If I use the phrase “crime family drama,” you have a pretty good idea what to expect, right? I mean, they vary somewhat: There are the Corleones and the Sopranos, the high-living Triad clans of Hong Kong cinema, the brutal, black-suited thugs of the Tokyo yakuza. Australian director David Michôd recently showed us a downscale, suburban Melbourne version in this year’s art-house hit “Animal Kingdom.”
But I guarantee you’ve never seen a crime film like “Down Terrace,” a strange and dry low-budget blend from English director Ben Wheatley, or a crime family like the one headed by the father-and-son team of Bill and Karl (played by real-life father and son Robert and Robin Hill). We get the impression that Bill, a 60ish guy with close-cropped steel-wool hair and a feral visage, is a major drug dealer in an unnamed English provincial city. (It’s Brighton, on the south coast.) But for at least the first half of the movie, he does nothing that even hints at serious criminality. He seems like an aging, impotent, vaguely erudite hippie who sits around smoking bowls and boring people with his monologues about Timothy Leary and Tibetan meditation.
To anybody who’s watched a lot of recent British cinema, the characters and situations in “Down Terrace” seem immediately familiar: Bill, along with his hardass, harridan wife, Maggie (Julia Deakin), and Karl, a shaggy, shambolic 34-year-old who still lives at home, come straight out of the lo-fi, vérité-style films of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. These perennially aggrieved people are partly sympathetic and partly intolerable; they sit around drinking tea and bitching about each other and the rest of the world. (The cast includes such British sitcom vets as David Schaal, Tony Way and Michael Smiley, as the sad-sack members of Bill’s inefficient and alcoholic criminal crew.)
Wheatley strikes a tone of bleak, half-affectionate working-class comedy without much action, and when Karl’s ex-girlfriend Valda (Kerry Peacock) shows up pregnant, we assume the major plot development has just happened. “Granddad to a bastard child,” Bill muses unhappily. “Is there a word for that?” Maggie answers him: “Cunt.” He nods; he’s an old cunt, all right. But he’ll come around to granddad-ness after his own crusty fashion, and that’ll be it, right?
Well, except that’s when the killing starts. I don’t want to tell you too much about how far Wheatley and co-writer Robin Hill (also the actor who plays Karl) push these characters and their story. Much of the pleasure in “Down Terrace” — if you’re the sort of person who finds pleasure in these things — comes from the nasty shocks it delivers, right in the middle of what seems a lackadaisical, likable narrative. Suffice it to say that Bill and Karl are much more than the semi-lovable, lower-middle-class stoner losers they appear to be. I mean, they definitely fit that description, but they’re also a pair of vicious, manipulative and selfish low-lifes, locked in an epic Oedipal struggle that threatens to destroy their decrepit inner-suburban row house and everybody in it.
By the time we witness an attempted contract murder fatefully interrupted when the hit man must pause to use his inhaler — he appears to suffer both from asthma and some form of palsy — the film has turned gleefully evil, not to mention frequently hilarious. Other critics have suggested that “Down Terrace” resembles “The Sopranos” as created by Mike Leigh instead of David Chase, or a Coen brothers film infused with British kitchen-sink realism. Those descriptions come close, but they miss the fact that Wheatley and Hill are channeling the grand British tradition of “taking the piss,” meaning that they’re emulating working-class drama to make its conventions look ridiculous, and also that they delight in offending every possible viewer. In this, “Down Terrace” resembles Chris Morris’ as-yet-unreleased terrorism comedy, “Four Lions,” a farce about a group of Midlands Muslim idiots whose nutso bomb plot turns deadly serious.
