tough New Jersey settings, the film soon takes on a fairy tale aspect. Patti meets and befriends an anarchist punk, “Bastard – The Antichrist” (Mamoudou Athie), who somewhat improbably lives in a little hut in the woods, near the cemetery where both he and Patti have close family members buried.

He has his own makeshift recording equipment. For all his dreadlocks and nose rings, Bastard turns out to be a sweet-natured boy from a very middle-class background. He can play the piano. He’s the one who tells Patti that she has more talent in her little finger than any of her detractors.

The scenes in which Patti, Bastard, Jheri and the wheelchair-bound grandmother record their own single are whimsical in the extreme. As in The Full Monty or old Ealing comedies, they’re the group of lovable outsiders who come together to buck the system. Their song “PBNJ” is nonsensical but very catchy… and not very confrontational.

Patti Cake$ is full of references to poverty, hardship and illness. “It’s a cold world out there,” Patti is warned. We see her humiliated and head-butted. She is stuck in “dirty Jersey” where everything is a struggle and no one does her any favours. Nonetheless, her nickname “Dumbo” is revealing – and not just because of her size.

At times, the film become as maudlin and manipulative as any Walt Disney fable. Patti’s talent is so obvious to us as viewers that it is only a matter of time until everyone else in the film will notice it too. The suffering here is only ever skin deep. However, that doesn’t lessen the magic at all when she begins to rap.

God’s Own Country (15)

★★★★☆

Francis Lee, 105 mins, starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart

There’s a lot of mud, saliva and vomit in God’s Own Country, which inevitably is being billed as rural Yorkshire’s answer to Brokeback Mountain. This is the story of a same-sex love affair between a young farmer and a Romanian migrant worker.

Writer-director Francis Lee knows his world from the inside. His depiction of the farmer’s life is fascinating because it is both so intimate and so authentic. He shows his characters pregnancy testing cattle, lambing, building walls and generally shovelling the shit. It’s the detail which is so impressive here: the painstaking way a character will shear off a dead lamb’s fleece in order to trick a sheep into accepting another lamb as its own, or the scenes of the farmers trying to reassure the cattle.

Johnny (Josh O’Connor), who is in his early twenties, endures an existence of monotony and back-breaking toil. He’s embittered that he is stuck on the family farm when others of his generation are off at university. He drinks too much. He picks up men after trips to market, but doesn’t appear to have any meaningful relationships.

Johnny’s father Martin (superbly played by Ian Hart) has suffered a stroke and is no longer able to undertake any of the heavy work himself. He is gruff, dour and censorious in the extreme, with a big streak of Yorkshire stubbornness about him.

Johnny’s long-suffering grandmother (Gemma Jones) tries to keep the household together, but there’s too much work for all of them. That is why they hire Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), the Romanian. They house him in a dilapidated caravan and Johnny taunts him, calling him a “gypo”.

Gheorghe, though, turns out to be a natural when it comes to tending the livestock. He even knows how to make cheese from sheep’s milk – something the Yorkshire farming folk haven’t yet attempted.

Lee shoots God’s Own Country as if it’s an observational documentary, with Johnny as its subject. The youngster is continually shown in close-up. The director emphasises the harshness of his existence. Nonetheless, when Johnny and Gheorghe spend time together on the moors, the feuding stops. The Romanian brings out a gentleness in his lover that wasn’t at all apparent before. Even the landscapes, which had previously appeared hard and oppressive, seem to soften.

In its latter stages, the film risks losing its way. It turns into a conventional love story. There is betrayal, misunderstanding and the narrative becomes as mushy underfoot as the fields the farmers tramp through. Nonetheless, this is a highly impressive debut feature: bleak and lyrical by turns, and with very fine performances from its two young leads.

Una (15)

★★☆☆☆

Benedict Andrews, 92 mins, starring: Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed, Ruby Strokes, Tara Fitzgerald, Tobias Menzies

Una makes queasy and uncomfortable viewing. It is well enough acted, especially by a very febrile and intense Rooney Mara, but it is hard to work out at whom it is aimed, or why adapting David Harrower’s play Blackbird for the screen was ever considered a worthwhile idea.

Mara plays the eponymous Una, a woman in her late twenties who engineers a reunion with the man who sexually abused her when she was 13 years old. Ray (Ben Mendelsohn) has served time in prison and is now working as a boss at a warehouse. He has rebuilt his life.

Una’s motivations in tracking him down are difficult to fathom. Whether it is vengeance that drives her, or curiosity, or even desire, what is clear is that she is a disturbed and unhappy woman. Ray, now with a new name “Pete”, tries to brush her away, but when they do finally talk he attempts to justify his own behaviour. He claims that he loved her: that he wasn’t grooming her and that he doesn’t regard himself as a paedophile.

There are flashbacks to Una as a teenager (played by Ruby Stokes) meeting Ray. He was a friend and neighbour. We see them walking on a beach and at a funfair.

Director Benedict Andrews, best known for his theatre work, makes inventive use of the warehouse in which much of the film unfolds. It’s a huge maze-like building in which Una and her former lover can hide away from prying eyes. Certain moments, for example the meeting between Una and Ray’s current wife, are very cleverly staged.

Andrews captures the furtiveness, seediness and sadness of the doomed relationship between Una and Ray. What’s most unsettling and distasteful here is the relative sympathy with which Ray is treated. In spite of the devastation his behaviour causes, he is not simply portrayed as a monster. Nor is Una seen entirely as the victim.

Stratton (15)

★★☆☆☆

Simon West, 94 mins, starring: Dominic Cooper, Connie Nielsen, Gemma Chan, Tom Felton, Tyler Hoechlin, Derek Jacobi

Stratton is a perfectly serviceable action thriller, in the mould not so much of James Bond and Jason Bourne, but of an episode of a cheesy old TV show like The Professionals. The film is directed by Simon West, but was clearly made for a fraction of the budget of West’s Hollywood movies like Con Air.

Dominic Cooper is the ever-cheerful hero, a “Special Boat Service Commando” working for British intelligence. The film begins with a preposterous action sequence which involves Stratton and his American colleague swimming underwater to reach what appears to be an Iranian nuclear facility.

Within five minutes of the opening credits, we are served up shoot outs, chases, scenes of malfunctioning oxygen tanks and of helicopter rescues. The plot, such as it is, involves a rogue Russian agent who has made off with chemical weapons that he plans to unleash on London from the top of a doubledecker bus.

Danish actress Connie Nielsen enjoys herself as the prim but glamorous MI6 spy chief, overseeing the mission – even if she is a little coy about the fact that she was once the lover of the rogue Russian. Derek Jacobi seems to have popped out of a Charles Dickens novel as the boatman and father figure to Stratton.

The filmmakers are so busy cranking up the action that they don’t have much time for romance, although Stratton does make mooncalf eyes at colleague, old flame and computer expert Aggie (Connie Chang), courting her by discussing Napoleon’s battle tactics with her. There is also a bromance quietly brewing between Stratton and his new American partner.

All the expected elements are here – explosive action on land and underwater, chases, shootings and plenty of subterfuge from the agents. Cooper plays the hero with boyish enthusiasm. What can never be escaped, though, is the utterly formulaic nature of the storytelling.