The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years a friend gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing a film," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world aren’t anoraks who used to rent four films a day from their university DVD library and announce to long-suffering flatmates, with a self-congratulatory sigh, that they’d better get back to the Tarkovsky box set. Nobody gives a toss if a scene reminds you of Béla Tarr, or if a tracking shot is “so Nuri Bilge Ceylan”. It’s Baz Lurhmann, for fuck’s sake! Nice Baz Lurhmann, who had the decency to go on Jonathan Ross and do his bit for a fun new take on a beloved book. Stop showing off and just talk about the damn film.”

The Great Gatsby. The Great bloody Gatsby. I wonder if it’s one of those books, like On The Road or Camus’ The Outsider, that loses a certain youth-inflated vitality when you reread it later in life. When I read it for the first time at eighteen, it was bloody wonderful: the cagey narrator; the moonlit, humanist lyricism; the injustice of it all. When I read it again a few months ago, it wasn’t quite the life-affirming Great American Novel I remember, but a major work in a minor key – a slender, melancholic, occasionally mannered prose poem of ambition, longing and identity. However, I fear that Baz Lurhmann – for all his swooping party shots and lovely clothes and smart musical anachronisms – has sandblasted the subtlety out of it.

This Gatsby is a peculiar mix of slavish fidelity to the novel and a slather of Lurhmann’s own can’t-help-himself flourishes. Let’s start with the flourishes.

Our narrator Nick Carraway, that elusive outsider’s insider, has been planted onto a therapist’s couch and his written recollections of mysterious former neighbour Jay Gatsby provide the narrative frame of the story; this is a trite, unnecessary device that becomes more irritating as the film progresses. Lurhmann loves jerking back and forth: sometimes this works quite well (the restless editing of a desultory dinner party, Nick’s first with the Buchanans, gives the viewer an appropriate sort of social seasickness); at others it’s overflogged, as with the to-ing and fro-ing over the stretch of water from Gatsby’s house to Daisy’s. As such, at Meaningful Moments, the flow of the story jars back to Nick in his therapist’s office, deep in thought or passed out from too much writing, with his therapist bringing in cups of tea or tiptoeing around Nick’s papers as though they’re the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can’t help but feel Baz has treated the novel with the same tendentious awe as the psychiatrist treats Nick.

The visual brio of the film, Lurhmann’s trademark, is undoubtedly impressive, especially in the party scenes, which fall somewhere between a big brash music video, a Chanel advert and a Ken Russell rock opera. The music bolsters them, not just Jay-Z, but a Little Black Book of the novel’s talented fans (including Florence and the Machine, Lana del Rey and The XX): there’s a particularly fun, Goodfellas-type entrance to a secret party under a barbershop. It’s all just a bit soulless, more in keeping with the Brand Gatsby plastered in Harrods’ front windows as part of the advertising campaign than the low-key spirit of the original. Where’s Nick’s sense of loneliness? I always found the novel’s party scenes devastatingly solitary, whereas here Tobey Maguire just seems to be having a bit of a laugh. Even Tom Ford’s A Single Man, veneered with a similar Vogue magazine glossiness, managed to be delicate and wistful, thanks mainly to Colin Firth. But this Gatsby often feels like a musical without the singing, whose performances belong to the Les Misérables, “This Is My Happy Face, Now This Is My Sad Face” school of acting.

So, the performances. Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly good – initially radiant with charisma; a frenetic, past-darkened shadow of himself as time wears on – though his Gatsby has little of the sadness or intensity of his performance in The Aviator as Howard Hughes, a real-life, rich, reclusive, America-as-man. Carey Mulligan, an admirably unstudied performer, is slightly irritating as Daisy Buchanan, and I’m still not sure whether it’s because she succeeded in capturing a maddening character or whether she fell a bit short. Either way, I’ve never seen what all the fuss was about Daisy. She’s a terrible mother (one of the film’s few subtleties is the reminder, right at the end, that Daisy has a daughter), flirts with all men (including her cousin Nick), and, with a “voice full of money”, prides high society comfort over everything else. The scene where Gatsby gives Daisy the tour of his house and she expects music to be played in the ballroom, with Gatsby flinging designer clothes at her, made me feel a bit sick. Of course she was never going to leave Tom: unlike Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, the perks that come from being her husband’s wife are too great for Daisy. This makes for a much sadder, more pragmatically believable ending than running away with Gatsby. The best love stories are often those left unfulfilled (Casablanca; Brief Encounter; the gorgeous In The Mood For Love), but by the end of this Gatsby I wasn’t yearning across the bay for what might have been, I was wondering why Gatsby had wasted his time on a girl as materialistic and conformist as Daisy, a girl who loves Tom’s unenlightened, unearned social standing more than she loves Gatsby’s wild, self-made idealism and who prefers to forgive Tom years of philandering than Gatsby a one-off loss of temper.