There’s even an element of Shakespearean grandeur to “Down Terrace,” although I’m not sure a movie as intimate and domestic as this one can really pull it off. (Most of the action takes place in the family home — which actually is the Hill family’s home.) Convinced that someone in their inner circle has sold them out to the cops, Bill and Karl launch a worsening spiral of violence that will pit them against each other, with all the inevitability of one of the Bard’s murder plays. A ruthless woman of few words, Maggie ranks high on the Homemaker Lady Macbeth scale — and Valda, Karl’s on-again, off-again squeeze (who may or may not be pregnant with his kid) reveals some hidden dimensions of her own.
If you’re one of those viewers who really wants to find somebody to root for, I’d suggest skipping “Down Terrace.” You’d have to describe Karl as the hero, but Robin Hill plays him, with delicious abandon, as a weaselly, whiny, emotionally volatile and thoroughly unappealing little man, who almost always wears the same shapeless and horrible striped shirt. Bill is far more charismatic and confident, but Robert Hill reveals him, over time, to possess nearly every odious quality possible in a human being: Under the pot smoke and the shorthand philosophy, he’s cruel, violent, vindictive, small in spirit and utterly selfish.
No doubt many people will find “Down Terrace,” and its utterly unredemptive view of humanity, completely unbearable. What saves the film for me (and a few other dark-hearted souls, I expect) is that its litany of outrageous abuses and horrible crimes, as it careens from delicately phrased dinner-table insults to old ladies murdered in the street, is often gaspingly, ridiculously funny. When it’s all over and you don’t have to spend any more time smoking pot with Karl and Bill in their horrid little house, you may feel the elation of tragic catharsis. Then again, you may feel as if you just drank a bottle of drain opener; the difference between those states is subtle.
“Down Terrace” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, and opens Oct. 29 in Portland, Ore., with other cities (and eventual DVD release) to follow.
It’s easy to take Meryl Streep for granted, and to view her uncanny ability to disappear inside virtually any kind of character as a form of shtick or a parlor trick. It’s perfectly true that Streep has an appetite for larger-than-life characters and a natural instinct for showmanship, and that she’s often at her best in mediocre or even sloppy films. But we shouldn’t allow that to obscure the fact that she’s one of the greatest stage and screen actresses of her time, or anybody else’s time. (Indeed, Streep is something like the female Laurence Olivier, with the proviso that she made a far smoother transition to movie stardom than Sir Larry did.)
Streep is so powerful as Margaret Thatcher in director Phyllida Lloyd’s “The Iron Lady” that she made me believe I understood the legendary and ferocious former British prime minister much better than I had before. That may be an illusion, of course; Streep does not know Thatcher personally, and neither do you or I. But it’s really all you can ask from an actor playing a historical personage, especially one whose significance is so immense and whose legacy is so disputed. This Maggie Thatcher — played by Streep as the mature politician and by Alexandra Roach as the young Maggie Roberts, a grocer’s daughter from Lincolnshire — is in many ways a sympathetic and admirable character, a woman of indomitable will, enormous ambition and profound personal convictions. Those qualities are also shown as driving her to sociopathic extremes, and to a megalomaniacal conception of herself as embodying all the noblest British qualities and single-handedly saving the British nation from socialist doom.
I find that a highly plausible interpretation of Thatcher as an individual, who had to overcome both the inherent sexism of British politics and society and also the ingrained snobbishness of her beloved Conservative Party. (Tory politicians customarily came from the landed gentry and the titans of industry, not the lower-middle shopkeeping bourgeoisie.) She could be as dismissive of any womanly talk about emotions and feelings as she was with pinko abstractions like “society” (although her assertion that there is no such thing does not appear in Abi Morgan’s screenplay). The film’s present tense is around 2009, when the widowed Baroness Thatcher, in her mid-80s, is struggling with senile dementia but has lost none of her flinty intelligence. When some faintly patronizing younger woman comes down to Thatcher’s level, schoolteacher-style, and thanks her for creating opportunities for other women, Maggie does not appear interested in the gender-studies claptrap. “It used to be about trying to do something,” she says disdainfully.
