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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Life’ (MA) *** and half

life movieWHILE “Life” magazine isn’t the principal theme of Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s fourth feature, it provides a thread underlying a story about a Hollywood star that shone brightly in only three feature films in 1953.

James Dean’s influence on cinema grew out of the public’s need for someone to stand up for the disenfranchised young of the era, and the air of androgyny that he projected onscreen.

Luke Davies has written a screenplay for Corbijn that examines the friendship between Dean (Dane DeHaan) and freelance photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and the influence that Stock’s pictures, first published in a four-page spread toward the back of an issue of “Life”, had on Dean’s career.

Corbijn’s films challenge the filmgoer’s responses. The film flows at an unhurried pace through the period between the release of “East of Eden” and “Rebel Without A Cause”. Not a Hollywood exposé of how the studio system used to work (Ben Kingsley plays a ruthless Jack Warner), it concentrates on Stock’s ambitions and friendship between the two young men.

Much of the film takes place on the Dean family farm in Indiana, where Stock shot the candids that his agent John Morris (Joel Egerton) eventually sold to “Life” magazine. Many of those original shots background the final credits. But those that most delighted me were shots on the farm in winter. They’re truly splendid, shot for the film in colour but a reminder of the artistic power of still black and white photography.

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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