Tony Benn: Will and Testament. (12A.)
Directed by Skip Kite.
Featuring Tony Benn. 95 mins
All political careers end in failure, but the really great ones embrace failure throughout. Tony, formerly Anthony Wedgewood, Benn may have been in government for 10 years but he somehow always remained an outsider. A once divisive figure, when he died in March, Benn had ascended, very reluctantly, to the cosy realm of National Treasure simply for being the last remaining political figure of principle. His story is like the inverse of Forrest Gump: a thoughtful and intellectual figure who bobbed along well-meaningly in prominent positions through momentous periods of history but had little to no impact to them.
Kite's film, filmed over the last three years of his life, proved to be an all too timely record of his life in politics. His perspective on our dismal post war calamities is just as depressing as you'd expect it to be, but also far more moving. Any record of somebody looking back over their life is likely to jerk the odd tear and especially someone who came of age during the fear and uncertainty of WWII (in which he lost his older brother) and when the 90 year sweep of their life encompass the whole span of our epic post war betrayal. Any heart not consisting of pure blue Thatcherite granite is going to be broken and enraged.
Kite's treatment borders on hero worship. It starts with red cinema curtains parting on a screen featuring a giant, imposing close up of Benn's face, puffing away on the inevitable pipe, who then recites the beginning or Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy. There's something creepy about this benign and adoring image, as if Benn were some kind of Shadow Big Brother. Kite sometimes films him in a studio mock up of his home in which autumn leaves fall from unseen trees or a symbolic Dollar sign hangs from the ceiling.
Mostly though the film is Benn giving his view to camera from his real kitchen or over archive footage, and that it is all it needs to be. It is all here: Hiroshima, Aldermaston, the Miner's strike, Thatcherism, New Labour, Concorde, the IMF, Iraq, so much tragedy and farce. Ever the contrarian, Benn's own political journey saw him get more left wing as he got older. To quote Harold Wilson, “he immatures with age.” (I never knew Wilson was witty: he never said anything funny when Mike Yarwood was doing him on telly.)
Directed by Skip Kite.
Featuring Tony Benn. 95 mins
All political careers end in failure, but the really great ones embrace failure throughout. Tony, formerly Anthony Wedgewood, Benn may have been in government for 10 years but he somehow always remained an outsider. A once divisive figure, when he died in March, Benn had ascended, very reluctantly, to the cosy realm of National Treasure simply for being the last remaining political figure of principle. His story is like the inverse of Forrest Gump: a thoughtful and intellectual figure who bobbed along well-meaningly in prominent positions through momentous periods of history but had little to no impact to them.
Kite's film, filmed over the last three years of his life, proved to be an all too timely record of his life in politics. His perspective on our dismal post war calamities is just as depressing as you'd expect it to be, but also far more moving. Any record of somebody looking back over their life is likely to jerk the odd tear and especially someone who came of age during the fear and uncertainty of WWII (in which he lost his older brother) and when the 90 year sweep of their life encompass the whole span of our epic post war betrayal. Any heart not consisting of pure blue Thatcherite granite is going to be broken and enraged.
Kite's treatment borders on hero worship. It starts with red cinema curtains parting on a screen featuring a giant, imposing close up of Benn's face, puffing away on the inevitable pipe, who then recites the beginning or Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy. There's something creepy about this benign and adoring image, as if Benn were some kind of Shadow Big Brother. Kite sometimes films him in a studio mock up of his home in which autumn leaves fall from unseen trees or a symbolic Dollar sign hangs from the ceiling.
Mostly though the film is Benn giving his view to camera from his real kitchen or over archive footage, and that it is all it needs to be. It is all here: Hiroshima, Aldermaston, the Miner's strike, Thatcherism, New Labour, Concorde, the IMF, Iraq, so much tragedy and farce. Ever the contrarian, Benn's own political journey saw him get more left wing as he got older. To quote Harold Wilson, “he immatures with age.” (I never knew Wilson was witty: he never said anything funny when Mike Yarwood was doing him on telly.)