If I enjoyed “The Iron Lady” more than Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” that’s not to say it’s necessarily a better film. It’s largely about how much more charismatic and enjoyable Streep is than the woefully miscast Leonardo DiCaprio. Both pictures adhere closely to standard biopic formula, turning contentious historical figures into the subjects of routine domestic melodrama while playing a highlight reel of major 20th-century events in the background: strikes, riots, bombings, hunger strikes, the Berlin Wall. It’s massively ironic that Streep’s Thatcher tells another interlocutor that no one seems to care about ideas anymore, since “The Iron Lady” is entirely bereft of them.
Oh, we get that young Maggie Roberts inherited her belief in individual effort and limited government from her upstanding dad — who was a local politician for the centrist Liberal Party, in its waning years — but no mention is made, for instance, of her encounter with Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” as a 20-year-old Oxford student, which marked her conversion to what was then the Tory far right. No politician, including Ronald Reagan, has ever gone further than Thatcher did in trying to implement Hayek’s free-market ideology (and that of his principal disciple, Milton Friedman) on a grand scale. I can understand why Lloyd and Morgan concluded that fundamental questions of economic theory didn’t belong in a movie for general audiences, but I’d like to believe that if Lady Thatcher is sufficiently compos mentis to watch it, she will snort in derision at its sentimental narrative mode: There she is as a girl, dewy-eyed and dish-scrubbing, as her pa extols the British spirit; there she is as elected leader of the United Kingdom, telling the miners’ unions to stuff it: “The medicine is painful, but the patient requires it!”
One of the oddities of Morgan’s screenplay lies in the fact that Thatcher is a living person who still owns the right to her own public utterances, so that everything we see in the movie is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. But that’s not nearly as strange as the fact that so much of “The Iron Lady” consists of the present-day Thatcher’s extended conversations with her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent), who died in 2003. It’s not unusual for elderly people to believe, or half-believe, that deceased spouses are still with them, of course, and such may be the case with Thatcher. But Broadbent’s semi-belligerent, semi-affectionate Denis is too obviously a writer’s gimmick, a key to unlock Thatcher’s memories and a symbol of the way she conflates past and present.
“The Iron Lady” begins with a delicious scene of the aged Thatcher buying milk at a corner grocery, a completely unnoticed old lady surrounded by the new world she made (fast-talking, suit-wearing jerks attached to their cellphones) and the new world she could not resist (a London street awash in bhangra music and South Asian comestibles). Most of what follows is straightforward, brightly photographed TV drama in the BBC style, both mildly entertaining and somewhat interesting to those who remember that era. There’s John Sessions as the early-’70s prime minister Edward Heath, whose compromises with the left persuaded Thatcher to skew ever more sharply in the other direction; and Nicholas Farrell as Thatcher’s mentor Airey Neave, whose assassination by the IRA hardened her on the Irish question. Anthony Head plays the shuffling, stammering Geoffrey Howe, and Richard E. Grant plays the suave Michael Heseltine, two influential Tories who would eventually betray Thatcher, ending her political career. If you’re really a Brit-politics wonk, you’ll be glad to see Michael Pennington as the beloved Labour leader Michael Foot, who would lead the left-wing opposition to its 1983 Armageddon.
I suppose what you’ll get from “The Iron Lady” is the sense that Thatcher was a female pioneer who relished a fight, made tough decisions she thought would return Britain to prosperity, and was hated by many people. (We repeatedly see a lazy synecdoche: Thatcher’s limo pushing through a crowd, with some angry working-class yob with bad hair pounding on her window.) That’s fine as far as it goes, but listen: Speaking as someone who despises almost every aspect of the Thatcherite social-economic consensus that has defined the capitalist world for 30 years, and almost every aspect of Thatcher’s actual policies, she deserves more than this. Streep has captured Thatcher wonderfully as a plausible human being, but “The Iron Lady” explains nothing about her thoroughgoing rejection of Britain’s postwar social-democratic consensus, or about the way she helped create a new class of the Anglo-American super-rich, or about her immense influence on the Cold War as a pragmatic intellectual influence on the Reagan administration. (She saw, much earlier than the Americans did, that Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy meant the end of old-line communism.)
