Variety, June 15, 1998
The Book of Life
By Deborah Young
Hal Hartley is the only American director to contribute to France’s Collection 2000 Seen By series, a group of one-hour TV films about the end of the millennium. In “The Book of Life,” he gives a playful, irreverent and quite unorthodox account of the Second Coming of Jesus, who is depicted as a young businessman returning to earth to kick off the Apocalypse. Though pic’s cast and buffoonery partially overlap Hartley’s recent feature film “Henry Fool,” this is a distinctly different story. It is one of the hipper items in the Collection 2000 and should be one of its most popular episodes with liberal-minded TV buyers.
A feeling of doom pervades the jaded population of New York as they get ready to turn the Big Page on the calendar. In a hotel bar, a young gambler (Dave Simonds) and the waitress who secretly loves him (Miho Nikaido) chat with a down-and-out (Thomas Jay Ryan), who is the devil in disguise.
Meanwhile, Jesus (Martin Donovan) makes a smart re-entry at JFK airport with his sexy assistant Magdalena (PJ Harvey). He has been sent by his wrathful Father to break the seven seals on the Book of Life and bring about the end of the world. But he has second thoughts.
It’s a fairly witty conceit, as Hartley sets up his premise and has Jesus pick up the fateful Book — now conveniently on computer disk — in a bowling alley locker room. Donovan and singer Harvey hit the right note of straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek farce. The parallel action in the bar, with its pseudo-philosophizing and poor man’s Faustian pact, is far less fascinating than their mission, but in the end the two segments dovetail as all the characters come together in a hotel room.
Lacking a neat conclusion to his story, Hartley finds himself with nowhere to take the strong setup, and film wraps a bit lamely.
Many faces in the cast are familiar from Hartley’s other films but are amusingly distinctive here in their updated morality play roles. Lensed in digital video by cinematographer Jim Denault and blown up to 35mm, pic has an eye-catching techno look that goes curiously well with its omnipotent hero. Not only the music but abstract sounds are imaginatively used to give events a familiar yet otherworldly feel.
The Times, August 25, 1998
A Bit of Grit for the Eye (excerpt)
By Geoff Brown
In “The Book of Life,” another American attraction, most of the actors wear deadpan faces or irritated scowls. There is a reason for this: the director is Hal Hartley, and he sculpts his performances in his trademark way for this hour-long contribution to a French TV series featuring the millennial musings of leading directors. But visually he has broken out with a vengeance: shooting on video, he keeps blurring the images, creating a kind of kinetic painting usually associated with the cult Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wei. Aspects of the subject matter are also unusual: you don’t expect Hartley to show Jesus Christ snaking through Manhattan in a business suit on December 31, 1999, the fate of the world in his laptop computer. Hartley regular Martin Donovan assumes that role; Satan, grousing in bars, is Thomas Jay Ryan. The talk, at least, follows the usual pattern of philosophical jousting: good fun for Hartley fans, slimmer pickings for anyone else.
The Scotsman, August 22, 1998
Jesus’ Sidekick is P.J. Harvey. Satan is a New York Bum. The King James Version it Ain’t.
Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)
Millennium fever brings Jesus to JFK in a business suit.
This is the Second Coming, Hal Hartley style, the acclaimed indie director’s playful and highly inventive contribution to France’s Collection 2000, television films about the end of the millennium. Jesus, in Hartley’s world, is accompanied by P J Harvey as Magdelena, all plush lips atop a stick-thin body.
Satan, meanwhile, is propping up the New York bars, posing as a down and out, waiting for Jesus for the apocalyptic showdown on 31 December, 1999. The Book of Life has been downloaded on to a computer and an angry God wants his son to break the seven seals and end the world. But Jesus, played by Hartley’s veteran stalwart Martin Donovan, ain’t so sure, and the Devil — Thomas Jay Ryan, excellent as the constantly irritated fallen angel — just wants to get the whole thing over with as he is bored with humanity.
It’s a celestial High Noon in New York filmed in blurry digital video and the glaring colours of a feverish world.
Irreverent but not mocking and occasionally inspired, Hartley’s hour is a short delight.
The Guardian (London), August 27, 1997
As prophesied by Hal Hartley, the Apocalypse will come when Jesus flies into JFK in search of The Book holding the names of the redeemed. The book is an Apple Mac Powerbook, of course, and it only takes a double-click to unfasten the seals that will summon plague, pestilence and the rising of the dead souls. But first, the Messiah must engage in negotiations with uptown lawyers, a breed especially beloved of the Almighty.
“The Book of Life,” an hour-long vignette, is Hartley all over. Jesus is played by the director’s craggy-faced, impassive regular Martin Donovan as a charismatic, careworn executive in a business suit. His brisk, glamorous personal assistant, Mary Magdalene, is played to rather wooden effect by avant-rock queen PJ Harvey. Satan is in town too, a shambling lounge-lizard. Played by Thomas Jay Ryan, with an appealingly shaggy Tom Waits edge, it’s Satan who provides the film’s pithiest moments. But isn’t that always the way?