Tobey Maguire has a tricky part as Nick, with lots of standing around observing (in that sweltering hotel room argument between Gatsby and the Buchanans, Maguire doesn’t talk for about fifteen minutes); disappointingly, he veers like Gatsby’s yellow car between wide-eyed simpering and preppy angst, a graduate older cousin to his Spiderman. Oh, for a Tom Hiddleston or a Zachary Quinto! Joel Edgerton, on the other hand, is rather good as hulking, old-money bastard Tom Buchanan. He is a dreadful man – he cheats on his wife, hits his mistress, champions white supremacy at the dinner table – and yet I did feel ever so slightly sorry for him towards the end, only momentarily, because he is such an idiot, and this is down to Edgerton’s nuances. The moment he sees Daisy tell Gatsby he loves her, and Daisy’s unconvincing assertion that she never loved Tom, prompts a moment of poignant, primitive vulnerability (as the novel says, “there is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind”). It’s also the one moment I felt sorry for Daisy: it is too much to force her to declare that, because she loves Gatsby, she couldn’t have once loved anyone else. But once the Buchanans reunite, and use Gatsby's corpse as a rag to mop up their own misdeeds, they are odious. I also rather liked Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the oleaginous Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s business associate and the embodiment of Gatsby’s dodgy-dealing, behind-the-mask Mr Hyde.

Amongst all Lurhmann’s tricks and twists, there is an almost religious reverence for the book’s words: one senses that Lurhmann and co-writer Craig Pearce went through the novel with a big bright highlighter and wondered which lines could be chucked straight into the script and which could be amplified out of all recognition. Sassy aphorisms are transposed into dialogue (“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy”) while Lurhmann’s absolute faves are plucked and projected onto the screen in a jumble of typewritten letters. The poeticism works best at its most throwaway (“his mind would never romp again like the mind of God”), but the line about guests coming and going like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars collapses under the joint earnestness of the script and Tobey Maguire: he takes a deep breath, doesn’t quite get it out in one go, don’t worry, take a quick pause, have a think, another breath, another think, then deliver the line, there it is, the famous line. The book’s even more famous final line is smothered, too, in a fog of heavy-handed imagery and repetitions. Lurhmann also, inexplicably, butchers the opening line (hypocrite, Cripps!), removing the reference to Nick’s own advantages in life and the irony that material privilege (particularly in the case of Tom) is any sort of intellectual or emotional advantage. It is also telling which bits Lurhmann has left out. For instance, Gatsby’s funeral, a muted affair where Nick meets Gatsby's father, is arguably the most moving moment in the novel, and Lurhmann’s omission of it speaks volumes for his priorities.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway described F. Scott Fitzgerald as a talent “as natural as the pattern made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings”. One wonders whether Baz Lurhmann, whose last film was Australia, is deft and patient enough to capture his sense of that talent without daubing over it in glitter and glue. It is so hard to adapt a novel for the screen, and it is even harder to adapt a book as adored as The Great Gatsby, especially when it's been done four times already. Who is to say that Lurhmann’s interpretation of the novel is less true to Fitzgerald than mine or yours, or less effective. However, the best screen adaptations – A Clockwork Orange; Barry Lyndon; The Virgin Suicides; Submarine – tend to give the original an extra dimension and not for one second did I feel Lurhmann was expanding on the novel. Which is such a shame, because he certainly managed it with his feverish, blood-and-sand Romeo + Juliet. Like Daisy Buchanan, Lurhmann seems to prefer the grandiose gestures, melodramatic sweeps, roaring parties, flash clothes and Chanel advert stares-and-glances to the quieter, deeper moments of psychological insight.

I shall end, if you’ll permit me, with a line from Fitzgerald’s later novel Tender is the Night: “When I see a beautiful shell like that, I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.” Inside Lurhmann’s Gatsby, for all its colour and kineticism, I fear there’s very little.

Ricky Gervais and 'Derek': a defence

The Office is one of the great artistic works of the twenty-first century. It was the Waiting for Godot of television comedy, a radical reinvention of the genre that will probably never be equalled. Weighted with a deadpan poeticism somewhere between Christopher Guest and Kafka, it is a staggeringly textured study of class, ennui, self-delusion, laughter, companionship, solitude and the importance of work. Its anti-hero, David Brent, joins Messrs Partridge, Fawlty and Mainwaring in the canon of misunderstood, quixotic, middle-English dreamers. It is the sort of show that makes you proud to be British.

