Millions (2005) – DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring James Nesbitt, Daisy Donovan, Alex Etel, Lewis McGibbon
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, based on his novel
directed by Danny Boyle

by Walter Chaw Unbelievably sentimental and, finally, corrupt with a hideous paternalism (how a flick like this ends first at a child’s Nativity pageant à la Love Actually, then in Africa, where a well is being dug for dying Africans, is one of those all-timers), Millions finds director Danny Boyle, after last year’s brief return to some semblance of Shallow Grave/Trainspotting form with 28 Days Later…, returning to his A Life Less Ordinary/The Beach form in all its excrescent glory. It’s the tale of two adorable, buck-toothed British urchins (the rage after Finding Neverland) who stumble upon pilfered millions in the form of the soon-to-be-Euros British Pounds Sterling and, Shallow Grave-like, ultimately hide the money in an attic with cunningly-placed slats in the floorboards for panicked eyeballs. It’s Pay It Forward, with younger Damien (Alex Etel) obsessed with the lives and messy deaths of saints and dedicated to giving the wealth to the poor (even Mormons, whom the film portrays as evil little twats), and it’s Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana in the poor’s reaction to getting rich, sporting its own version of the beggar’s banquet Last Supper from Buñuel’s picture in a scene set in a pizza parlour. And it’s Pay It Forward again in its subversion of that film’s “teach the world to sing” finale: a genuinely disturbing mob scene starring the superstars of organizations asking for your money to save the world from itself. But finally, it’s just another Danny Boyle film–a little meat and a lot of showing off with CGI pyrotechnics and confused editing.

Damien, his hedonistic brother Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon), and their father Ronnie (James Nesbitt) have moved from the city to a fresh suburban development when what should happen but a bag of cash crashes into Damien’s cardboard-box hermitage by the train tracks. Thinking it’s a gift from the Catholic god because that’s the kind of movie Millions is, Damien wants to contribute to charity and talk to his dead mother (the patron saint of beauty supplies), Anthony wants to invest in property, and Ronnie and his new girlfriend (Daisy Donovan) decide they’d like to have a really nice first Christmas. The thieves to whom the cash ostensibly belongs, meanwhile, send a thug (Christopher Fulford) to retrieve the goods in the requisite Boyle horror movie portion of the film, and Damien gets to hallucinate chatting with his deceased mother, who wastes all her allotted time vomiting up platitudes like: “Money makes it harder to see what’s what.” If I had counsel with the dead, I’d ask what next week’s PowerBall number is–which means, I guess, that I wasn’t really paying very close attention to Millions.

For a while, the appearance of various saints (especially an earthy St. Claire (Kathryn Pogson) as the patron saint of television) is charming and engaging. And then Saint Joseph (Nasser Memarzia) subs for a missing Damien in the school Christmas pageant and the urge to pluck out your eyes like another of Damien’s quoted saints is nigh irresistible. Throughout are sprinkled hints of the brilliance of the other people involved in this film: legendary Dogme95 DP Anthony Dod Mantle, for instance, does amazing work with quiet moments (one where widowed da is discovered cuddling two pillows in a fort/da for his missing wife; another of a child standing by a burning stack of paper on a railway line that recalls Jürgen Jürges cinematography on Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf), while screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Code 46) concocts an intriguing future-vision of a Britain that has, impossibly, decided to change over completely from the pound to the Euro. But Boyle and his complete inability or unwillingness to reign in his impulse to batter his chicken like Ricky Ricardo did his babaloo renders the whole thing irritating, shrill, and, taken as a whole with its Radio Flyer conclusion, the sort of thing that gives do-gooderism a bad name. Originally published: March 11, 2005.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Fox shepherds Millions to DVD in a sparkling 1.84:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. The film’s candy-coloured palette has not just vibrancy but depth, too, and while the image looks exceedingly artificial at times, I suspect that’s the point. A bit of banding (which also crops up on the otherwise-impeccable reissue of Titanic) is the transfer’s only objective flaw. Similarly, the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio has a playful quality–and is surprisingly bassy music for a kid’s movie. The robbery sequence takes full advantage of the discrete soundstage, though I wish the whole shebang had been mixed a little louder.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce reunite for a feature-length commentary that’s almost as busy as Millions itself; for anyone not aware that Britain never did convert to the euro, the two conscientiously refer to the film as “science-fiction.” Several fascinating details stand out from the thicket of conversation, including the reason for the picture’s 12A certificate in Britain (showing kids playing near railways automatically gets you a harsher rating). Elsewhere on the disc, ten deleted scenes totalling 31 minutes demonstrate by their lack of context what an undisciplined piece of filmmaking Millions really is, while four brief “behind-the-scenes” clips–“Million Pounds” (2 mins.), “Saints” (4 mins.), “Spirit of the Film” (3 mins.), “Robbery” (4 mins.)–merely provide pretext for cast and crew to do a publicist’s job by synopsizing the plot and characters. A “DVD Cutdown” (the entirety of Millions compressed into a telling 4-minute montage), soundtrack spot, and theatrical trailer for Millions round out the supplements. The Fox Searchlight promo and ubiquitous anti-piracy PSA precede the main menu.

98 minutes; PG; 1.84:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, Spanish Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox