Herself: Richly poignant empowerment drama

Herself (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and vicious domestic violence

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.29.21 

There’s a strong sense, throughout this superbly mounted little Irish drama — exclusive to Amazon Prime — that star/co-scripter Clare Dunne writes from personal awareness.

 

I dearly hope that isn’t the case.

 

Sandra (Clare Dunne) and younger daughter Molly (Molly McCann) are delighted by
the progress being made under the watchful gaze of contractor Aido (Conleth Hill).

She stars as Sandra, a single mother with two young daughters, who has just escaped her possessive and abusive partner, Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson). Although “the system” has kept a roof over their heads, bouncing them from one tiny hotel room to another, she’s barely scraping by. She works two part-time jobs, to keep them fed: as a pub barmaid; and as a housekeeper for Peggy (Harriet Walter), an aging doctor for whom Sandra’s mother once worked, back in the day.

 

But these details come a bit later. Director Phyllida Lloyd, and scripters Dunne and Malcolm Campbell, open their film with a shocking sequence: Gary bloodies Sandra’s face and then stomps on her wrist, shattering it far beyond any hope of total recovery.

 

The worst part? Sandra has anticipated just such an encounter, arming elder daughter Emma (Ruby Rose O’Hara) with a previously written plea for help and a code phrase — “black widow” — that sends the little girl running to the closest store.

 

Despite this, months later, Sandra’s still forced to interact with Gary, given that he gets weekend visits with their daughters. (Seriously? After that display of violence? If this is accurate, either Sandra had a crap lawyer, or Ireland needs to seriously revise its family protective services laws.)

 

And, as always is the case with serial abusers, Gary’s doing his best to wheedle his way back into their lives. Which, to Sandra’s credit, she rejects utterly. She most emphatically is not a serial victim.

 

But she is increasingly desperate, because the status quo isn’t sustainable; lacking a permanent home isn’t psychologically healthy for her daughters. Worse yet, this situation actually lends weight to Gary’s contrasting “stability,” since he’s living with his parents. But Sandra seems without options; rents are beyond her financial ability, never mind mortgages and property prices.

 

One day, a passing reference in one of her daughters’ bedtime stories proves inspirational: Could she build her own home? (Dunne was inspired, as she explains in the film’s production notes, by Irish architect Dominic Stevens, who with friends constructed a wooden self-build in 2012, for roughly $33,000.)

 

Seductive as this notion is, money remains an issue. During an exchange with a bureaucratic clerk that brilliantly illustrates the ludicrous flaws of the welfare system, Sandra accurately argues that a one-time loan would be far cheaper to the system, than the ongoing costs associated with hotel expenses … and gets nowhere. It’s a shrewdly scripted shake-your-head exchange.

Official Secrets: Thou shalt not lie

Official Secrets (2019) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.13.19

This fact-based drama could not be better timed.

More than ever, we must be reminded of the imperative necessity of speaking truth and integrity to power.

Once exposed and arrested, Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) is allowed a brief visit from
her husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri). In a touching act that feels genuine, he brings her a
thick jacket, because he knows the jail cell will be cold.

Along with the value of the Fourth Estate, and its role in exposing the filthy secrets of power-mongers who believe they can get away with anything.

And of the foolishness of reflexively relying on a crutch such as Spell check.

Director Gavin Hood makes smart, thoughtful films that don’t get near enough attention in the mainstream market. Folks who stumbled across 2015’s Eye in the Sky were mesmerized by its intriguing depiction of a wartime conundrum — do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few? — as it related to the potential civilian fatalities that would result from a drone strike targeting a suicide bomber.

Hood’s film had the intensity of an intimate stage drama, and it was comforting (if naïve) to imagine that the civilian/military chain of command actually might ponder such consequences. At the end of the day, though, Eye in the Sky — however provocative — remains a mere philosophical exercise, because it’s fictitious. 

That’s not the case with Official Secrets. 

Hood’s newest film isn’t merely a depiction of actual events; it illuminates an impressively brave act that should be a humiliating footnote in this country’s reckless 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead, the incident is all but unknown on this side of the pond … which, frankly, is shameful.

It made far more noise in England, where — to this day — people debate whether Katharine Gun is an honorable patriot on par with our own Daniel Ellsberg … or a traitor to her country.

That should be enough to get you into a movie theater. Better still, Hood and his co-scripters — Gregory and Sara Bernstein, adapting Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s nonfiction book, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War — have crafted their film with the clever precision of a multi-act suspense thriller.

Somewhere toward the middle, you’ll begin to wonder: How the hell could we not have known about this?

Add a terrific ensemble cast of top-notch British actors, and you couldn’t ask for more.