Mickey Rourke's face - puffed, spongy, semi-mobile, is like a relief map of failure in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, a sports drama that struggles semi-successfully to transcend it's genre. To the degree that it succeeds Rourke, Marisa Tomei, and Aronofsky deserve the credit for sharply grounding the film in reality. Likewise, it's shortcomings are again Aronofsky's - who sometimes uses a staple gun when a thumbtack would do (quite literally) and screenwriter Robert Siegel who sometimes flounders against the mechanics of his plot and some clunky dialogue.
Aronofsky tones down the lyrical visual flourishes of The Fountain to shoot in a spare, hand-held fashion. There are some nice flourishes, the best of which is the constant soundtrack of 80s hair metal. When Rourke laments the rise of Kurt Cobain and the 90s, its the sweeping away of his dreams and his status as a cultural force he is railing against. It's heavy meta, if you will.
Early on Tomei recommends Scorsese's The Passion of The Christ to Rourke, jokingly calling his character "The sacrificial Ram." Not surprisingly that's exactly what he is, a piece of meat thrown into a ring as a lightning rod for his fans hopes and rage and passion - even as he slides down the ladder of his chosen profession.
Tomei, is his spiritual doppelganger, a stripper who equals him in bare chested and buttocked screen time. It's a measure of how far she's come that her high school drama class Brooklynese that inexplicable netted an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny is replaced here by an utterly believable Jersey girl. These are both sweet characters who absorb the blows of the world around them and find their power in the spotlight of the stage even as their bodies begin to betray them.
The real pleasure of this film lie in the backstage sequences - seeing the way younger wrestlers respond to Rourke's Randy the Ram, the business of plotting out the rough action that will occur in the ring, the subtle signals the wrestlers give to each other while grappling, all speak to the film's verisimilitude.
Less real are the scenes with Ram's estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood. They both come across fine but the scenes feel sketched out rather than fully fleshed. This is true too of the climax which is designed to place Ram on his metaphorical cross. It feels like a bit too much in a film full of surprising subtlety.
Let me know what you think here, or on Twitter at @nmallin .
At the screening of Milk I attended a number of people walked out during scenes in which Sean Penn and James Franco were kissing. I had to wonder whether these folks thought they were going to see a film about beverage consumption. Did they not know this was a film about a gay man?
On reflection though I suspect what really bothered these patrons was the nature of the scenes. My wife pointed out that they weren’t as “explicit” as Brokeback Mountain which, in its way, was rather chaste (at least with the two male characters). I think the difference is that much of what happened between the lovers in Brokeback was furtive, whereas Milk depicts a relationship between two men that is sensual, passionate, and clearly enjoyable to both.
The fact that Sean Penn is playing someone onscreen who is capable of the joy that Harvey Milk revels in – of being alive, of being in love, of breaking barriers, of being an activist – is one of the sweetest revelations of the film. More bittersweet are the inescapable parallels between the election season just passed. Like someone else I can think of, Harvey Milk is a canny politician who calls on people’s sense of hope and desire for change. He has a social agenda that is specific but he also knows how to broaden his base and take in broader issues to bring others on board. Hopefully the tragic ending of Milk’s life will not find it’s repetition in real life.
On the other hand there is the state ballot proposition that is a major focus of Milk’s organizational efforts. This film stands as a pretty good rebuke to both sides of Prop 8 – the religious zealots and frightened conservatives who oppose gay marriage and the lackluster organizers who failed to see how badly they would get trounced in their efforts to keep gay marriage legal in California.
Milk is very much a conventional biopic, and that’s not a bad thing. It compares well to two of the best in the genre, David Lean’s Ghandi and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. In itself this is a major achievement for director Gus Van Sant, who has shuttled between pretentious twaddle like Gerry and just plain old twaddle like Finding Forrester. For me, this is his best film since Drugstore Cowboy. All of his experimental trickery is channeled into storytelling – with some brilliant sequences of montage and clever use of archival footage.
The actors help ground this a great deal. Penn is at his best here. He’s been playing bottled up white guys for so long that just seeing him smile radiantly takes him to a different performance level. He effortlessly becomes Milk, eyes dancing with glee at every chance to play and win the political game and to simply get someone to believe in the power of change. James Franco turns in another great, centered performance as Milk’s longtime partner Scott Smith – from frivolous in the opening scenes to weary and wary – but always warm. Emile Hirsch is sharp and sarcastic as Cleve Jones, mostly winning a fight against his huge prop glasses. Finally the amazing Josh Brolin is stunning as Milk’s assassin Dan White – with Blogojevich hair and a screw loose – or perhaps repressed.
