How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson Read Free Book Online

his own disaster and the way he has permitted the death of his beloved not once, but twice.
    Vertigo (which is now, according to the Sight & Sound critics’ poll, the best film ever made) is a mark of Hitchcock’s lifelong fascination with the process of movie. For the detective in that film is a metaphor for directors (and for Hitchcockhimself?) seeking to make a woman in his own image of desire. Vertigo was a commercial failure when it opened, and that frustrated Hitchcock, who was as fond of his rewards as he was of movie mechanics. But it is a landmark in his inclination to leave us stranded. For years he had gone along with conventional romantic harmony as a closer—it’s there in his English films, and in Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, Strangers on a Train (albeit with two anemic lovers so much less interesting than Robert Walker’s killer), and even in Rear Window . But in Vertigo we have the hero’s failure at our feet, and in Psycho there are no likeable characters left at the end, so we are put in a holding cell with Norman Bates.
    Sometimes a picture comes along that is not just engrossing and moving but an enactment of this thesis. Such solitude is hard to resist. Yet Locke (released in 2014) is a film that in outline description seems impossible, or even absurd. How can there be a movie with only a single character on screen who never gets out of his car? What sort of story or entertainment can that make? The only answer is how could there not be a picture in so ingeniously fashioned a situation, granted the variety of Tom Hardy as an actor and our own profound attachment to automobiles and telephones?
    Ivan Locke is married, with children. He ought to be driving home in the Birmingham area to be with them and to watch a big soccer match on television with his boys. But he is not going to make that date. Nine months before, he met a woman and had a one-night stand with her. It’s not that she was the new love of his life. Indeed, she seems needy to a point of desperation; on the phone she doesn’t sound like his type. But she got pregnant and elected to have the baby, and Ivan has agreed to be in London for the delivery. It is a matter of honorfor him in a dishonorable situation, but now he has resolved to tell his wife about it. You see, he is a soft-spoken, rational, and conscientious man who has too much on his plate—if only he could get away to a pleasant movie and relax. As he drives the hundred miles to London, trying to speak to his wife on the car phone and talking to his nervous lover, he is also caught up in his job. Ivan is a top engineer in the concrete business (probably a first in movies). On the morrow an enormous concrete drop is to be made for the foundation of a new building. He should be there, but duty is not always a straightforward master. So now he has to talk to an assistant (less than worthy or able) to make sure nothing goes wrong. There are complications that show us how diligent and resourceful Locke can be.
    He is driving south on the motorway at night—the film is 84 minutes of apparently continuous time. Occasionally Locke cuts away from the car interior to views of the road, of cars, and the slipstream of headlights. But this is like an interval in music. The film is rigorously concentrated on the interior as Ivan talks on his car phone to half a dozen different people. You can say that Hardy is up to the task (though I believe other actors could have done well in the role). He is inventive, brilliant, sympathetic without being ingratiating—a critic’s words matter less than the creation of Ivan as a careful, dutiful Welshman, speaking softly to quell mounting stress. This is a film about reason and disorder that takes no side. You can approve or disapprove of Ivan, but only because the film keeps the neutrality of a camera, and the absorbing duplicity in which we know we are watching a living person and a known actor.
    Locke is