Extras, Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant's follow-up, was a searing, complicated fable about fame, ambition and loyalty, and the sourest, sharpest satire of show-business since The Larry Sanders Show. (The best since Extras, for what it's worth, is Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback - it is bleakly magnificent and, like Human Remains, the sort of one-series wonder that commands an almost Masonic solidarity amongst its followers). Those who've been on a film or TV set may well have wondered what a lonely, Sisyphean existence the extra must lead: seen but not heard, they stand around, make hours of small talk with strangers, are herded back and forth like cattle, and can only eat once everybody else has. The pronounced, shifting hierarchy of the film set is a lovely metaphor for the hierarchy of life, and Andy Millman's ascent is a cautionary one. Everyone will have their favourite cameos (David Bowie; Ian McKellen; Daniel Radcliffe; Ronnie Corbett), but the Les Dennis episode is the tragicomic apogee of Extras and, outside of The Office, the finest half hour of Gervais' career to date.

Life's Too Short, Gervais and Merchant's much-anticipated third TV collaboration after a dabble in film, is the closest they've had to a dud. Though a nice conceit gamely played by Warwick Davis, it is difficult to see Life's Too Short as more than a Frankenstein's monster of Gervais' previous work: Warwick's speech patterns and exasperated looks to camera are almost identical to Brent's; the potted-career-satire of the celebrity cameo has become a bit paint-by-numbers (though Liam Neeson was wonderfully dour); Warwick's assistant and accountant are basically Maggie and Darren Lamb, minus the pathos; even Barry, Les and Cheggers (all revelations in Extras) are reappropriated and dumbed down. It feels altogether less sophisticated, and the subtle visual gags (like Warwick throwing his trousers against a background loo window while his assistant talks to an estate agent) are to be cherished amongst the funny-at-first, repetitious pratfalling (like Warwick falling out of his car for the tenth time). Sprinkle in private jokes nicked straight from the podcasts and the co-creators' cameos as themselves (which bottle the faux-mean-spiritedness of Gervais' public persona), and the result is a moveable feast gone stale and cold. This is, very much, their difficult third album.

Derek, then, is perhaps the bravest move of Gervais' career so far. Chris Rock once said that it takes serious balls to do comedy on stage as subtle as Gervais' early stand-up: it takes even more balls to make a sitcom as sincere as Derek. It is an anti-Life's Too Short, a gentle chamber piece that sheds his usual chrysalis of irony. The acrid moral wasteland of showbiz has been replaced by the cosy, death-around-the-corner altruism of an old people's home, and Derek himself is Gervais' most generous character to date - an affectionate, deceptively acute marvel: his performance takes a bit of getting used to and some argue the part should have been given to a 'better actor' (a Peter Capaldi, for instance), but I disagree: it is a perplexing performance that suits a profoundly personal show (half of Gervais' family work in care) and it's revealing that Gervais wrote this, his most understated work, on his own as I always assumed Merchant was the one who reined him in.

The characterization is complex, if muted. Derek's fellow carer Hannah (an enchanting Kerry Godliman) is the warm, grounded Tim figure. Derek adores her, as she does him, but Gervais resists the fairytale temptation to bring them together. Instead, she has a relationship with Tom (Brett Goldstein), who initially, intriguingly, is mean to Derek and comes across as a bit of a prick, but once they're together and she keeps forgetting date nights, their romance is left (deliberately?) underdeveloped. Derek's other friends are no-nonsense, handyman-of-the-people Dougie (a surprisingly convincing Karl Pilkington) and crass perv Kev (Gervaisian muse David Earl), with whom Derek channels the same, slightly wearisome "which would you rather" badinage that Gervais disciples will have heard countless times on Extras or podcasts. We must also remember the residents, a genteel community of non-complainers living in a shadow-mesh of each other's memories. Derek is a lovely character, but I did find the last episode's talking-heads montage, in which they bathe Derek with praise and Dougie wishes he could come back as him in another life, a bit too hagiographic. More interesting is the self-loathing Kev reveals in his talking-head and the qualified optimism of the Doc Brown character's rap.

