The Way Back

February 16, 2013

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One of the most misunderstood and underrated films of the past couple of years has been The Way Back by Peter Weir. Before it came out, I remember reading an article lamenting how the Hollywood distribution landscape had changed so much over the previous decade that Weir — an Oscar nominated and widely admired filmmaker — could no longer get studio backing and distribution for his latest effort. Just seven years earlier, Twentieth Century Fox put its weight behind the production and distribution of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), which went on to land 10 Academy Award nominations (including two for Weir). But, by the time of The Way Back, Weir’s financiers and distributors consisted of a network of fairly small companies geared for the art-house market. Not that the look and quality of The Way Back suffers, but it’s sad all the same because the absence of heavyweight companies with deep pockets as well as far-reaching distribution and marketing muscle could really have helped this ambitious and deserving film reach a wider audience. As it stands, Weir and his cinema — once A-list sure bets — risk becoming overshadowed by the studios’ desire to back only tentpole franchises engineered for maximum box office.

The Way Back follows a group of prison-camp escapees during WWII as they trek the thousands of miles from Siberia to safe asylum in British-occupied India. This is not an action or a suspense film, though Wier fashions elements of both into his tale. This is not a character study, particularly, since none of the characters — save that of Janusz, a political prisoner played by Jim Sturgess — really assumes fully rounded dimensions. There are two others, a cutthroat ex-criminal played by Colin Farrell and an enigmatic American played by Ed Harris who command our attention with their hard-edged personalities, their jaded world views. Gradually, through their cooperation and grit, we become fond of them, as we do the rest in the group because of their pure and enduring will to live. For the most part, The Way Back is a quiet and reflective experience in which its characters — and we, the audience — weigh constantly whether it isn’t better to just lie down and die. But always these men — and the one young Polish woman who joins them, played by Saoirse Ronan — push onwards, haggard, parched, famished, but driven toward life, escape, a more hopeful future.

Weir’s drama is decidedly low-key and exists largely as one between the individual and the passing landscape. The men distract themselves with conversations about chicken recipes as they subsist on tree bark, trudge on on swollen feet wrapped in rags, and dream of the next sip of water or a bit of real food. The Way Back is like a prison film and a prison escape film in one, because upon escaping the real prison, the group finds itself in another one, extending 4000 miles from end to end. They drop like flies as they go, one by one, their graves indicated by the markers like bread crumbs along the way. And there are surprising decisions too as, for instance, when Farrell’s character realizes that Mother Russia is the only home for him, for better or worse. His fate is a haunting one, visualized in the image of a lone man against the rugged, unforgiving starkness of his homeland, and we can’t help but wonder what lies ahead for him. Whether The Way Back is fiction or not isn’t really important (there are assertions that the story, despite its claim as being based-on-fact, is all fabrication). There are greater concerns in the film, especially the running desire for redemption that inspires Janusz. Even after his betrayal, the man isn’t angry at his wife, he understands the duress under which she had to give him up. His goal now is to tell her he forgives her. Harris’s story too is anchored by the guilt he feels towards his child.

Weir maintains a sure, subtle hand throughout. His one major story flaw is that he doesn’t allow for enough buildup at the prison camp before the men stage their breakout. There isn’t enough of a sense of last-straw desperation or, for that matter, any sense of coordinated planning, things that would’ve added suspense to the breakout once it did happen. As it is, the breakout comes abruptly, too soon, and seems too easy, amounting only to a bunch of men running wildly through the woods as dogs and soldiers pursue. They have only to run hard enough and long enough to secure their chance at survival. Still, in the passages that follow, Weir offers a solid, resonant meditation on survival, on hope, on the value of life in the face of implacable hostility, portrayed memorably by an excellent cast and Weir’s vast, brutal, awe-inspiring landscapes.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Peter Weir
Written by: Keith R. Clarke, Peter Weir
Cast: Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan, Mark Strong, Colin Farrell

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Zero Dark Thirty

February 12, 2013

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Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal offer up a workmanlike blow-by-blow of the CIA’s efforts to hunt down Osama bin Laden following the September 11th attacks. Purely as cinematic exercise, Zero Dark Thirty is an exhilarating piece of work. But, beyond its for-the-times subject matter, the work does not linger whatsoever. Except for Bigelow’s masterful calibration of suspense throughout, her film has almost no point of view, no thematic underpinnings, and not a single character worth remembering.

Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a CIA operative who becomes obsessed with tracking down bin Landen–the mastermind behind the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Because Bigelow, Boal and Chastain present Maya as essentially a cipher–an absolute blank, a young woman with a shady past, a murky inner life, and absolutely zero human connections (familial, romantic or otherwise)–they risk giving us a two-dimensional protagonist whose zeal to see her goal through must suffice in sustaining our rooting interest. Inasfar as Chastain’s character is concerned, we find a potentially interesting and headstrong individual with nothing for the audience to really cling to. She’s not as obnoxious as Claire Danes as the pathological human train-wreck Carrie in television’s Homeland, but she’s not far behind. Maya’s triumph at the end of Zero Dark Thirty is exactly what Bigelow intends–a Pyrrhic victory, an empty and meaningless futility in the endless fight-fire-with-fire crusade against al-Qaeda–but, because we don’t actually care about Maya, we don’t sympathize with that realization (or perhaps lack thereof). Rather, we just sink back in our seat, exhausted, our nerves strained from the anxiety that Bigelow’s razor-sharp technique manages to conjure up in her viewers. Other than that, we wonder for what purpose, other than as a suspenseful journalistic chronology of well-known events, the film exists.

Zero Dark Thirty is a draining and brutal experience emotionally. The acting is generally solid; the performances are as restrained and unrevealing as the screenplay. And much has been made of the film’s frank depiction of torture as an occupational moral hazard in America’s great fight. Bigelow takes no stance vis-a-vis torture. Representation is not an endorsement, she has said, and she is right. Her aim here is to present the events as they happened. But because the characters are all battle-hardened and morally weary, they aren’t our best guides through this terrain. Zero Dark Thirty is packed wall-to-wall with humans in peril, whether it’s the prisoners at the interrogation sites or the Special Forces soldiers on their fateful mission at film’s end. In terms of individual sequences–the helter-skelter hunt to intercept a cell phone caller in a crowded city market, for instance, or the climactic raid on bin Laden’s compound–there are several in the film that could be used as examples of how to modulate a suspense scene in any cinema class.

Bigelow actually pulls off quite a feat because the events she depicts have all already happened, the outcome of this story is already familiar to all of us, and yet her mastery of the craft still plays us all like a piano. In that sense, her film resembles Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) with the key difference being that, in the latter, the characters all feel like fully rounded, lived-in human characters rather than connect-the-dots archetypes. Zero Dark Thirty is an expertly made, 157-minute torture mechanism with no real payoff. That’s ultimately the point, I suppose, because there is no payoff in this War on Terror. Everything is relative–how one defines torture, how one defines victory, etc. But, on a strictly old-fashioned narrative level, Bigelow can’t pull back enough from her boiler-room atmosphere of tense meetings, interrogations, fire fights, and terror attacks to give us a truly human chronicle of this latest chapter in our messy geopolitical history.

Grade: B

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Reda Kateb, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Harold Perrineau

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

January 11, 2013

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Peter Jackson brings audiences back to the New Zealand-inspired grandeur of Middle Earth — complete with copious aerial panorama shots, snarling orcs and goblins, and picture-book imagery of fantasy landscapes — in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a somewhat entertaining, entirely unnecessary adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel to The Lord of the Rings. When word of Jackson’s three-part production came out, the whole thing reeked of a money-grab — the product of a coddled, over-zealous filmmaker attempting to cash in on his most successful property. The Hobbit is a children’s book and lacks the majesty and thematic power of The Lord of the Rings, but by delving into Tolkien’s diaries and notes, Jacksons pads out the dramatic stakes (there are story ideas, plot lines and characters non-existent in Tolkien’s novel) of the film as well as the god-forsaken running time. The Hobbit runs about a half-hour too long, stuffs more action set pieces than it needs by half, and the result is a drag-down, mildly diverting entertainment.

Tolkien’s story, in essence, deals with the homebody Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), who’s lured from the coziness of The Shire by Gandalf the Gray (Ian MacKellan) to embark on a mission alongside a twelve-member group of dwarves to reclaim treasure stolen from them by a horrible dragon. The dwarves are led by Thorin (Richard Armitage), the deposed heir-apparent of the dwarf kingdom — a kind of dwarf equivalent to Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings. Armitage is a smoldering, righteous prince, hell-bent not only on reclaiming his land’s treasure but also on seeking revenge against the Pale Orc, the muscular brute who killed his father in a long-ago battle.

There is also a parallel sub-plot about an encroaching necromancer — the foreshadowing of the rise of Sauron. One of The Hobbit’s real pleasures, in fact, is seeing this sub-plot unfold, as the eccentric wizard Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) investigates a dark, secretive force unleashing black magic across Middle Earth. Radagast’s scenes in The Hobbit comprise some of the movie’s most striking moments, ranging from the fearsome sequence in which Radagast tracks down the source of the black magic to a ruined castle to the exhilarating visuals of the wizard, borne along on a sleigh pulled by hyper-kinetic rabbits, being chased by a tribe of orcs astride giant wolves. It’s in these moments that Jackson’s essential pulse as a cinematic storyteller comes alive, and where we feel the director’s vitality for image-making. And delightful as McCoy is as Radagast, Jackson truly lucked out when he cast Freeman as Bilbo. Freeman is the best hobbit ever cast; with his trademark mix of comic nervousness and dramatic sincerity, Freeman ably spins the fussbudget Bilbo into a charming, endearing reluctant hero.

