Revengers Tragedy

Starring:Fraser Ayres, Anthony Booth, Sophie Dahl, Sammy Duplay, Carla Henry, Eddie Izzard, Kristopher Lundon, Shaun Mason, Ged McCormack, James McMartin, Paul Reynolds, Michael Ryan (VI), Justin Salinger, Andrew Schofield, Marc Warren
Studio: Fantoma
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Description
"He Who Seeks Revenge Should Dig Two Graves"

Alex Cox's new film is a scathing black comedy about love, sex, family, murder, incest and revenge, set in a post-apocalyptic Liverpool. After ten years in hiding, Vindici (Christopher Eccleston-28 Days Later, The Others) returns to destroy the Duke (Derek Jacobi-Gosford Park, Gladiator) who murdered Vindici's wife on their wedding day. During his absence Vindici's family fell into poverty, while the Duke, Duchess and their decadent sons acquired wealth and power, ruling over their court obsessed with transient beauty, money, inherited privilege and power. Determined to exact his revenge, Vindici sets out to gain the confidence of the Duke and his villainous heir, Lussurioso (Eddie Izzard-Dressed To Kill, Circle).

Description

"He Who Seeks Revenge Should Dig Two Graves"

Customer Reviews:

Alex Cox treats his audience like intelligent people - refreshing, ingenuitive.......2007-02-28

Artistically, this is a very interesting presentation of the story. By setting it in modern pronunciation (AKA Liverpool accents), the director forces us to understand how closely it resembles our own world; he even mentions in the extras how fitting it was that during the filming the US and Britain entered an actual war of revenge - unfortunately this world is politically strife with revenge and it makes the film that much more topical when he hands it to us in a setting full of factory-lined alleyways, chain link fences, corrugated metal and modern contraptions to allegorically dig in the point.

The actors were absolutely perfect for their roles, every one of them (though i must confess to have a particular weakness for Derek Jacobi and Eddie Izzard - they're just both so interesting in their own right) and unlike Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo, they actually seem to know what they are saying. The manner of speaking incorporates both old style prose and modern day curses and slang, which only seems to further anchor it to the set and make the collaboration of 17th century play and modern day trappings seem all the more natural - kind of a cute way of talking too. The language is very powerful, definitely gets it's point across.

There is makeup on men (as one should expect when reading Eddie Izzard on the playbill), but rather than being a contagion that spread to the other actors I do see this makeup as an artistic advantage. Besides tying the movie to it's stage roots (where all men wear makeup), the makeup visually divulges the excess that these rich men were treating themselves to, and also outlines their vanity very well indeed.

I also found fascinating the movies' proposition that different leadership would simply find different reasons to be corrupt. I am very glad that they left in the scene with the confrontation of the mother. She had toyed with the idea of selling her daughter's favors for the goodwill of the duke. Not only did the confrontation scene provide continuity by tying up this loose end, but it also lets the audience know how fine a line we all walk - how easy it is for vengeance to go too far and for one to become no better than their enemy.

This is the best adaptation of an out-of-date play to the screen that I have seen yet. While I do enjoy old plays, it is very hard to relate to them. The licenses that Alex Cox has taken are illuminating and keep you on your toes.

bring on more middleton, please.......2007-02-23

Much ado on this DVD is made of whether a reconciliation scene should have been cut from the film. Though after the fact the director states he was probably mistaken when insisting to retain the scene, I heartily disagree.

An early scene shows the main character disguised beyond recognition to his sister and mother. (Neither time I've viewed the film has it been clear to me that the wedding slaughter and his disappearance from society were a decade earlier, likely accounting for his family's not knowing him now.) Incognito, he is pleased to find that his sister is virtuous but shocked to discover that his mother is willing to pimp her daughter's virtue for the sake of payment. This led me to anticipate a climactic scene at the end where the "revenger" would punish his mother for her immorality. The reconciliation that displaces this scene absolutely needs, therefore, to be included in the story.

Regardless of what one voice in the documentary insists, theme is NOT automatically superceded in deference to bloody action, just to keep the 15-yr-olds in the audience attentive. Indeed, one infers that busy MTV editing of a confusing arena competition at the opening of the plot should have been ditched, but was used in deference to mandates of the "weird movie" sponsors of the production.

