Past and present worlds on Netflix

You’ve probably all seen The Crown by now. I enjoyed it but like many of the mini-series on Netflix it was anything but ‘mini’. I also thought John Lithgow was far too tall for Winston Churchill though his performance is solid. We’ve been so spoiled by some of the recently brilliant depictions of Churchill on the big screen the bar has been set very high. As for Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth, I had no problems here. Ms Foy is shaping up to be the new Helen Mirren.

Dramas

Ever since I tuned into The Crown, Netflix has been inundating me with period dramas. Bridgerton is the latest one on offer. I can’t recommend this yawnful depiction of high society in Regency London. It’s been dubbed ‘a raunchy Downton Abbey’ and that’s a pretty apt description. Life is too short for these inconsequential costume epics.

Coming up to the present, Hope Gap is a riveting depiction of marital breakdown with astonishing performances from Annette Bening and Bill Nighy as a couple who’ve been drifting apart for years. Bening has to face the prospect of Nighty walking out on her as the film begins. During the next hour she undergoes all the parabolas of emotion you might expect – rage, disbelief, sarcasm, loneliness, raw pain. It’s played with downbeat elegance on a suitably bleak corner of England against the backdrop of the Cliffs of Dover.

I can also recommend Marriage Story, a more streetwise film from Noah Baumbach on a similar theme. Here it’s the woman who walks out.  Scarlett Johansson courageously goes without make-up for the part and looks almost plain as a result. (I never thought I’d see myself using the words ‘plain’ and ‘Scarlett Johansson’ in the same sentence.)  A lot of it boils down to a child custody squabble. I thought it was going to turn into a latterday version of Kramer Vs Kramer for a while but thankfully it doesn’t go down that schmaltzy road.

Sides

Baumbach doesn’t take sides. That’s what makes it so engrossing. His style, like that of his directorial mentor Woody Allen, is almost documentary in tone. The film plays out like a matrimonial autopsy. For much of the time my sympathies were with Adam Driver,  Johansson’s husband. I was reminded of the man who said, ‘Alimony is like putting a dime into the traffic meter after your car has been towed away’.

If you want to see pure evil in action, watch the Spanish thriller The Occupant. It’s one of these ‘cuckoo in the nest’ films where a character infiltrates another person’s life in an attempt to almost become them. The trope for this genre can be seen in everything from Unlawful Entry to One Hour Photo. It’s disturbing but ingenious in its depiction of a man who loses his job and, subsequently, his comfortable life in a luxurious apartment. After he’s forced to move out of it he targets the new owner and hatches his nefarious plan.