But, alas, The Hobbit is also overloaded with ridiculousness. There are entire sequences here that feel ill-conceived, over-wrought, and fatally drawn-out. A case in point is the entire goblin hall sequence that sags the latter half of the movie. I characterize it as Jackson’s “Jabba the Hutt” moment because of how it trumps dread and danger with silliness and cartoonishness. The goblin king himself — warts, wattle, bug-eyes and all — is just an updated Jabba the Hutt, the bloated baddie in what was the weakest of Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. Jackson wants to make this sequence the movie’s Mines of Moria (from The Fellowship of the Ring) analogue, but it’s a failure: The goblins are cartoons, the chase is as ludicrously manic as any Looney Tunes outing, and the perils are too outlandish to really grab our emotional involvement. Most of The Hobbit functions at this outlandish level, as if the lesson that Jackson took from The Lord of the Rings is that bigger is better. But The Lord of the Rings also boasted sympathetic, dynamic characters — the dwarves in his movie are, again, just cartoons save for Thorin — and sincere storytelling that served a captivating narrative, whereas The Hobbit often feels like a cynic packaging a Happy Meal and calling it magic.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Ian MacKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, William Kircher, Sylvester McCoy, James Nesbitt, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee

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Silver Linings Playbook

December 7, 2012

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You have to hand it to David O. Russell. Since his debut feature, Spanking the Monkey in 1994, he has steadily proven himself to be a worthy descendent of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. More than any other Hollywood filmmaker, Russell has demonstrated a facility with nutty situations, screwball energy, and eccentric characters, the kind of facility that recalls Sturges in his Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek heyday, the kind that approximates the manic farce of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot together with the acerbic wit and sentiment of The Apartment. Movies like Flirting with Disaster (my vote for Russell’s best movie), I Heart Huckabees, and his latest, Silver Linings Playbook all have the pace and hysterics to match Hollywood’s screwball tradition and no other filmmaker seems capable of sustaining a sense of sheer lunacy–that is, an edgy, barely contained craziness–over a feature-length movie without losing his audience. Yet, as entertainingly oddball as Playbook is, the movie derives much of its pleasure from its offbeat energy, soft-heartedness, and the roiling tensions that preoccupy its largely two-dimensional characters.

Insanity, or at least some degree of it, is all over this movie. Bradley Cooper stars as Pat Solatano, just released from a mental institution after a violent episode that’s scared off his wife. He moves back in with his parents, played by Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver, vows to clean up his act, and win back the affections of his estranged wife, Nikki (Brea Bee), who’s taken out a restraining order on him. Of course, Pat functions in a kind of manic delusional state, just as his father–as warm and genuine as he is in his love for Pat–is an obsessive-compulsive Eagles football fan whose life pivots on the outcomes of football Sundays. Because he can’t get to Nikki, Pat enlists the aid, however grudgingly, of Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), one of her friends. Tiffany herself has more than her share of emotional issues; she’s struggling to put the grief and guilt over her husband’s death behind her. So she pours her energies into a dance competition and makes a deal with Pat: if he agrees to be her dance partner in the competition, she’ll cooperate in his attempts to win back his wife. Pat and Tiffany’s uneasy alliance warms to a mutually dependent friendship that, after some ups and downs, blossoms into, you guessed it, an old-time romance.

Five years ago, Mark Wahlberg–an actor who’s been featured in three of Russell’s movies–would have played Pat; the role of the off-kilter yet adorably sweet working-class misfit seems tailor-made for an earlier Wahlberg incarnation. Cooper gamely fills Wahlberg’s shoes here; his comic timing and intensity level matches that of his predecessor. And, as the volatile Tiffany, Lawrence is consistently watchable. De Niro and Weever nicely counterpoint each other with the latter serving as a kind of buffer for the neurotic excesses of the former. But, when all’s said and done, Silver Linings Playbook is as aggressively offbeat as it is aggressively by-the-numbers. This is a tried-and-true, paint-by-numbers rom-com whose adherence to convention is masked by Russell’s brand of anarchic comedy. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, so the story goes–what’s different this time around are the players and the twists in the path that lead us to the end. Russell doesn’t really offer a new take on family or interpersonal dynamics and we never feel that Pat, Tiffany, or anyone else here are particularly authentic human beings, just a collection of tics, oddities, and obsessions. But, for what it’s worth, Silver Linings Playbook is grounded in real heart–an embrace of such eternal virtues as true love, parent-child bonding, and self realization–and it delivers the kind of sharply timed laughs that Sturges and Wilder would’ve appreciated.

Grade: B-

Directed by: David O. Russell
Written by: David O. Russell
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, Anupam Ker, John Ortiz, Julia Stiles, Brea Bee

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Drama, Romance | Leave a Comment »

Lincoln

November 24, 2012

There are three possible responses you might have to Lincoln, the long-in-development biopic from Steven Spielberg. You might instantly love the film, case closed. Or you might find it so shatteringly dull that you never want to come near it again. Or you might have a delayed response, a complicated mixture of the first two responses, one that admires the film but isn’t so taken with its inherent stodginess. I proclaim that I’m in that third category of audience member — within the first 15 minutes of Lincoln, I couldn’t believe how bored I was but, by the end, I knew I loved (and was fascinated by) enough of Lincoln to want to take another look (and another) down the road.

Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner take as their dramatic impetus Lincoln’s intense (and ultimately successful) efforts to get the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, passed in the House of Representatives. Against the politicking and agitation pro and against the bill, the Civil War rages — another great weight on Lincoln’s shoulders. What’s more, Lincoln’s family life and relationship with his wife, Mary (Sally Field), are pained and haunted by the recent death of a child. The tragedy has driven Mary closer to a nervous breakdown and Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) must maintain a facade of strength — a kind of tough love — whenever Mary’s mental state begins to crumble.

The first impression that hits you about Kushner’s screenplay is how just how talky it is. We don’t come upon movies this talky anymore. Lincoln is supremely talky, almost to the exclusion of all other qualities. Scene after scene is rooted in dialogue — mostly dialogue among politicians, Lincoln among them, cajoling, bribing, and browbeating others into supporting the passage of the bill. When word arrives that the South may be ready to surrender, the news throws the chance of the bill passing into jeopardy — after all, would Americans care any longer about freeing slaves if the war over slavery is brought to an end? Thus, Kushner and Spielberg arrive at an effective race-against-the-clock device as Lincoln’s convictions about the moral imperative of the Thirteen Amendment are tested.

Apart from seeing the great moral crusade of American history devolve (by necessity) into a battle between Lincoln’s shrewd Machiavellian plotting — he hires lobbyists to bribe functionaries with sought-after posts in the administration in return for their votes — and the fire-and-brimstone fearmongering of anti-abolitionists in Congress, Lincoln offers a tender and heartbreaking look at the dynamics within the President’s family. As Mary seeks to shield her older son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from enlistment, we feel his anguish, his determination to join the Union effort not only to be of service to the country but to honor his pride and his manhood. We feel too Lincoln’s inner battle between his reluctance to endanger Robert (especially after suffering the death of another child) and his duty to let his son be his own man. Gordon-Levitt and Day-Lewis’s scenes together prove Spielberg’s keenness for depicting father-son relationships — something he’s shown mastery with throughout his career. Even more powerful are those moments — however fleeting they are — between Lincoln and his younger son Tad (Gulliver McGrath); we sense the bond that father feels for his son in every interaction they have. Tad adores his father and Lincoln is an infinitely loving and patient father. Spielberg shows us as much when, in one scene, Lincoln — weary from another’s day fight — finds Tad sleeping on the floor with this toys scattered before him. Lincoln lies down next to Tad, strokes his hair, and kisses him — actions which seem so organic, so unforced and natural as could only occur in those spontaneous moments between parent and child. Then Tad wakes — and without saying a word — climbs onto his father’s back before Lincoln stands and carries his son, piggy-backed, to bed. There’s another breathtaking moment, conveyed entirely though imagery and behavior, when Lincoln hears the pealing of bells outside his office — signaling his hard-fought Congressional victory. Father and son walk to the window. Spielberg’s camera views them through the curtain, blanched in heavenly daylight, as Lincoln holds his son and absorbs the moment’s exultation. It’s a moment of deep, thoughtful silence and extraordinary poignance, captured by a filmmaker working in peak form.

There is directorial mastery here, and, even for those like me for whom the power of Lincoln is a percolating realization, one thing is certain: The performance by Daniel Day-Lewis is astonishing. It is an uncanny, almost atavistic accomplishment of one man channeling the spirit of another and bringing him to life on-screen. Enough has been said in praise of Day-Lewis, both for his performance in Lincoln and his career as a whole, so I won’t delve much into it. Please note that the performance is nothing short of miraculous, the result of the actor’s (and the director’s) willingness to take major artistic leaps and span the chasm of time and between two souls, one invoking the deceased spirit of the other. Supporting performances from Tommy Lee Jones as fiery abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, and James Spader as cunning lobbyist W.N. Bilbo stand out in a solid cast.

Lincoln is, in many ways, Spielberg’s boldest and most committed picture. It is absent of the director’s visual showmanship as well as, thankfully, his propensity for drippy sentiment (something that’s marred otherwise solid Spielberg efforts). This is a straightforward, sharply written telling of one man and one nation facing their toughest crucible, workmanlike yet reverential. As a portrait of political acumen, moral resolve, and leadership (both within a family and as a President), Lincoln magnificently makes the case that the man it depicts more than deserves the iconic status that history and affection have afforded him.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Tony Kushner
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, James Spader, John Hawkes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tim Blake Nelson, Jackie Earle Haley, Bruce McGill

Posted in Best of 2012, Drama | 1 Comment »

Flight

November 15, 2012

The first 40 minutes of Flight feature perhaps the boldest filmmaking in the career of director Robert Zemeckis. Not only does it further prove his mastery of suspense, his complete command over the physical elements of action, but we find him pushing his characters to the brink of emotional disaster, far-gone into abusive behavior, and he keeps them there, teetering on the precipice between salvation and certain doom. The fact that we care as much as we do about his protagonist, an alcoholic commercial airline pilot named Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), means that his struggle to face his demons becomes every bit as harrowing an experience as enduring the terror-filled mid-air incident that triggers the entire narrative. After the dust from that expertly directed opening episode settles, though, Flight becomes an awfully familiar melodrama redeemed thankfully by a bracing performance by the world-class Washington.

