The Lives Of Us
Posted by David N. Guy | May 6, 2010 | Comments Off
Production year: 2010
Country: UK
Language: English
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 183 mins
Director: Ted Vaak
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jude Law
This idiotic English-language remake of The Lives Of Others, set in modern day London and starring Kevin Spacey as a civil servant, is a remarkably muddled return to film-making for 70s cinema wunderkind Ted Vaaak. Kevin Spacey, whose job in the Home Office consists solely of monitoring potential dissidents on a big bank of monitors showing every CCTV feed in the capital, is assigned the job of proving that beautiful patriot Jude Law, a director of adverts and political films for the Conservatives, is a paedophile, thus discrediting his work and allowing for his imprisonment.
Vaaak, once described by Nic Roeg as a “pervert”, for once manages to give us a relatively unsexualised narrative, although he has replaced the coda of the original film with a sequence in which, after the (presumably hoped for) fall of the current Labour government – Vaaak was a notorious Thatcherite in the 1980s, which was often assumed, incorrectly, to be the reason for his blacklisting by the British film industry -, Kevin Spacey and Jude Law meet each other just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace and, both smiling nervously, reach in and tenderly kiss.
One of the criticisms of the original was its perceived misogyny, with the only female character being a weak-willed and drug-addicted informant for the state, and although this has been addressed by Vaaak, his solution of having an all male cast is deeply disquieting.
Peter Bradshaw will return.