Derek is genuinely life-affirming. How many sitcoms capture the quiet, gradual, dignified, terrifying, wistful, relief-flecked prospect of death? Of recent comedies, only Jo Brand's masterful Getting On comes close. The photo montages of the elderly residents looking back on their lives are almost unbearably moving. In the pre-series pilot broadcast in April last year, there is an awful moment of dramatic irony, heightened by the mockumentary format, when Derek comes back from a trip into town with lottery tickets for a favourite resident, who has died while he's been out. What follows – through-the-door glimpses of Derek putting her hand on his head; the "kindness is magic" recollection; Derek's unguarded, tear-blotched candour – is superlative, achingly sad television. There's something very affecting about a crying Ricky Gervais (a rare exception is the overwrought scene in his film The Invention of Lying at his mother's bedside, which has no build and comes rather out of nowhere). The pitiful scene in The Office where Brent begs Neil not to make him redundant and Andy Millman's virtuoso rant about fame in the Celebrity Big Brother house are glorious syntheses of Gervais the actor and Gervais the writer. But in Derek, it's even more touching. The final shot of the series, reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption's, is a rapturous, knock-the-wind-out-of-you delight, though surely former XFM DJ Gervais could have picked a song other than Coldplay's 'Fix You' (released 2005) to go over the top of it.

Good old Ricky Gervais. He can come across as a bit of a pompous arse - on chat shows; at American awards ceremonies; baiting Christians on Twitter - but he is the closest we have to a comedic poet laureate and Derek, far from mocking disability, is so sensitively written and imbued with such goodness that it could be shown in schools. An interviewer once put it to Joseph Heller that, since Catch-22, he hadn't written anything nearly as good. Heller replied: "No, but neither has anyone else." The same could be said of Gervais and The Office (even if Gervais implies so himself - he tweeted this exchange as "perfect"), and he won't better it. But with Derek he has plumbed unprecedented emotional depths and reminded audiences how sweet, understated and thoughtful he can be. Please watch Derek as soon as possible.

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson is arguably the finest film director working in the English language today. His work recalls the precocity of Welles, the verve of Scorsese and the meticulous grandeur of Kubrick, though it is Robert Altman's shadow that looms darkest - the sprawling allegorical narratives, the malaise-en-masse, that angry, American otherness. Most importantly, however, he has created and grown into his own distinctive cinematic grammar, which is both gloriously modern and reassuringly true to the intellectual rigour of seventies New Hollywood.

Anderson made ripples at Cannes in 1996 with his debut Hard Eight, a chamber-mooded, punchily performed crime drama. His follow-up Boogie Nights (1997) is Anderson's Mean Streets, a brash, bleak fantasia of lust and innocence lost. With its flawed grandiosity, dark Biblical tones and deadpan surrealism, Magnolia (1999) is a cinematic Tower of Pisa, a broad-canvas parable seared with modern frustrations. Punch Drunk Love (2002) is an arthouse photo negative of a typical Adam Sandler film, where a raging Sandler is, brilliantly, played for pathos rather than laughs. There Will Be Blood (2007) is a magisterial, seething epic poem of greed, guilt and fatherhood, and (along with Synecdoche, New York) the most impressive American film of the twenty-first century so far. 

The Master has been five years in the making, which has meant five years of fending off rather tiresome claims that it dared to critique the Church of Scientology: it's a shame that this, to many, is what the film will be known for, as it does infinitely more.

It is Anderson's maturest, strangest, most uplifting work to date, both more pared-down and more expansive than anything he's done so far. Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, a naval officer struggling to readjust to civilian life after the Second World War. He is an erratic, eccentric, addictive loner, not lucid or committed enough to be a Yossarian-type rebel-among-the-ranks: he sees genitalia in Rorschach tests, masturbates on the beach (like that other itinerant everyman, Leopold Bloom) and dry-humps women made of sand. One day, when a colleague dies after drinking Freddie's home-brewed hooch, he flees and stows away on a boat, where a wedding happens to be taking place. He is introduced to father-of-the-bride Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-styled polymath who immediately takes Freddie under his wing and into the bosom of his faintly cultish family of disciples. I won't say any more about the plot for two reasons: the first is it is so ambiguous I still haven't quite worked it out for myself; the second is it is almost incidental to what is really a triptych of character studies told through Pinteresque scenes of shifting power.

The film hangs on the dynamic between Phoenix and Hoffman, and it is completely intoxicating. Joaquin Phoenix gives the sort of performance that makes you slightly worry for his sanity: it shimmers with the danger and the volatility of a young De Niro, especially when he 'loses it' with a gentleman he is photographing in the mall, but it also has moments of considerable subtlety. Hoffman, on the other hand, has a stately, Wellesian control of his faculties: he invests Dodd with charm, authority, a disarming sense of humour, and a pedantic diction redolent of Daniel Day-Lewis' delivery in There Will Be Blood.