The second unexpected story element involved a plot to finally kill the Duke. Given the cynical bloodiness of this trenchant satire, when the protagonist's sister agrees to disguise herself as the Duke's lust partner and dons a wig, I feared she'd end up slaughtered by mistake a la TITUS ANDRONICUS and the like. How nice to see she survives unscathed. At least survives THAT adventure!

The DVD correctly identifies this fascinating play as a precursor to Joe Orton. It only whets one's curiosity for more about Thomas Middleton, and to wish some of his other plays were also captured on film.

The Luhrmann effect..........2007-01-30

All I needed to watch this movie was to know that Alex Cox had directed it, but as soon as the credits rolled, and there was Doctor Who (Eccleston) and Eddie Izzard and Derek Jacobi, and a soundtrack by Chumbawumba, I was settling in and expecting quite a thrill.

But outside of the wonderful nastiness of the original play, there is a serious dirth of solid direction in this movie. I chalk it up to the Luhrmann effect--spend so much time finding flashy ways to update the way a Renaissance-era play can be staged, but pay almost NO attention to the actual acting or use of the language itself. The Luhrmann _Romeo & Juliet_ was almost unwatchable for its clumsy Shakespeare--if so much time is spent updating the setting, why not also spend some time to update the delivery of the lines? Not that I would necessarily recommend throwing out the old script and rewriting all of the dialogue in modern lingo. This approach often falls flat as well, but in keeping the original text, it would seem helpful to teach the actors how to say the lines with genuine expression and emotion rather than stumble over the lines in a faux-classical approach.

A linguist recently did a study of English accents and determined that a Renaissance London accent probably more resembled an Appalaichan accent, so these poor renditions of classic English drama need to STOP these fake deliveries and try to deliver lines with some genuine emotion rather than present the fallacy of a classical performance.

The story here is a juicy one, full of incest and rape and bawdy jokes and necrophilia. Poison and love and revenge, and Cox picks up well on the sense of revenge spiral and how violence begets violence into endless spirals, but his overly-hyped setting with loud combinations of colors and neon and technology up the wazoo grows quickly tiresome when the lines sound about as fluid as kindergarten recital.

And poor Derek Jacob...in purple fingernail polish and dark lipstick flounders without solid direction on the language--if a great actor like this had trouble pulling off an even adequate performance, what chance has the rest of the cast have? I am a huge fan of Eddie Izzard, and I long for him to be in a stupendous movie, but here he is as clumsy as most everyone else in the film.

Read the play, and try to imagine a solid, straightforward performance without all the unnecessary lights and mirrors. This is a brutal work, worthy of a brutal performance.

Stagebound.......2006-05-22

A man's newlywed bride is murdered by an evil duke after she resists his lecherous advances. A decade later the man returns, bent upon vengeance.

One of the nice things about amateur reviewing is not needing to review anything. No assignments, no deadlines. We choose books, music and movies by whim or by purpose. I stumbled upon REVENGERS TRAGEDY while doing a search of movies using the keywords "Australia" and "post-apocalyptic." REVENGERS TRAGEDY topped the recommendation lists of a lot of Australian post-apocalyptic movies. That was the bait. The hook was set when I read this was a futuristic adaptation of a 17th century Jacobean revenge play - the image of Blade Runner merging with Macbeth came to mind - starring Derek Jacobi and directed by the guy who directed the great cult classic `Repo Man.'

`The Revengers Tragedy' is a stage-play attributed to Thomas Middleton, circa 1606. I have to admit I'd never heard of Middleton, and even after twenty minutes of power surfing I still can't tell you the difference between an Elizabethan like Shakespeare and a Jacobean like Middleton. They were contemporaries, more or less, and threw a shovelful of `thees' and `thous' into their scripts. They both ended dialogue scenes with rhymed couplets. According to the specials on the dvd and some internet sources Middleton was a big one, second only to Shakespeare in some estimations, and an author of Sacred Text. Not `sacred' in the religious sense. `Sacred' in the sense that pages upon pages of dialogue and soliloquies had to be transported in their entirety to the screenplay to maintain integrity. And therein lies the rub. Not only is the text dense - too dense for the screen - but the action takes place in Liverpool. In sooth the accents were impossible for my midwestern United States ears to handle. The last line I heard before turning the English subtitles on at about the twenty-minute mark was "Nace wan, gai." Rewound and subtitled the line translated to a harmless "Nice one, girl."