Maggie Thatcher contains multitudes; she is rife with contradictions you can barely glimpse in this modestly affecting movie. American conservatives who profess to worship her probably don’t know that she was pro-choice and pro-gay rights (although she was against the liberalization of divorce). She was one of the least popular prime ministers in British history yet was elected three times, partly thanks to the hopeless divisions within the Labour Party and partly because British elections are, at least arguably, less dominated by questions of personality. (As Lloyd and Morgan make clear, if she hadn’t fought and won the Falklands war in 1982, Thatcher’s premiership might easily have ended after three or four years.) As a starting point for Meryl Streep’s 17th Oscar nomination — and perhaps her third win — “The Iron Lady” is exemplary. As a starter course in Thatcher studies and a post-”King’s Speech,” Brit-history melodrama, it’s only barely acceptable.
“The Iron Lady” opens Dec. 30 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to begin Jan. 13.
I went to “The King’s Speech” completely prepared to dig in and resist it: a British period piece, suffused with imperial nostalgia, about a member of the royal family nobly battling a disability. Trustworthy people told me they loved it, but I knew better. Could such a movie be anything but sentimental claptrap, a prettified picture of a long-gone era when kings behaved like kings and commoners knew their place, shamelessly crafted to lure Oscar voters?
Maybe not. There’s nothing I can tell you about “The King’s Speech” that contradicts that description, except that resistance is futile. It’s a warm, richly funny and highly enjoyable human story that takes an intriguing sideways glance at a crucial period in 20th-century history. Its star performance, and probably the best reason to see it, comes from Colin Firth as the monumentally awkward Prince Albert, or Bertie, who became King George VI unexpectedly in 1936 after his older brother, Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), abdicated to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson (Eve Best).
For all the pomp and privilege of his upbringing, Bertie was essentially an abused child, tormented by nannies, plagued by childhood ailments and raised in isolation from the outside world. He barely knew his parents (Michael Gambon plays King George V, his father), had no real friends, wore painful leg braces and suffered from early childhood from a chronic stammer that made his public appearances painful for everyone. Perhaps the last monarch reared in the old aristocratic style, with a father who ruled at least nominally over one-fourth of the globe’s population, Bertie was literally a man trapped between worlds. As Firth plays him, the prickly prince (who spent his early career as a naval officer and teacher) is eager to take offense yet painfully shy, fully aware that the monarchy has become a defanged symbolic contrivance in an age of radio and motorcars, yet halfway convinced that divine right is still involved somewhere.
The unlikely story that director Tom Hooper and screenwriter David Seidler spin in “The King’s Speech” is pretty much true: Bertie and his wife, the high-spirited Princess Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter, absolutely sparkling in a second-fiddle role), somehow find their way to an Australian-born speech therapist and amateur actor named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, in his maximum wisdom-and-twinkle mode). Logue isn’t a doctor, has no academic credentials and is viewed by proper authorities as a charlatan. But his then-radical idea that stuttering was as much a psychological problem as a physiological one, and that its roots lay in childhood, is exactly the medicine the future king required.
I don’t know whether the real Logue told Bertie to envision his public speeches as snatches of song (although that’s fairly standard therapy), or to distract himself by exclaiming words and phrases a man of his position is never supposed to speak or even think. Either way, watching these two acting pros go at each other hammer-and-tongs is well worth the price of admission, and both Firth and Rush are being urged to clear some knickknacks off the mantelpiece before February. Their scenes together are marvelously paced and full of laughs, but add up to something richer and subtler than standard British class-barrier comedy. Each of these men is a desperate misfit — the stuttering prince and the would-be Aussie Shakespearean — badly in need of a new friend and a bit more self-esteem.