There is one scene in particular, where Phoenix and Hoffman are in adjacent prison cells, that crystallises their different acting styles. Phoenix is pure feverish id: he snarls and stumbles, kicks and claws, smacks the underside of the upper bunk with the back of his head like a chained bear, bites chunks out of the mattress, and smashes his porcelain basin. Hoffman barely moves throughout this: he leans on the bed and speaks gently, like a benign headmaster, until they start swearing at each other through the bars (expletive-filled arguments from protected positions seem to be an Andersonian leitmotif: two of the best are the fantastically rude phone call between Hoffman and Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love and Tom Cruise's outpouring to his barely conscious father in Magnolia).

The most powerful moment of the film comes when Hoffman first interrogates Phoenix. It starts tentatively and flippantly, with Phoenix farting and Hoffman warmly dismissing him as a "silly animal". When Phoenix begs to continue, Hoffman says he will, but this time, if he blinks, they have to start the questions from the beginning. What follows is four minutes of perfect cinema. It's perfect. It reminds you how good Phoenix can be, and wonder why it's taken him since Gladiator to be this good, but it also shows you how Anderson has evolved as a film-maker from his already assured early works.

The film carries a very fifties sadness, the same mix of stasis and upheaval you find in the literary works of Richard Yates or John Cheever, and the music enriches this. The soundtrack combines Jonny Greenwood's modernist, discordant strings-and-clunks with love songs from the time. Anderson said in a recent interview that the lyrics in post-war songs often refer to being reunited in another life with lost lovers, to dreams and ghosts (this gives Freddie's choice of film at the cinema, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, an added poignancy), and the use of these songs in the film reinforces the widespread emotional void the likes of Freddie and Lancaster attempt to fill with their own belief system.

There are other Andersonian preoccupations here. The danger of the preacher, at its most nuanced in Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd, rhymes with Tom Cruise's seduction guru in Magnolia and Paul Dano's wily pastor in There Will Be Blood. Freddie is debilitated by lust-induced guilt and longing, as are Julianne Moore, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall in Magnolia, as is Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights. When Hoffman makes Freddie walk from the wall to the window again and again in front of the family until he reaches some sort of breakthrough, it is the same subjugation tactic of public humiliation-dressed-up-as-atonement as Paul Dano uses on Daniel Day-Lewis in the famous 'I abandoned my boy!' scene in There Will Be Blood. But the hopeful, understated, ever so slightly unsettling end to The Master (in England, of all places) is unique within the Anderson canon.

In an article I wrote about Robert Altman last year, I suggested Paul Thomas Anderson was his mad, Smerdyakovian* heir. Now I feel he's even more than that, a sort of dark Messiah of American arthouse. We are very lucky to be alive at the same time as him. If you only see one film this year, this should be it.

* This is a reference to Dostoevsky and should be ignored.

Laughter in the Dark

I went to see Richard III at the Globe a few weeks ago. Mark Rylance was brilliant - shaggy; languid; ursine; subtly, pitifully repulsive - and, along with the rest of the cast, didn't bat an eyelid when a man in Bay C had what looked like a stroke and was gently extricated by a hoary team of ushers. But what spoilt the evening was the lady sat directly behind me, who didn't stop laughing throughout the play.

Richard III has its mildly funny moments, especially with old Rylance pantomiming to the front row, but it was telling which bits made her laugh: any vague mention of key plot or thematic buzzwords ('The Tower', Bosworth, a red rose, boars, Wales) elicited the strangest type of laughter, the sort of laughter you only hear in the theatre. It starts as a knowing, "don't say I didn't warn you"-type throat-clear, then shifts up a semitone into a hollow, self-congratulatory guffaw, and is often followed by a leisurely glance over the shoulder to see who else got it. It is divorced from humour. Yet the most depressing thing about this laughter is that the lady behind me was just one of dozens in our audience guilty of it: indeed, it seemed to become a sort of inane competition for who can understand or recognise a particular bit first.

Don't get me wrong, I love a laugh as much as the next man, even in a theatre (I once saw Rory Bremner live - a wonderful evening). But there's something about older, slightly more complicated plays and earnest new ones that elicits (from certain people) this smug, tepid, middle-class rictus-gargle. It is not the sound of people enjoying themselves, but of a stupefying, centuries-old, socio-intellectual flock insecurity. They are laughing at the shadows of the dialogue rather than the dialogue itself. The exaggerated public laugh is self-indulgent cultural territory-marking, the equivalent of cocking a hind leg over a work and pissing on it (or, indeed, farting on it). People who laugh like this are cousins to head-nodders and knee-tappers at sit-down music gigs (see any Later with Jools Holland audience) and those who preach and preen in art galleries.

