Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Dane DeHaan, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley, Alessandra Mastronardi, Ron White, Kasey Lea, Eve Crawford, Michael Therriault, Peter Lucas, Lauren Gallagher, Jack Fulton, Kristen Hager, Barbara Gordon, Reg Dreger, Kristian Bruun.
There are photographs that are so iconic, so powerful in their delivery that they not only capture a slice of what could be considered symbolic, but they also define a generation by its message and the image they portray.
These images, especially since the dawn of teen-culture after the Second World War, have adorned bedroom wall after teenage bedroom wall and in many cases well in middle age as the thought of letting go of some youthful fanciful notion might be too difficult to contemplate or mentally gruelling to suffer.
Amongst the most iconic surely has to be a windswept and guarded against both the rain and all that the intrusive one eyed lens can throw at it James Dean as he walks through Time Square and is photographed by the now legendary Dennis Stock. It is a picture that captures loneliness, pain, the shy and the quietly reserved man as New York gets lashed by a storm. It is a picture that inspires hope in the darkest of moments and one that arguably doesn’t get looked at for the story it contains as it sits with regal position on the bedroom wall.
If a picture tells a thousand words then the one of James Dean looking mean, moody and magnificent is a whole book but one that doesn’t get read a bit is adapted with singular vision in the film Life.
Life is after all a series a meetings with people who are either destined to enlighten, or despairingly designed to drag you down, some are fated to capture you at your very best and share that image with the whole world and make you if not a cultural icon but someone to say was here on this Earth at this moment and for James Dean it was all about the moment.
Dane DeHann captures the shyness and the bitter simmering anger in the young actor to the point of absolute conviction and in a role that could have demanded so much tension, so much resistance, accomplishes itself to be one of intended beauty. DeHann’s scenes with the likes of Allessandra Mastronardi as Pier Angeli, the superb Kelly McCreary as the sensuous Eartha Kitt and against the dogmatic, over controlling Jack Warner played by the excellent Ben Kingsley are outstanding moments of biopic cinema.
The film though seems to be heartily let down in the casting of Robert Pattinson as photographer Dennis Stock, it is a piece of casting that feels arguably very wrong as whatever soul or depth Mr. Pattinson is trying to convey is just seen as lumpy, under whelming and one that is surely only intended to have hearts fluttering in the bodies of those still enamoured by the pseudo sexual brooding menace of the Twilight saga.
A film of two perspectives, one single message that time can always capture the very best in you and that it takes two people to make an iconic picture. A film verging on class and one to sit through for the subject matter at hand.
Ian D. Hall