We don’t submit to terror. We make the terror.

House of Cards

Season Four

(SPOILERS) Well, it’s a massive step up from the middling third season, mostly hitting its targets in making Claire (Robin Wright) as steely and reptilian as President Frank (Kevin Spacey). As such, Season Four of House of Cards is somewhat superior in the first half, when the Underwoods are at sabotaging loggerheads with each other, rather than the resumption of the new united front in opposition of Republican, selfie-obsessed pretty boy Will Conway (Joel Kinnaman) in the second. It’s a particularly nice touch to have her stare into the camera in the final shot too.

Mostly this show is as politically disconnected a fantasy as The West Wing, merely replacing altruistic motives with Machiavellian ones. Frank and Claire have no one calling their shots, perpetuating the notion of an Oval Office that actually issues edicts and exerts control. But there are occasional neat touches along the way.

If Conway’s strangely garbled Google-esque search engine election-rigging formula never really convinces as anything that would work (which is probably why the writers are so vague about what exactly Pollyhop can do and how it keeps him ahead), and Frank’s countermeasures CIA surveillance is a crude grab at invoking Snowden topicality without really being remotely relevant, and ICO is just the latest forlorn attempt at making capital from a fictionalised War on Terror, at least the final curtain, as the President, backed into a corner, goes to war as the only way out, is appropriately, ruthlessly cynical (“We don’t submit to terror. We make the terror”). The only problem is that, for every time the makers come up with something neat, they miss something even better. I fooled myself for about 10 minutes into thinking the hostage abduction might be a false flag designed to gain capital as part of a ruse to undermine Conway, but it was just more sub-Homeland terrorists-on-home-turf nonsense.

The Frank and Claire Show, with her running for VP (the kind of unlikely conceit that actually just might work, given public appetites for gloss over substance, but just as likely really wouldn’t – you’d have to completely love them as a celebrity couple to get public onside) looks more and more like a parallel with the Clintons, with all the skeletons attempting to break open the closet doors. Against that, her relationship with Tom Yates (Paul Sparks) is a little laboured, and the kind of thing, in its extended form as the US show is, that reminds you this kind of material works so much better as a finite, focussed satire; that they’re wrapping it up after five seasons is probably as much about Spacey wanting to do other things as getting out while the going is good and there are still a few storylines left to plot.

The assassination attempt on Frank made for good dramatic capital for a few episodes, even if I never really bought into Lucas (Sebastian Arcelus) being brought to the brink, and the whole deathbed hallucinations thing was dreadfully overplayed. Which lead into the Big Bad of the season, and, while his arsenal of hooks isn’t terribly convincing, Kinnaman really delivers as Conway; it’s one of the best roles he’s had, in fact.

But, while House of Cards manages to be more-ish in a manner a number of Netflix shows just plain aren’t (the Marvel run, and I’ve mentioned I’m really struggling to summon enthusiasm for Bloodline Season Two), and it’s nice that it leaves characters for a while and then returns to them, there is a sense that rather than a shrewdly devised and calculated schematic for a show that wants to be as elegant and poised as this one, it’s actually going around in a lot of circles (Boris McGiver’s Tom Hammerschmidt picking up the investigation into Frank again), often spinning its wheels and patching up holes rather than ploughing ahead with intent. What I’d have liked more of is the unlikely, and the idiosyncratic, like the Damian Young’s offbeat NSA data scientist listening to rap on his headphones as he fucks people’s lives up.

The show has definitely proved it works best when making the Underwoods devilish equals, be that as opposing forces or working symbiotically, showing off both sides at various stages of the season. So, however the final chapter goes, and possibly nervously so without Beau Beaumont running things anymore, it needs to keep that in focus.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

They'll think I've lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

Time Bandits (1981) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam had co-directed previously, and his solo debut had visual flourish on its side, but it was with Time Bandits that Gilliam the auteur was born. The first part of his Trilogy of Imagination, it remains a dazzling work – as well as being one of his most successful – rich in theme and overflowing with ideas while resolutely aimed at a wide (family, if you like) audience. Indeed, most impressive about Time Bandits is that there’s no evidence of self-censoring here, of attempting to make it fit a certain formula, format or palatable template.

I never strangled a chicken in my life!

Rope (1948) (SPOILERS) Rope doesn’t initially appear to have been one of the most venerated of Hitchcocks, but it has gone through something of a rehabilitation over the years, certainly since it came back into circulation during the 80s. I’ve always rated it highly; yes, the seams of it being, essentially, a formal experiment on the director’s part, are evident, but it’s also an expert piece of writing that uses our immediate knowledge of the crime to create tension throughout; what we/the killers know is juxtaposed with the polite dinner party they’ve thrown in order to wallow in their superiority.