Coming off less well is moony-eyed Diego Luna as Milk’s later love interest Jack Lira. It’s the typical biopic role of the companion whose smothering idea of love holds our hero back from accomplishing what they need to do – often through whining and cajoling (see Ginnifer Goodwin in Walk the Line). Luna takes an underwritten part and makes the worst of it. I understand that Milk’s friends find this guy irritating but must we as the audience want to strangle him as well? It leads to a bit of a false note being struck as his eventual exit is meant to be sad and profound. It comes more as a relief.
What this pulls focus from is the core of the film – a sheer unadulterated paean to activism and political engagement that will ring true to anyone who spent the last year chanting “Yes we can!” Milk is portrayed as both an idealist and a crafty politician – an honest portrayal and a fitting one for our times.
Slumdog Millionaire is unusual in that it’s a fairytale built on a core of the real misery and struggle that exists in cities like Mumbai. Then again, maybe it’s not so unusual – the Grimm’s fairtytales had some extremely disturbing elements and at a time before urban sprawl and centralized law and order staying out of the forest was probably a wise idea. There is also a trace of Dickensian London, a mass of humanity with different rules for different classes.
Director Danny Boyle shoots everything with bold colors and a panoramic eye, unstinting in the depiction of life in Mumbai slums but never wavering from the focus on character. The aptly named Chris Dickens edits each sequence perfectly so that the movie has a rapid pace but without sacrificing meaning or impact.
The basic premise is hoary: a slum kid makes it to the final round of India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. No-one can figure out how he can know the answers to many of the questions he gets right so the police question him, often using enhanced tactics that will seem familiar to Dick Cheney.
This device provides a framework to explore the love triangle between slumdog Jamal, his brother Salim, and Latika, a girl from the neighborhood. Unusually it’s Salim and Latika who vie for Jamal’s affections throughout the movie. The three are orphaned at a young age when their families are victims of anti-Muslim violence. It’s a sequence that yanks the film out of distant observational interest and firmly ties it to the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai – it’s nearly too much for the confectionery story to bear.
It does manage the load, helped along by an extraordinary sequence that takes place on a train which is stunning in its visual beauty and storytelling simplicity, all the more so following as it does the darkest most Dickensian vision of a Mumbai orphanage.
The child actors are simply incredible and despite the tragic surroundings of their lives their joy in simply surviving is palpable. Though I always have a little trouble with multiple actors playing characters at different ages it mostly works here.
If there is a flaw it's that the third act feels a little bit rushed and that can diminish the magic (and indeed magical realism) that Boyle aims for. Still, if great movies show you people and places that you might never get to see ordinarily. Slumdog Millionaire fits this bill perfectly.
The gratifying surprise then is that Rachel Getting Married is a revelatory gem, a naturalistic film in both acting and photography that never devolves into melodrama. The aces up its sleeve are a remarkable cast and a re-energized director. This is Demme’s best film since Silence of the Lambs, and is also the best screen performance to date by Hathaway, who is mesmerizing and unsparing. Her big eyes seem to swim around in a way that appears predatory but eventually registers as deep wariness, searchlights scouting for the next enemy plane.
The characters are never allowed to devolve into archetypes or one-notes. Yes, Hathaway’s Kym is a needy, dramatic screw-up who can suck the oxygen out of a room, but we get to see enough layers to understand that she is desperately fighting to shoulder the weight of what other see when they look at her.
There is a dark family event that tugs at the corners of the truly happy joining of the film’s title, and Demme doesn’t toy with the fact that Rachel is at its center. It’s neither sprung as an “Aha!” moment nor used as an excuse but it’s present for everyone in subtle and profound ways.
Hathaway is matched by a trio of stellar performers. Bill Irwin as the girls’ father is drawn into Kym’s drama helplessly, ever protective to a fault. His sweetness and crinkle-eyed gaze give him the aspect of someone stunned. Underneath his caring exterior there is brittleness and deep pain. It's a transformative role for a man better known for onstage clowning and movement.
The titular Rachel is played by Rosemarie DeWitt, seemingly plucked from life. There is nothing contrived in her performance or her character. She struggles to make her wedding the centerpiece of attention, as it should be, just as she struggles to get some of the attention mopped up by Kym. Her anger is as palpable as her love, both for her damaged sister and for her husband to be, played quietly by TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe.