Whitaker is a powerhouse drunk, the kind of drunk who chugs gallons of vodka like it’s water while behind the wheel. And he’ll snort a few lines to bounce back out of his stupor. When we find him taking the cockpit of his fully loaded plane, Whitaker is coming off a bruising drug and booze-fueled bender. But what should’ve been a short hop from Florida to Georgia ends up being a descent into Hell as Whittaker’s plane loses hydraulics and nosedives. In the ensuing vortex of panic and confusion, Whittaker miraculously lands the plane, saving most of the lives on-board. This entire sequence is worth the price of admission and should be filed among the movies’ greatest air disasters.

What should be a cause for celebration for Whitaker is the beginning of a nightmare as evidence of his blood-alcohol content soon comes to light. And the lawyer representing the pilot’s union (Don Cheedle), along with the union rep (Bruce Greenwood), struggle to keep Whittaker on the straight-and-narrow as they seek to deflect liability away from his drunkenness in preparation for an upcoming NTSB hearing. Hounded by shame, guilt, and anger, however, Whittaker can’t stay away from the bottle. The alcohol is both the source all his anguish — he feels he’s betrayed and abandoned his son and ex-wife due to his drinking — and his only comfort. The comfort, of course, is only an illusion, and it’s that journey towards dispelling the illusion and towards openly admitting (and repenting) his alcoholism that Zemeckis’s movie explores.

Anyone familiar with movie-of-the-week tropes about alcoholism knows the scenes: The drinking binges followed by chastened periods of going clean followed by guilt-fueled relapses followed by the protagonist reluctantly attending AA meetings and so on and so forth until the moment of truth, the moment of utter humility when the alcoholic sees the light. And, yes, we have a fellow traveler on Whittaker’s path too — a heroin addict, Nicole (Kelly Reilly), who’s farther along on the path than Whittaker and who tries to stand him up when he’s down. Anyone who’s seen Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and countless similar dramas, knows their fairly worn-out dynamic.

A shame about Flight is that what’s truly a spectacular (in every sense of the word) first act serves merely as a pretext to a far less interesting and cliche-ridden story about one man’s struggle to find himself. This isn’t to say that the movie isn’t compelling and absorbing: Washington is so wrenching, so heartbreaking — the kind of performance that’s both repulsive and appealing at once — that we forgive most of screenwriter John Gatins and Zemeckis’s lingerings in the familiar. There are some grievous errors that almost sink the whole movie as when John Goodman, playing Whitaker’s Dr. Feelgood, shows up at a critical point and throws the tone of the entire film out of whack. For the duration of his appearance and purpose in the scene, Flight goes from a deadly serious personal drama to some kind of perverse spring-break comedy. How Zemeckis could have miscalculated the nature and tone of his own drama, as evidenced by this scene, is baffling, and it points to a certain disconnect with the material as if he were out of his depth, and he needed to swim to the shallows to liven things up.

The performances are top-drawer across the board, especially Washington’s. He’s an actor supremely adept at playing men puffed up by a misguided sense of themselves only to be humbled by circumstance and deep introspection. Reilly is sweet and committed in a performance that’s largely redundant, while Greenwood and Cheedle hold up the sober end of the ensemble solidly. After Cast Away (2000), Flight is exactly the kind of product you’d by now expect from Zemeckis: Brilliantly crafted and loaded with high-end potential at the outset but which quickly falls into a rather pedestrian tour of monumental themes. As A-list substance-abuse melodramas go, this one lands safely enough.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Written by: John Gatins
Starring: Denzel Washington, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheedle, Nadine Valazquez, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman

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Skyfall

November 11, 2012

The James Bond franchise celebrates its 50th anniversary with not the most celebratory of Bond movies. Director Sam Mendes and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan fall back on the heavy-duty psycho-drama and origin-story psychoanalysis — elements better and more suitably employed in Casino Royale (2006) — to fuel the latest Bond go-around, Skyfall. What ends up happening, though, is that Mendes and company get so lost in the murk of the drama, in the leaden themes of betrayal, guilt, and vindication and in the theatrics involved with all the above that they completely miss the point that Bond is supposed to be fun.

The plot concerns the theft of top-secret computer files that contained the names of all MI6 agents working undercover in terrorist organizations around the world. By exposing their names, the culprit not only puts the agents’ lives in danger, but also the credibility of MI6, the super-secret spy organization headed up by M (Judi Dench). Bond’s pursuit of the criminal mastermind ends at the headquarters of an embittered former MI6 agent, Silva (Javier Bardem), who was once betrayed by M and who now harbors a smoldering desire for revenge against her and her organization. Bond’s capture of Silva is only the beginning in the latter’s ploy to find satisfaction, leading to an explosion-filled showdown at Bond’s titular childhood estate where he and M are holed up.

Daniel Craig is among the more captivating Bonds ever to be cast. He’s up there with Connery in his no-nonsense and amoral pursuit of mission objectives. But the dire mistake that the current crop of Bond producers, writers, and directors make is to overplay Craig’s penchant for brooding self-absorption. At one point in the story, when Bond is given up for dead, he spends his time getting drunk and chugging pain pills, and we see in him a vulnerability we rarely glimpse. Later, in a face-to-face with Silva, as the latter is running down a checklist of Bond’s flaws (including his substance abuse and childhood trauma), and, again, in a third-act revelation about his parents’ deaths when he was child, we get occasions for digging into Bond’s past and for understanding his state of mind. But all this, especially because Casino Royale went over this ground already, is just redundant character-building. It’s as if Mendes couldn’t be bothered with crafting an exciting, fast-paced spy thriller — or didn’t know how to make one — and so retreated into the territory in which he felt comfortable.

One evidence of this can be found in the chase sequence at the movie’s outset. Everything’s rolling along fine until the writers find themselves stuck on a train, with Bond ducking a hail of gunfire from his opponent. Rather than keep things elemental and physical (as Casino Royale did in its smart, riveting, vertiginous opening), the writers get the idea of putting a shovel tractor on the bed of the train. Its presence on the train is baffling, but it’s convenient and provides a clever device for a “sensational” moment that Bond gets to impress his audience with as he goes to work manipulating the tractor. For me, it’s a clunky, graceless moment in a film filled with unremarkable action set pieces — all of which are loud, expensive, and arbitrary. The two worst include a subterranean chase that involves a train careering through a blown-apart hole, and straight into Bond’s path: It all looks neat but does nothing but make noise. The other set piece, the movie’s capper, involves the siege that Silva lays to Bond’s estate — a setting that bafflingly recalls the moors in dreary Victorian gothic novels. Crass with explosions, firepower, and machine-gun bullets traded back and forth, this finale is a disappointing dog; again, it’s as if Mendes and company are more interested in the thematic and symbolic underpinnings of the action than the pace, wit, and originality of the action itself.

Who pays the price for Skyfall? Bond fans do, of course. But so does Daniel Craig. He’s not going to be around forever — not in this shape, anyway — so it’s this reviewer’s hope that, next time around, they give Craig an opportunity to be Fleming’s Bond, the Bond of Connery, instead of this neo-Victorian creation, a broken-down Heathcliff whose past bereavements must be continually paraded out every time he confronts a new mission. Craig gets almost no opportunity, apart from a few scenes, to be Bond — self-reliant, hyper-competent, and resourceful in spite of the odds. M is also wasted. In fact, this is the first time I grew truly annoyed by Judi Dench, not exactly the actress but her character: principled, yes, and headstrong, but here she commandeers an entire Bond film through her sheer ineptitudes, past and present. Lastly, what a waste of a potentially superb Bond villain. Bardem has two terrific scenes: His first, opposite Craig, sends chills as he fops and capers, trying to tease and belittle Bond with a just-right homoerotic edge; here, I thought, is a Bond villain who creeps people out but also seduces us. The other, opposite M, in which Silva is in his transparent holding cell, is a showstopper. Bardem makes Silva’s damaged humanity, deranged mind, and thirst for vengeance fully palpable and relatable. But, ultimately, the actor’s brilliant portrayal is squandered in a series of standard-issue chases, fights, and a couple of cliché-ridden moments that recall the dullest of action-movie conventions: The villain getting cold feet before he can finish the job. Yes, that happens.

Apart from select moments of character interplay, Skyfall is more or less a bust as a Bond movie. In fact, this isn’t a Bond movie, except in name. This is an approximation, a posturing of a Bond movie. The movie you get when the director and the writers — really, anyone in any prime creative or executive role on the project — have zero grasp of what has made Bond such a magnetic draw for 50 years. Gone is the man of action, replaced by a vexed and agitated neurotic. Gone is the pure sense of fun, adventure, the unexpected. Bond movies only come around every few years, and we can hope Craig’s Bond finds again the script and director he deserves. As for Skyfall, it’s a wasted opportunity.

If you’ve read this far: One final carp. Except for Adele’s excellent title song, the score in Skyfall by Thomas Newman is a dreadful bore. The lack of memorable Bond music since John Barry is a cause for concern as is the near-absence of Bond’s signature theme in these latest offerings. Why have the franchise executives turned their backs on the classic Bond template, its classic sense of style and attitude? The fact that the opening gun-barrel sequence is now relegated to the pre end-credit roll is also troubling and shows a baffling disregard for form; for decades, Bond movies opened with the gun-barrel sequence at the beginning — it’s Bond’s signature, a graphic choice that sets the brand apart from a crowded field of pretenders and competitors. This desperate desire to re-shuffle the template, to ditch elements that helped define the brand, is a worrisome trend. Perhaps what Bond needs is less of a re-boot and more of a celebration of what made the brand great to begin with.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Sam Mendes
Written by: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan
Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Bérénice Marlohe, Albert Finney

Posted in Action & Adventure, Thriller | 34 Comments »

Moon

November 9, 2012

Talk about curveballs. What begins as a self-searching meditation on loneliness, set on a lunar mining station in the near-future, becomes a Twilight Zone-esque, down-the-rabbit-hole inquiry into identity, madness, and the validity of one’s memories. Sam Rockwell plays Sam, a miner sent to the moon by an energy company specializing in extracting a lunar mineral that ends up solving Earth’s energy crisis.

At the end of a solo, three-year stint, Sam is desperately homesick, eager to see his wife (Dominique McElligott) and daughter again, and give life on Earth another shot after a track record marred presumably by dangerous mood swings. His only companion on the lunar station is GERTY, a robot voiced by Kevin Spacey, and one of Moon’s slyest and most amusing offerings. Equipped with a full range of emotional and verbal abilities, it’s odd that GERTY expresses moods by way of smiley-face/sad-face emoticons that appear on a tiny screen. Add to that Spacey’s gift for the half-genuine, half-sarcastic line reading, and you’ve got one of the screen’s most memorable computer characters since HAL 9000.

It’s in the second half of Moon that GERTY’s motives become suspect. After Sam survives a mining accident, strange things begin to happen. Chief among them, he finds himself sharing the station with his doppelganger, who mysteriously appears as Sam awakens from his trauma. Also calling himself Sam, this twin is just as perplexed as the original Sam at the presence of the other. Both Sams share the same memories, the same hopes, dreams, and goals. What the two can agree on is that GERTY is hiding something. And, in spite of their mistrust of each other, team up to uncover the truth behind who they are and why they’re here.

The star of the show, of course, is Rockwell who bifurcates Sam into two wholly compelling characters, both different shades of the same persona. The more you consider his performance, the more its brilliance and complexity dawns on you. Rockwell brings his trademark quirkiness and snark to both Sams, but his style is tempered by a guilelessness on the one hand and a tough-guy bravado on the other so that we see competing ranges of color coalescing into a pleasing buddy-movie dynamic that’s alternately comedic and poignant. Intriguing, imaginative, and thematically ambitious, Moon gives ample proof that Jones is a serious talent, pushing his concepts into intellectually and spiritually challenging territory.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Duncan Jones
Written by: Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott

Posted in Science Fiction | Leave a Comment »

Looper

November 2, 2012

Looper is among the cleverest, most skillfully crafted and entertaining sci-fi thrillers of the past 20 years. Writer-director Rian Johnson, who made the smart, savvy high-school-set noir Brick in 2005, opts for a cat-and-mouse action-movie with not the easiest gimmicks driving it: Time travel. Often raising more questions of narrative logic than the filmmakers’ originally intended — and which detract from the movie’s ultimate enjoyment — the time-travel gimmick can become more trouble than is worth for all concerned. But with its swift, sure-footed pacing, Johnson’s shrewd staging and framing, and pitch-perfect performances, Looper is so winning and absorbing that any plot holes and time-travel gaffes are easily overlooked.

It’s 2044, and there’s a new breed of criminal thriving in the mercenary underground: Loopers. These are killers hired to assassinate individuals from the future, sent back 30 years — from a time when time-travel has been invented and immediately banned — by a criminal syndicate commissioned to eliminate them. Apparently, disposing of dead bodies in the future is a tricky ordeal, so it’s a better bet to ship those you want to kill back in time and have the loopers do it for you.

Enter Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a looper who’s made a killing — pun intended — at his profession who works for Abe (Jeff Daniels), a kingpin in the time-travel assassination business. Business is brisk, but a wrinkle appears when the loopers discover that more and more of their targets are older versions of themselves, shunted back 30 years from the future. It turns out that a nefarious figure, dubbed The Rainmaker, is tyrannizing the future, bringing governments to their knees, and one of The Rainmaker’s decrees is to eliminate every ex-looper still living.