Oh, you got me right in the pantaloons, partner.

The Party (1968) (SPOILERS) Blake Edwards’ semi-improvisational reunion with Peter Sellers is now probably best known for – I was going to use an elephant-in-the-room gag, but at least one person already went there – Sellers’ “brown face”. And it isn’t a decision one can really defend, even by citing The Party ’s influence on Bollywood. Satyajit Ray had also reportedly been considering working with Sellers… and then he saw the film. One can only assume he’d missed similar performances in The Millionairess and The Road to Hong Kong ; in the latter case, entirely understandable, if not advisable. Nevertheless, for all the flagrant stereotyping, Sellers’ bungling Hrundi V Bakshi is a very likeable character, and indeed, it’s the piece’s good-natured, soft centre – his fledgling romance with Claudine Longet’s Michele – that sees The Party through in spite of its patchy, hit-and-miss quality.

Never lose any sleep over accusations. Unless they can be proved, of course.

Strangers on a Train (1951) (SPOILERS) Watching a run of lesser Hitchcock films is apt to mislead one into thinking he was merely a highly competent, supremely professional stylist. It takes a picture where, to use a not inappropriate gourmand analogy, his juices were really flowing to remind oneself just how peerless he was when inspired. Strangers on a Train is one of his very, very best works, one he may have a few issues with but really deserves nary a word said against it, even in “compromised” form.

You must have hopes, wishes, dreams.

Brazil (1985) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam didn’t consider Brazil the embodiment of a totalitarian nightmare it is often labelled as. His 1984½ (one of the film’s Fellini-riffing working titles) was “ the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984 ”, in contrast to Michael Anderson’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1948. This despite Gilliam famously boasting never to have read the Orwell’s novel: “ The thing that intrigues me about certain books is that you know them even though you’ve never read them. I guess the images are archetypal ”. Or as Pauline Kael observed, Brazil is to Nineteen Eighty-Four as “ if you’d just heard about it over the years and it had seeped into your visual imagination ”. Gilliam’s suffocating system isn’t unflinchingly cruel and malevolently intolerant of individuality; it is, in his vision of a nightmare “future”, one of evils spawned by the mechanisms of an out-of-control behemoth: a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. And yet, that is not really, despite how indulgently and glee

Miss Livingstone, I presume.

Stage Fright (1950) (SPOILERS) This one has traditionally taken a bit of a bruising, for committing a cardinal crime – lying to the audience. More specifically, lying via a flashback, through which it is implicitly assumed the truth is always relayed. As Richard Schickel commented, though, the egregiousness of the action depends largely on whether you see it as a flaw or a brilliant act of daring: an innovation. I don’t think it’s quite that – not in Stage Fright ’s case anyway; the plot is too ordinary – but I do think it’s a picture that rewards revisiting knowing the twist, since there’s much else to enjoy it for besides.

A herbal enema should fix you up.

Never Say Never Again (1983) (SPOILERS) There are plenty of sub-par Bond s in the official (Eon) franchise, several of them even weaker than this opportunistic remake of Thunderball , but they do still feel like Bond movies. Never Say Never Again , despite – or possibly because he’s part of it – featuring the much-vaunted, title-referencing return of the Sean Connery to the lead role, only ever feels like a cheap imitation. And yet, reputedly, it cost more than the same year’s Rog outing Octopussy .

I'm an old ruin, but she certainly brings my pulse up a beat or two.

The Paradine Case (1947) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock wasn’t very positive about The Paradine Case , his second collaboration with Gregory Peck, but I think he’s a little harsh on a picture that, if it doesn’t quite come together dramatically, nevertheless maintains interest on the basis of its skewed take on the courtroom drama. Peck’s defence counsel falls for his client, Alida Valli’s accused (of murder), while wife Ann Todd wilts dependably and masochistically on the side-lines.

You’re easily the best policeman in Moscow.

Gorky Park (1983) (SPOILERS) Michael Apted and workmanlike go hand in hand when it comes to thriller fare (his Bond outing barely registered a pulse). This adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 novel – by Dennis Potter, no less – is duly serviceable but resolutely unremarkable. William Hurt’s militsiya officer Renko investigates three faceless bodies found in the titular park. It was that grisly element that gave Gorky Park a certain cachet when I first saw it as an impressionable youngster. Which was actually not unfair, as it’s by far its most memorable aspect.

I don’t like fighting at all. I try not to do too much of it.

Cuba (1979) (SPOILERS) Cuba -based movies don’t have a great track record at the box office, unless Bad Boys II counts. I guess The Godfather Part II does qualify. Steven Soderbergh , who could later speak to box office bombs revolving around Castro’s revolution, called Richard Lester’s Cuba fascinating but flawed. Which is generous of him.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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