Is it just me? Am I a grumpy git? Is there anything wrong with people laughing whenever they like? Unlike many, the sound of other people's laughter during a performance can turn me into even more of a bad mood bear. A Tim Key gig last year was tarnished for just this reason, and I adore Tim Key. In the Holy Trinity of high-end ‘art comedy', if Stewart Lee is the Father and Daniel Kitson the Son, Key is the e.e.cummings-flecked Holy Ghost. He is peerless. But I was sat on the very right of a horseshoe-shaped auditorium that night in Edinburgh and had a view of the entire audience, whose readiness to laugh at every single tiny gesture made the laughter track on series three of Little Britain seem understated. It reminded me of the same sort of empty, sycophantic laughter you get when, say, Tom Cruise goes on Jonathan Ross, the laughter of people who are saying “I've got a ticket to Tim Key and I'm laughing at him” (completely different to the nervous, bewildered, more scattered, occasionally thunderous laughter that met his early gigs).

God knows why we laugh when we do. You’ve Been Framed was on the other night: I watched some of it, perversely curious and staggered that it was still on, and it shames me how often I laughed (most of the clips involved old men falling onto or into things, like ponds). But I find even the computerised canned laughter of YBF has more soul than this theatre laughter, which reverberates with a sort of socio-cultural, unthinking mob clang, almost like a football chant or a prescribed response in a religious order of service. By all means have a drink when you’re at the Globe: you might even hire a cushion for a pound. But before you laugh, just think: did you really find that bit funny, or are you just showing off?

True Love

I don't tend to write about TV, but True Love is one of the finest pieces of British television of recent years and I want to spread the word.

It is a really classy, bold, unusual take on a familiar subject, both more cinematic and more literary than one might expect from a BBC One drama (though it is produced by hallowed film production company Working Title). Over five episodes, True Love focuses on five characters in seaside town Margate and the love-dilemmas that develop around them: David Tennant is happily married to nice Anna from Downton Abbey, until an old flame pops up; Ashley Walters is fed up with the sexless monotony of parenthood and embarks on an affair with a pretty stranger he spots at a bus stop; lonely English teacher Billie Piper develops an intense friendship with female pupil Karen (Kaya Scodelario from Skins), a rare ray of sunshine in a tough school; Jane Horrocks, stuck in a lifeless marriage, befriends a mysterious customer at her shop; and David Morrissey meets the perfect woman online, much to his daughter's disgust and an unexpected admirer's dismay.

I imagine a show like this is an actor's dream. Writer-director Dominic Savage encourages improvisation (he worked wonders with Colin Firth and Robert Carlyle in Born Equal), and here he elicits exceptionally deft, naturalistic performances. True Love is full of lovely nuances and achingly believable representations of relationships that have lost their spark (listless conversations in restaurants, kitchens, beds...), but there are a couple of scenes that rank amongst the best television acting I've seen. The first is the moment David Tennant tells his friend from work he's not sure he can stay away from his ex-girlfriend: the second is when David Morrissey, an actor I could watch all day, is confronted with a false accusation, one that could destroy a relationship for which he’s waited his whole life, and he defends his innocence with heartbreaking, animalistic urgency.

The structure and shifting perspective of the characterisation is ingenious (and much subtler than the likes of Crash), as the characters from each of the five episodes interlock and recur throughout the series: as in Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad, a character briefly introduced early on often reappears in rather a different light. For instance, Kaya Scodelario's Karen is a mature, gentle, artistically curious companion to her teacher Billie Piper in Episode Three, but a stroppy, unsympathetic cow with her dad (David Morrissey) in Episode Five. Billie Piper's bit-on-the-side (Charlie Creed Miles) goes from priapic indifference in Episode Three to something rather more vulnerable when we learn in Episode Four that his own wife is cheating on him. Karen is betrayed by her friend Lorraine, whom we glimpse very briefly as David Tennant's daughter in the first episode, but we see a very different side to Lorraine in the final one. Each episode is brought to a satisfying, authentic end, too, and they are refreshingly difficult to predict (the restraint of the David Tennant and Ashley Walters episodes is particularly impressive). The pathos is enriched by a rather interesting selection of music, though it is more effective when used sparingly. Roberta Flack's 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' is timed perfectly in the David Tennant episode, but the Mumford and Sons album is flogged within an inch of its life in the Jane Horrocks one.