“The Book of Life” is a new departure for Hartley only in terms of the visuals. Shot with High-Definition TV equipment, the image constantly shakes, shivers and blurs. But the film relies too heavily on this visual frenzy for its energy: it suffers from Hartley’s usual complaints, a stiltedness in the dialogue and acting, and a chronic fixation with surface glamour.
The trouble is, there’s nothing very new about the film’s satirical passion play. Jesus and Satan engage in philosophical disputations like a couple of boardroom litigants. They used to work for the same boss, Jesus points out. “I quit,” retorts Satan. “You were fired,” Jesus corrects him.
The metaphysical crux of the story revolves around the fate of the one Good Soul in New York, a Japanese waitress (Miho Nikaido), who wins a million on the lottery and decides to spend it all dispensing soup — which makes for one of the film’s better running gags. But the more flip the film becomes, the more you feel that Hartley imagines it to be a terribly trenchant jeu d’esprit rather than the souped-up sketch that it is.
The mix of dry theological dialogues and disjointed slapstick suggests warmed-over Dostoevsky given a Godard polish. So this is how the world ends, neither with a bang nor a whimper but an arched eyebrow.
New York Times
Hollow Reed
By Stephen Holden
Rigid and wide-eyed with terror, 9-year-old Oliver Wyatt (Sam Bould) steals into the recesses of his mother’s garage where he cowers in the darkness like a frightened animal, clutching his injured hand, and waits for his mother to return home from work.
Oliver has just been brutally punished by Frank Donally (Jason Flemyng), his mother’s architect boyfriend, for some imaginary infraction. It’s not the first serious injury Oliver has suffered at Frank’s hands, but the boy is scared to tell his mother that the man who has made her so happy is responsible.
The scenes of this frightened child navigating through the house in which this abusive monster could spring out at any second are among the most wrenching moments in Angela Pope’s powerful and unsettling film, “Hollow Reed.” Adapted from a short story by Paula Milne, the British film is a probing sociological tract fitted into the contours of a suspense thriller. Casting a cold inquiring gaze on contemporary British attitudes toward divorce, child custody and homosexuality, the film looks deeply into the network of troubled adult relationships surrounding Oliver and finds a maelstrom of resentment and sorrow.
At the heart of the drama is a failed marriage fraught with extreme bitterness. Oliver’s parents, Martyn (Martin Donovan) and Hannah (Joely Richardson), have divorced after Martyn, a family doctor who had been struggling to suppress his homosexuality, finally acknowledged his orientation and left his wife for a male lover. Hannah, who also works in the medical profession, has assumed custody of Oliver. She unabashedly hates her ex-husband, whose live-in boyfriend, Tom (Ian Hart), works in a record store.
Whenever Oliver is hurt, he runs home to his father, who has been granted limited access to his son. After the boy has suffered several mysterious “accidents” for which he invents unsatisfying explanations, Martyn intuits that Frank is the culprit. And when Hannah unexpectedly returns home and discovers her lover beating Oliver, she throws him out of the house.
If the movie ended right here, it would be a pat little drama of child abuse, denial and discovery. But Frank weeps and loves his way back into Hannah’s good graces and vows never to strike the boy again. A vicious child custody battle ensues in which Hannah and Frank unite against Martyn, whose homosexuality is used against him in court interrogations that are loaded with nasty insinuation. And in the film’s ugliest scene, Frank takes Oliver aside and poisonously tries to instill him with a fear and loathing of homosexuality. At the same time, Martyn’s and Tom’s edgy relationship is severely tested.
“Hollow Reed” makes no bones about whose side it is on. Martyn is a gentle, caring father who, although far from comfortable living as an openly gay man, stands up for the truth no matter how personally embarrassing. Hannah may be a loving mother, but her decision to lie in court about Frank’s behavior is an unforgivable betrayal of her son.
The exceptional performances go a long way toward shading characters who might easily have been painted in black- and- white. Donovan gives Martyn an anguished perplexity and stubbornness that is not altogether heroic, while Flemyng reveals the frightened little boy (who was abused by his own father) inside the macho man. Hart’s tartly fiery Tom has no patience for Martyn’s initial impulse to try to conceal their relationship. Ms. Richardson delivers a compellingly scary portrait of a determined woman driven by revenge and her own sexual needs to do the wrong thing.
If “Hollow Reed” is a little too schematic and builds to a clumsy soap-opera finale on Hannah’s front lawn, it gets under the skins of its major characters in a way that movies seldom do. Long after it’s over, you will remember their hurts and worry about the damage done to the child caught in the crossfire of their passions.