Reviews Round-up: Embrace of The Serpent, Mother's Day, When Marnie Was There

Plus, Isabel Coixet's Learning to Drive

Female leads Anna and Marnie in the latest Studio Ghibli release When Marnie Was There (Studio Ghibli)

Embrace Of The Serpent (12A)
Four Stars

Ciro Guerra, 125 mins, starring: Nilbio Torres, Jan Bijvoet, Antonio Bolivar

Young Colombian director Guerra’s visionary and wildly ambitious film seems like a movie from another era. It’s the kind of jungle epic that Werner Herzog might have tackled in his prime. Spectacularly shot in black and white (with just a brief explosion of colour late on), it follows two different expeditions down river by European ethnographers many years apart but with the same shaman in tow.

They are both in search of a sacred plant - one because he is dangerously ill and hopes it will help him survive and the other in search of dreams and enlightenment. The shaman (Antonio Bolívar), the last survivor of his tribe, has an attritional relationship with these white men. He can’t understand the way they cling to their possessions but in their trunks are the drawings, diaries, and photographs chronicling their trips - and these are the only records of a civilisation that is fast disappearing after the colonialists spread “hell and death” in their wake.

The film is inspired by real-life figures Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes but has the mesmeric power of a Conrad story.

Mother’s Day (12A)
One Star

Garry Marshall, 118 mins, starring: Britt Robertson, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts, Jason Sudeikis

Marshall's horribly flaky and soft centred ensemble drama is set in the Atlanta suburbs in the run-up to Mother's Day. There is the usual mishmash of protagonists. Jennifer Aniston is a divorced mom whose ex-husband (Timothy Olyphant) has just married a much younger woman. Kate Hudson is a mom whose redneck parents have disowned her because she had an affair with an Indian doctor (Aasif Mandvi.) (She hasn’t told them that she has now married the man.)

Her sister (Sarah Chalke), who lives next door, is keeping quiet the fact that she is in a gay marriage. Jason Sudeikis is a grieving single dad. His karaoke-loving US military wife died (it is never revealed quite how) and when he is not at home moping and watching old videos of her singing, he’s at the supermarket buying sanitary towels for his teenage daughter.

Julia Roberts is a writer and TV personality who is single but has a family secret which pops out just in time for the final reel. Jack Whitehall is a gangly British barman and would be stand up comedian whose girlfriend (Britt Robertson) refuses to marry him, even though they have a baby together.

The plotting is contrived and the characters speak in melodramatic psycho-babble. Alongside its gooey sentimentality, the film also celebrates consumption and consumerism. The only real way the parents here seem able to express their affection for their kids is buying them presents or throwing them extravagant parties with clowns and llamas in tow.

Learning To Drive (15)
Three Stars

Isabel Coixet, 90 mins, starring: Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Grace Gummer, Sarita Choudhury, Jake Weber

Coixet’s small scale but finely observed New York-set drama was inspired by an article in the New Yorker. It has a determinedly literary feel about it. Its main character, Wendy Shields (Clarkson) is a book reviewer and author. She is first encountered chasing her husband into a yellow cab. After 21 years of marriage, he has walked out on her.

She is bitter, humiliated, and very angry. The cab driver (Ben Kingsley in a variety of different coloured turbans) is a calm, scrupulously polite Sikh who came to New York in 2000. He is also a driving instructor and becomes her teacher. For Wendy, learning to drive with him isn’t just about mastering the car. It’s a form of therapy. The rapport and intimacy between them grows even as he prepares for an arranged marriage. This is a low key but witty and often affecting film with excellent performances from Clarkson and Kingsley.

When Marnie Was There (U)
Four Stars

Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Jamie Simone, 103 mins, voiced: Hailee Steinfeld, Kiernan Shipka Geena Davis, John C. Reilly

This animated feature from Studio Ghibli may not have been directed by (the now retired) Hayao Miyazaki but it shares many of the hallmarks of Miyazaki’s films. Based on a children’s book by British author Joan G. Robinson, it’s yet another story about a lonely young girl who has fantastical adventures.

Anna, a tomboyish-looking 12-year-old, lives a sad life in Sapporo with her foster parents. They send her away to the country to spend the holidays with relatives. Here, she becomes obsessed by a derelict old marsh house which is eerily familiar to her. Sure enough, she is soon befriended by Marnie, a blonde-haired girl her own age who seems to have come back from the past. The film has a mournful delicacy and sense of mystery about it which counterbalances its sentimentality.