This is masterful television. It combines some of the poetic, modern, gold-in-the-mud realism of Andrea Arnold with the understated, non-judgmental, elliptical characterisation of Alice Munro or Raymond Carver. Most importantly, it illustrates the intoxicating sense of abandon when a relationship is exciting and the strange, guilty languor when it isn't. Please watch all five episodes of True Love: they're only half an hour each and they whistle by.

Moonrise Kingdom

Why did she do it? Was she scared? Was she bored?

(Belle and Sebastian)

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I love Wes Anderson: the neo-Nouvelle Vague swagger, the precocious children, the middle-age ennui, the arch dialogue, the symmetrical compositions, the literary conceits (diaries, letters, books, chapter headings, narrators...). His debut Bottle Rocket (1996), now a cult classic, is a Salingerian tour-de-force, an off-kilter caper film with lovely breakthrough performances from the Wilson brothers and a superb, self-effacing cameo from James Caan. Rushmore (1998) is sadder, spikier and more ambitious, and one of the great American films about adolescence. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is Anderson's most complete work, a peculiar, ink-black ensemble tragicomedy of exceptional depth and verve. I wasn't sure about the following two, The Life Aquatic (2004) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007), but he returned to form with Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), a retro, sophisticated, anarchic delight.

His latest offering Moonrise Kingdom, which opened this year's Cannes Film Festival, is an artful, delicate, subtly poignant piece and visually his most impressive film so far. The year is 1965 and we are on a small island where scouting, self-pity and Benjamin Britten seem to be all the rage: it also rains very hard. During a (remarkably elaborate) local production of Britten's opera Noye’s Fludde, young scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) leaves the church auditorium and finds himself in a girls-only dressing room. 'What type of bird are you?', he asks the one in the middle. 'A raven', quoths the troubled Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). Immediate Andersonian Kindred Spirits, they correspond and hatch a plan to run away, Sam from his scout platoon at Camp Ivanhoe, Suzy from the family that don't understand her. Local police officer Bruce Willis leads the hunt, supported by Ed Norton's sensitive scout master, all the little scout cubs (or whatever they're called) and Suzy's weary lawyer parents, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand.

At times, it seems a bit weird to have two twelve-year-old lovers as main characters for a film, behaving as though they're in their own mini-version of Badlands; the scene where Sam paints Suzy in just her bra and knickers is particularly borderline. But Anderson just about gets away with it, as Eric Rohmer got away with the little girl's holiday romance in Pauline at the Beach, because of the summery innocence and genuine empathy that underpin the snogs and fumbles. It's also less an affair than an adventure, in which Sam's diurnal boy-scout pragmatism and Suzy's bedtime reading dovetail rather well.

Indeed, as ever, Anderson celebrates the eccentrically imaginative, and the film itself has the hand-crafted charm of the community performance of the Britten opera. As Ed Norton observes in a rather fun interview on the Guardian website, characters put on plays throughout Wes Anderson's work and they often go unappreciated, like Max's brilliantly over-the-top productions in Rushmore and Margot Tenenbaum's play that her father Royal claims 'didn't seem believable to me'. The sympathy for the outsider is allied to a wariness of conformity and the cocksure, evidenced in the Teddy Boys at Sam's foster home and the ‘Lord of the Flies’-aggression of the cubs in the woods when they find the fugitives (led by an Aryan, Ralph-like figure on a motorbike who, to his great credit, has an epiphany later in the film and persuades the other boys that Sam needs their help). Harvey Keitel's bullying old-boy scout patriarch, who humiliates Ed Norton in front of a huge crowd, is the adult extrapolation of this easy, unthinking, macho bastardry, so it is rather a satisfying, graceful riposte, immediately afterwards, when Norton rescues Keitel from his burning cabin by carrying him on his back, like an ironic Anchises.

The film is full of lovely performances and Anderson's direction of the child actors is commendably understated, but the two stand-outs are Bruce Willis and Ed Norton, both sweet, solitary, beta-heroes who buck the trend. There is a particularly touching scene where Ed Norton stops halfway through a recording of his dictaphone-diary, is hit by a sort of existential crisis, and stays silent for about five seconds. Anderson has a real knack for these miniature moments of overwhelming pathos. There's a scene in Fantastic Mr Fox where the young fox Kristofferson, whose father is very ill, is made to sleep on the floor by his resentful cousin Ash. It's the last straw, and he starts to cry. Again, it's only for about five seconds, then we're onto the next scene (see also pretty much any scene with Bill Murray in Rushmore). Some dismiss Anderson as mannered and superficial, but I can't think of a director who can produce pearls of sadness in the everyday as purely and effectively as he can.