It’s not long before Joe finds himself face-to-face with his future self, played by Bruce Willis — at his chiseled action-hero best. Unlike his previous targets, Willis isn’t going to go so easily; he escapes his assassination and sets off on a mission to hunt down and kill The Rainmaker — the sole cause of all his grievances, including the death of his future wife. Willis narrows down his targets to one of three possible suspects — all young boys — and, it’s at the home of one of them that Gordon-Levitt arrives, anticipating that Willis will soon show up. Watched over by a tough-as-nails, protective mother — played by the always-captivating Emily Blunt — the young boy (Pierce Gagnon) is alert, observant, and he possesses seismic telekinetic powers, enough to tip anyone off that he’s the boy Willis is after. The dramatic tension between Gordon-Levitt and Blunt earn the romantic sparks that ensue while the former’s growing bond with Blunt’s son is also richly layered with close scenes of the two. With Gordon-Levitt, determined to save his charge, and Willis, bent on erasing the evils of his past, on a collision course, the final third of Looper becomes a riveting example of how shrewd storytelling can hold audience sympathies with both its lead characters, despite their being in direct opposition with each other.

Gordon-Levitt and Willis play two versions of the same character, that is to say, Gordon-Levitt does an impression of Willis. And, as impressions go, it’s an incredible one, channeling Willis’s tics and mannerisms to a tee. But it’s also performance that stands on its own — Joe is a tough, business-as-usual killer with a deference to his employers and with a cocky, assured sense of his future. All of that comes crashing to pieces when he slowly, surely falls for Blunt and vows to protect her son at all costs. Willis is commanding as always but now, showing his age and his wear-and-tear, he’s becoming our next Eastwood, especially since his on-screen persona — laconic, morally clear, and purposeful — is in line with Eastwood’s Man with No Name and Dirty Harry.

If Looper has a fault, it’s that it has too many moving parts, too many plot lines weaving together motives and counter-motives to keep track of. For plot-driven sci-fi thrillers, this is an occupational hazard and as clean as Johnson’s script is, it’s too busy — especially once Daniels and his minions go hunting for both Gordon-Levitt and Willis — to allow for a full immersion into the story’s wonderfully drawn characters. That frenetic quality also rules out any chance for Looper to achieve its potential for exploring those themes it openly invites — the meaning and purpose of life, the ethics of altering the future, and of sacrificing oneself for the good of humanity. It’s all there, touched upon, but Johnson could’ve slowed or simplified his plot for these themes to breathe and permeate our experience of his otherwise excellent storytelling.

Grade: A

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Pierce Gagnon, Quing Xu, Tracie Thomas, Garret Dillahunt

Posted in Action & Adventure, Best of 2012, Crime, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Argo

October 30, 2012

Ben Affleck stars in and directs Argo, a tense, absorbing true-life espionage yarn about a CIA operative who embarks on a daring, borderline foolhardy, mission to extract six members of the American embassy in Tehran during the most heated days of the 1980 Iran hostage crisis. Facing a diplomatic stalemate and smoldering anti-American sentiment among Iran’s Islamic hardliners, the State Department finds itself with no options as it tries to orchestrate a plan to lift the American men and women who fled the embassy just as the protestors were storming the building and who are now holed up at the residence of the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). Affleck plays agent Tony Mendez who comes up with a scheme to cobble together a fake Hollywood production company readying to start production on a fake science-fiction movie set in the exotic Middle East. With the help of a pair of hard-nosed Hollywood old-timers, played by John Goodman and Alan Arkin, Mendez manages to create a convincing enough facade. Undercover as a Hollywood producer, Mendez sneaks himself into Tehran and manages to persuade the six hideaways into posing as his film crew in Tehran on a location scout and attempting a risky exit across the city and through Tehran’s airport — a minefield of suspicious government hardliners on the lookout for the fugitive Americans — and out of Iran.

From the retro Warner Bros. logo that appears at the beginning, riddled with faux scratch marks and film grain, to the camerawork, screenplay and editing, Argo is an uncanny evocation of the best political thrillers of the 1970s. It was Affleck’s intention to recall the works of Alan J. Pakula, particularly All the President’s Men, and he succeeds brilliantly. Much to his credit, Affleck manages to fashion a Pakula-esque vibe and style without tipping over into the no-man’s-land of indulgent homage; Argo is in itself a riveting and fascinating drama, not only for its genuinely tense spy-game elements, but the very real fears, doubts, loyalties, and bonds among this tight-knit group of escapees that get tested as Mendez hatches his escape plan. The acting across the board is crackling in the grand 1970′s tradition, with Affleck effectively channeling Pacino, Redford or Hoffman, while Bryan Cranston plays Mendez’s superior with an intensity and moral certitude that would make Jack Lemmon or Jason Robards proud. Argo is among the worthiest spy thrillers to come out of Hollywood in years, and it puts to rest (at least for this reviewer) any doubts over Affleck’s chops as a smart, shrewd director of consistently topnotch fare. Not only is the movie one of the year’s best, it could also usher Affleck into the short list of directors to watch (and root for) this awards season.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Ben Affleck
Written by: Chris Terrio
Cast: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Victor Garber, Tate Donovan, Clean Duvall, Scoot McNairy, Rory Cochrane

Posted in Best of 2012, Drama, Genres, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

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