There is an element of rose-tinted nostalgia, perhaps, in Hooper’s loving and precise evocation of imperial Britain between the wars. But even more than that, there’s an appreciation for its peculiarity and fragility: The clipped, fruity BBC accents, the top-hat crowds at “industrial exhibitions” and horse races, the late-Victorian sense that the British monarchy, even with its wings clipped, is the very center of the universe — all of that is about to give way to a new order. George VI not only had to deliver a crucial 1939 speech telling his people that they were going to war with Germany (that scene provides the film with a half-manufactured climax), he also presided over the rapid dissolution of his great-grandmother Victoria’s empire. He would be the last English monarch to also be designated emperor of India and king of Ireland; by the time his daughter became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, there was a new, nuclear-armed Yankee sheriff in town and Britain had become a second-rate power at best.
Hooper’s direction is straightforward and unshowy, pretty much in the mode of high-end British TV. This is a picture full of old-fashioned audience satisfaction, and one that should garner numerous awards nominations for its cast. (Firth is the early leader in the best-actor sweepstakes, and I’d expect both Rush and Bonham Carter, who has hardly ever been this likable, to be nominated in supporting categories.) Even smaller parts and cameos are stocked with brand-name talent: Along with Gambon as the beloved but remote George V and Pearce as Edward VIII, the idiotic, Nazi-friendly playboy, we see Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop of Canterbury, a hilarious turn from Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill and Anthony Andrews as the prewar prime minister Stanley Baldwin, who forced Edward to abdicate.
In recent years, the Academy’s best-picture voters have often overlooked this kind of old-school, openhearted audience-pleaser aimed at a wide adult public — what they used to call a “honey, let’s hire a sitter” movie — and in terms of pure cinematic craft “The King’s Speech” arguably isn’t in the same class as “Inception” or “The Social Network” or Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming “Black Swan.” That seems like a topic for another time, but the point to make right now is that even if you’re an unregenerate monarchy-hater like me (and I was trained by my Irish Republican father to view the royals as corrupt, subhuman leeches) “The King’s Speech” is both a great night at the movies and a terrific yarn of unexpected human and historical depth.
“The King’s Speech” opens Nov. 26 in New York and Los Angeles, with national release to follow.
It’s not like “Made in Dagenham” marks the first time a fascinating historical episode has been made into mediocre melodrama. Moviemakers have ransacked history since the medium was invented, but the combination too often results in bad movies and bad history. You can’t even call “Made in Dagenham” bad — it’s a competent entertainment, built around an enjoyable performance by the superb English actress Sally Hawkins (Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky”). But it does manage to take a crucial turning point in feminist and labor history — an event loaded with ambiguous significance — and render it into one of those gang-of-gals movies full of bicycles, reggae songs, underwear shots and scenes of emotional growth. (Memo to producers: You can’t use Jimmy Cliff’s “You Can Get It if You Really Want” in your movie. You just can’t. It is against the law.)
There can be no doubt that the story of the female machinists’ strike in 1968 at the Ford plant in Dagenham, England, is worth telling. That event in an east London industrial suburb had social consequences that were arguably a lot more meaningful and far-reaching than, say, the invention of Facebook. As an inspirational history lesson, director Nigel Cole and screenwriter Billy Ivory’s “Made in Dagenham” gets the broad strokes across in dramatic fashion: At the height of late-’60s social unrest, a group of fewer than 200 working-class women brought Ford production to a halt, and in so doing forced the British labor movement, the British government and the ultra-conservative management of Ford to confront the immense wage gap between male and female workers. It was a moment that suggested class politics wasn’t just for guys and feminism wasn’t just for well-bred university girls.