The film also has a visual brio that surpasses even Anderson's best work, and two scenes are especially impressive. A midnight canoe expedition uses natural light in a way I haven't seen since the likes of Barry Lyndon and early Terrence Malick. Then, for the film's climax, a rescue sequence on top of a church is a maelstrom of moonlit rain, shadow and indigo, the cinematic equivalent of the astonishing storm-in-the-forest chapter of Nabokov's Pale Fire ('A flash of lightning, a handshake...'). It also provides an ingenious, cockle-warming solution to Sam's predicament (which I won’t spoil).

Moonshine Kingdom has its flaws. There is a lull about halfway through, a little too long is spent on Sam and Suzie's meanderings, and some of the cameos work better than others (regular Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman is a joy; Keitel and Swinton slightly less so). But the third act of the film is glorious and, for a stylised 'auteur' like Anderson, transposes unusually complicated, naturalistic exchanges within credible relationships (the scene when Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are in their adjacent single beds, for instance).

I sometimes think of Wes Anderson as the Belle and Sebastian of cinema, inasmuch as the quirky, cosy, crisp conveyance often covers up something a bit darker: the loneliness of the playground, the melodrama of puberty, the wry hyper-maturity of the outcast. Moonrise Kingdom, perhaps better than any of Anderson's work so far, captures the difficulty of family, the importance of companionship, and the cathartic moment children realise adults aren't perfect. A strange, tender, hopeful triumph.

The Descendants

Alexander Payne (along with Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Haynes) is one of the few American filmmakers still able to make sophisticated, distinctive, independent-minded films. Payne harks back to a more intelligent, artistically rigorous Hollywood, the New Hollywood of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. He is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of middle-aged stasis in middle-class Americana, a classy, wise, endlessly sympathetic chronicler of modern agonies. His breakthrough film, Election (1999), is a stylish, searingly funny school-as-politics allegory, with all sorts of symbolic currents of male sexual longing. About Schmidt (2002) is a patient, melancholy deconstruction of old age, led by an intriguingly reserved Jack Nicholson. Sideways (2004) is a sparkling wine of a film, an existential meander amongst the vineyards of friendship, marriage, casual sex and the tensions between the three. Payne’s short ‘14e arrondissement’, the final vignette in the variable anthology film Paris, je t’aime (2006), is possibly his most impressive achievement so far, a genuinely beautiful seven-minute hymn to happiness, narrated in halting French by an American postwoman on her first European holiday. Please watch it immediately if you haven’t already (here on YouTube).

The Descendants, then, is Payne’s first feature film in seven years, and it is ever so slightly disappointing. George Clooney plays Matt King, an affable Hawaii-based lawyer whose wife is sent into a coma after a speedboat accident. Matt is then burdened with family responsibility from all sides: he must look after his two livewire daughters (aged seventeen and ten) and deliver the news about his wife to all and sundry, but he must also oversee the potential sale of his ancestors’ vast plot of land, acting as sole trustee amongst his various cousins. The waters are muddied when Matt finds out his wife had been having an affair, so Matt and his daughters embark on a Broken Flowers-style hunt to find the culprit, bumping into friends and family along the way.

George Clooney is excellent, as ever, in what might be his saddest, most nuanced role so far, even lonelier than his one in Up In The Air. The secondary performances are universally strong, particularly Clooney’s two daughters and Beau Bridges as a hippy relative, and Payne’s characterisation is always admirably complicated. But there’s something rather staid and detached about the whole film. It is characteristically subtle, funny and dark, but it never seems to get going and certainly never reaches the heights of Payne's previous work. The philosophy of family and one’s place in history could also be explored more acutely than with photos of great-great-grandparents and hugs with cousins.

The Descendants is comfortably better than most American comedy dramas, very comfortably, and Alexander Payne remains one of the sharpest, most respectable figures in American cinema. However, the presence of Robert Forster, so good in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, made me wonder if this is Alexander Payne’s Jackie Brown, an intelligent, familiar, slightly restrained follow-up to an acknowledged masterpiece. Payne was always going to struggle to follow Sideways (for whose screenplay he won an Oscar, as Tarantino did for Pulp Fiction), but he’s had seven years since then and I worry that, in this instance, he’s mellowed at the expense of his socio-satirical bite. The short from Paris, je t’aime shows that Payne has not only still got it, but can scale even greater heights than Sideways. Ultimately, this film is rather like its central character: rational, very likeable, bold in places, funny in a sad sort of way, but ultimately both hold too much back, trapped between the past and the future, and are capable of so much more.