Look - on the stage you describe, on the screen you display. The intimacy between stage actors and their audience is achieved by artful talk. Screen intimacy is achieved by the artful arrangement of moving images. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all stage plays stink when filmed. It's not a fault of the play, or because movie audiences are dumber than live theater audiences. It's simply a different medium. Movies deliver the goods visually, stage-plays verbally. Director Alex Cox jazzed it up some with post-punk costumes and make-up, as well as some snappy camera angles, but this one still creaked like a four hundred year old play.

If I had ten stars to spend on it I'd give REVENGERS TRAGEDY five. It's not a reflection on Cox or Middleton, either. Heck, Cox fell in love with the play when he first read it as a teenager, and stories a good director is passionate about always deserve respect. Christopher Eccleston, who plays Vindici, is very good as the lean and hungry widower with a score to settle. For those with more patience for movies transposed from the stage this one may work a lot better. My score is a weak three stars. The story may have been appropriate for a seventeenth century English audience, but I found it tediously talky.

Decent effort, with a parallel to Titus.......2006-03-21

The Jacobean play Revenger's Tragedy by Thomas Middleton here finds an update, much in the same vein as did Titus, Julie Taymor's recent reworking of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. In fact, the same juxtaposition of over-stylized contemporary motifs and the original language of the source material is present. In both works, lust and murder figure prominently, as do the expected intricate machinations required to implement the actions expressing these venal sins.

Christopher Eccleston plays our "hero", Vindici, and while he is a bit over the top, his words do pierce and play the game of revenge, just as he does himself. The gifts of language do not forsake the author of the play, nor the screenwriter, Joe Boyce, who keeps most of the dialogue intact, and occasionally interjects a modern phrase--"piss off", for example. Yet in one of the more interesting extras included on the DVD, an Oxford don holds forth on the marked differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, especially their use of the language--the latter being more earthy, as it were.

The director, Alex Cox, agrees; he's interviewed and tells of his fascination with the play as long ago as his teenage years. Age and youth figure prominently as well in this work; Derek Jacobi appears as the evil Duke (something) and carries it off quite well. He's another actor's actor who couldn't sing a false note if he tried. His four loathsome sons--the "best" of them played by noted British comic Eddie Izzard--constnatly plot against themselves and based on this ill feeling, reduce their chances of ascending to the Dukedom.

It seems our Vindici had his bride poisoned by this evil Duke, ten years prior, and now seeks revenge against him. Also here is the Duke's second wife (or perhaps third) whose attractions are not confined to her husband; another oldster, an ostensibly nobler member of the peerage, played by Anthony Booth (Antonio), and his much younger and totally hottie wife; and various and sundry other inhabitants in and around the Dukedom.

Although much energy has gone into this production with quite a bit of flash, for some reason it does not quite have the juice and spark found in Titus. To be blunt, it's found wanting, to some degree, and one is not quite sure why that is. It's well staged, but the acting is not consistently good. While Eccleston, Jacobi, and Izzard do well, the other Duke's sons don't have their acting chops down as proficiently. The pacing is not as strong as it should be, and there are inconsistencies not in the juxtaposition of modern and 16th century, but instead in how much importance this juxtaposition has. It's as if it's more or less thrown in to try to make it seem fresh, while in Titus, one thinks the same at first, but gradually one sees that the juxtaposition really works and becomes an integral part of the production.

Here that's not true. In that sense, it's somewhat reminiscent of Cox's Walker, taking place in the 19th century in Nicaragua, but complete with cigarette vending machines, etc. It's done to be kind of cool, but doesn't have that effect at all. In addition, although this in and of itself is not a severe criticism, you may have to turn on the English subtitles inasmuch as the Liverpudlian accents are thick.

It would have been nicer if Cox had a stronger sense of integrating two different eras for a reason, rather than slamming them together as he does here. Parts of the production tend to lag a bit while others carry enough punch to move the scenes through the film without much effort at all.

Close, but no Havana cigar.