All that stuff, the complicated social and political reverberations of the Dagenham strike, is totally fascinating — but it’s also just packing material around the edges of a standard-issue female-empowerment ensemble drama, complete with kicky period costumes, rapid Cockney chatter and shots of the women stripping down to their brassieres and slips for a day in the hot factory. I kept waiting for the Dagenham ladies to take off their clothes and do a calendar shoot, which is what happened in Cole’s best-known film. Honestly, they might as well have, given that none of the characters in “Made in Dagenham” is based on a real person, and Ivory’s script reverts to a hackneyed set of Brit-film female stereotypes: the spunky but addled housewife; the beehive-wearing sex bomb; the Twiggy-esque blonde; the grim-faced, self-sacrificing mum. No one seems to have remarked that making a movie about women’s rights in which the female characters are all clichés is slightly odd.
Hawkins is being talked up as an Oscar contender for her starring role as Rita O’Grady, the brassy young wife and mother who gets thrust onto the front lines by Albert (Bob Hoskins), a sympathetic union leader. As always, Hawkins is immensely pleasurable to watch; she’s knock-kneed, bucktoothed, skinny as a rail and imbued with an almost feral intensity. Her performance is full of dimensions — Rita is raw, vulnerable, socially awkward, oddly sexy, driven by righteous indignation — but we’re still talking about a character cut from a template: Norma Rae meets Solidarity’s Anna Walentynowicz, with an Oliver Twist accent.
Rita and the other female machinists at Dagenham begin with a narrow and specific grievance: Ford has reclassified them as unskilled workers to hold down their wages, even though their work (sewing seat covers by hand, with no pattern to follow) requires considerable expertise. After a one-day strike and tense meetings with labor leaders and Ford management, they realize they’re facing a much bigger issue: British industry’s high-wage contracts with the major male-dominated unions are supported by a subordinate caste of low-wage female labor. Rita tours the country addressing other female workers, makes an unlikely alliance with a Ford executive’s Oxford-educated wife (Rosamund Pike) and ends up sipping sherry at Westminster Palace with Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), a Labour Party cabinet minister who dares to defy the power of Ford.
Creating a fictional composite to anchor a historical tale is defensible enough (there was and is no Rita O’Grady), but “Made in Dagenham” is an awkward mishmash that blends a lot of historical intrigue with the formulaic character interplay in the foreground. Like most of the men in Dagenham, Rita’s husband, Eddie (Danny Mays), doesn’t get it, but the filmmakers lack the stomach to make him cruel or unsympathetic. Rita’s co-worker Brenda (Andrea Riseborough) has a huge bouffant and humps anything in trousers, while Sandra (Jamie Winstone) wears Mary Quant hot pants and dreams of stardom, and shop steward Connie (Geraldine James) gloomily tends to her husband, still suffering from World War II trauma.
I feel pretty sure that “Made in Dagenham” comes with honorable infotainment intentions (thanks largely to producer Stephen Woolley, an indefatigable fighter of the good fight), but the movie is ultimately almost as patronizing to women as the devious union boss (Kenneth Cranham) and unctuous Ford executive (Rupert Graves) who try to outflank Rita. Whether they’re as nefarious as those two or as honorable as Hoskins’ Albert, the male characters seem like individuals, while the women come off as inspirational symbols of female camaraderie and diversity. Don’t get me wrong: As genial, positive-message holiday viewing goes, you could do a hell of a lot worse. “Made in Dagenham” offers girl power in a can, lightly seasoned with swinging London and topped with cute-clumsy Sally Hawkins charming us to pieces. But the real women of Dagenham deserve better, and so do their sisters in the audience.
“Made in Dagenham” opens Nov. 19 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
Sincerity always poses problems for the news media. Maybe the press has professionally inoculated itself with a vigorous blend of skepticism and cynicism, and maybe it’s just grown ever more fearful of being punked by pranksters, celebrities and presidents. One can only wish the New York Times had viewed the Bush administration’s call to war with half the caution with which it has approached “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the new documentary made (or presided over, or something) by the mysterious British street artist Banksy.
Commentators for the Times, National Public Radio and elsewhere have become hypnotized by the question of whether this fascinating and often exciting film about the global rise of guerrilla art, Banksy’s own career as a provocateur and the genesis of a sub-Banksy pop artist called Mr. Brainwash might itself be some kind of meta-fictional Banksy prank. I felt some of the same anxiety after first seeing “Exit Through the Gift Shop” a few months ago at Sundance, but I now think that reaction dramatically misses the point of the film.
Banksy offers a heady and hilarious voyage through the underworld of contemporary art that poses all kinds of puzzlers about the role, meaning and context of allegedly subversive art in a consumer society. “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is of a piece with Banksy’s murals and installations — bending a London phone booth in half, hanging his own “Old Master” painting in the Tate Gallery, planting a dummy wearing an orange Gitmo jumpsuit within a Disneyland ride — in many ways. It’s both a work of art and a process, in which the subject and object of creation seem to trade places. It’s meant to shift your perspective, both subtly and dramatically, no matter where you stand on the value of guerrilla art like Banksy’s. Moreover, it’s both a documentary that captures Banksy practicing his daring craft and an elaborate joke at his own expense that depicts him in an unexpected light.
Narrated by Rhys Ifans in plummy, mock-BBC tones, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” begins as a story about would-be filmmaker Thierry Guetta, a strange little French émigré who ran a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles and whose cousin was the Paris graffiti artist known as Space Invader. (You can guess what his stencils look like.) Guetta began compulsively documenting his cousin’s work with a video camera, and then moved on to other prominent street artists, including Shepard Fairey — now famous for his iconic Obama images — and finally, after a great deal of patience and detective work, the notoriously elusive Banksy. (According to his Wikipedia entry, Banksy is originally from Bristol, in southern England, and is about 35. His stencil work began to appear on the streets of Bristol and London around 2000.)
But after Banksy and Guetta start hanging out, a peculiar exchange follows: The artist becomes the director, and the filmmaker becomes his subject. Banksy, who is seen in the film delivering wry expositions — severely backlit, in a hoodie, with his voice masked — came to realize that Guetta was unable or unwilling to make a coherent film out of all his footage, and took over the project himself. Encouraged by Banksy to put down the camera and create his own art, Guetta transformed himself into Mr. Brainwash — at best, a miscellaneous repurposer of pop-culture images already adopted by other artists — and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.
This film has many levels, but in no sense is it insincere, or an attempt to trick you. If anything, it’s a rueful, comic exploration of what happens when artists like Banksy and Fairey, who have set themselves up as subversive opponents of the pretentious, big-money art establishment, see their own weapons used against them. Despite their rebel status, Banksy and Fairey are forthright about clinging to relatively old-fashioned ideas about artistic craft, training and vision. Somebody like Guetta, who lacks any art education or knowledge of art history, and whose aesthetic is mainlined from every prominent pop or street artist since Andy Warhol, threatens to undermine their entire raison d’être. To put it more directly: They’re good and he isn’t, but a whole lot of people apparently can’t tell the difference.
Banksy himself seems relaxed and even jovial about this. He has said he doesn’t want to extend his own artistic career beyond its point of social or political usefulness, and the ultimate lesson of “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is exactly what its title implies — that all the best ideas of all the most brilliant artists are ultimately rendered into more crap for sale. As Banksy’s London dealer muses late in the film, on the subject of Mr. Brainwash: “Good for Thierry if he can pull it off. At the same time, the joke’s on … well, I’m not sure who the joke’s on. I’m not even sure there is a joke.”
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It opens April 23 in Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle; April 30 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, San Diego and Washington; May 7 in Indianapolis and Toronto; and May 21 in Austin, Texas, with other cities to be announced.
Robin Hill and Julia Deakin 
Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady" 
Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter in "The King's Speech" 
Sally Hawkins in "Made in Dagenham" 
A still from "Exit Through the Gift Shop." 