Finally there’s Debra Winger as the mother keeping her family at arm’s length to protect herself. Both daughters desperately want her attention – it’s clear that her distance may have been emphasized by divorcing Irwin but started much earlier – perhaps was always there. It’s a brave, nuanced performance – she’s not a monster. Just deeply hurt and self-protective.
This is an unusual film for Demme. He thanks two major directors, Sidney Lumet (whose daughter Jenny wrote the screenplay) and the late Robert Altman, and features his mentor Roger Corman as part of the cast. Of the three his style here is most influenced by Altman and his A Wedding (1978) as well as Dogma 95 films like the classic The Celebration (1998) by Vinterberg.
Some have seen this as a return to Demme’s classic 80s style, but despite the welcome presence of offbeat previous Demme stars as Sister Carol East and lazy-eyed Paul Lazer and the liberal use of musicians interwoven as actors and doing their stuff on their instruments (including Robyn Hitchcock) this is light years away from his candy colored breakneck 80s films like Something Wild (1987) and Married to the Mob.(1988) There is a touch of the humanity of Melvin and Howard (1980) but it’s still on a much more intimate scale.
Nor is Rachel Getting Married similar to his big-budget 90s Hollywood stuff typified by the excellent Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the awful remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004). What does tie this in with Silence of the Lambs in particular is Demme’s fascination with women’s lives (something he shares with Altman), and the nuances of character detail - something increasingly getting lost as he’s gone from the 90s through the present decade. If anything this has more in common with his smaller scale documentaries like Cousin Bobby (1992) ove rthe past few years.
It will be a shame if this gets lost in the hoopla at awards time. Rachel Getting Married shows a director returned to full force and mining new territory, ably aided by a great cast. At the end of the day there is no "happy" ending and the closure that Kym wants is not necessarily what she gets, at least not in totality. Still the audience is left with the idea that the far-away island of happiness that Rachel has found in Hawaii may be in reach, someday for Kym too.
Welcome to our annual Thanksgiving turkey strangle - ten films that give bad a new name.Here are last year's Turkeys part one and part two. Every year we pick some of cinemas low flyers for special shame and ridicule. To the list!
1) The Wicker Man(remake)
The remake of a well regarded film is not an uncommon species of turkey, in fact this list sports several. However It must be said that the dropoff from the creepy Edward “The Equalizer” Woodward starring original to this Neil LaBute helmed crapfest is mighty steep. Aside from the nonsensical plot the main attraction for J.G. Ballard-esque car wreck fans is Nicholas Cage’s performance, a masterclass in frantic, pointless scenery chewing that reads like a bad Nic Cage impersonator “doing” Nic Cage. LaBute naturally focuses his attention on the evil women who run the mysterious island where cop Cage has gone to look for his ex-paramour’s missing child. Never has gynophobia seemed so downright silly.You'll root for the murderers.
2) Under the Rainbow
It’s hard to know what anyone involved in this awful film were thinking. Set in 1938 it involves 150 midgets in town to film the Wizard of Oz, Chevy Chase as a secret service agent, Carrie Fisher as the midget’s chaperon and a lot of convoluted plotting involving Nazis and fake European countries. Like A Fish Called Wanda, the cardinal Hollywood rule of avoiding dog deaths is overlooked. Unlike Wanda, it’s simply not funny here.
3) The Jerk, Too
Some of you might remember ABC’s short-lived Saturday Night Live knockoff Fridays, which in the early 80s introduced a small audience to Michael Richards and Larry David. One of the breakout stars was Mark Blankfield, whose over-the-top pharmacist character propelled him to this ill-considered remake of Steve Martin’s 1979 classic The Jerk, barely 5 years after the original.
4) Employee of the Month
My wife and I valiantly attempted to watch this excrescence on cable, just to see at what point one of us would cry chicken and call the whole thing off. What we didn’t bargain for is becoming literally mind-boggled by a seemingly interminable scene talking place high up in the stacks of the giant warehouse store where Dane Cook and his co-workers, well, work. The plot involves some meaningless bullcrap about Jessica Simpson and Cook – two “actors” notably devoid of charm here, and some desire by Cook to date Simpson who only dates employees of the month so Cook has to…snnnnnOOORRK!When my wife and I came to, we felt like Betty and Barney Hill - the couple who knew they were kidnapped by aliens because they had experienced chunks of missing time from their lives.
5) Stepford Wives (remake)
The original Stepford Wives was no great film, just a campy sub-Rosemary’s Baby vamp on The Feminine Mystique. Frank Oz’s ill-considered re-make is a mess, overstuffed, over-budgeted and over-plotted. Bad remake queen Nicole Kidman (of future turkey entries Invasion and Bewitched) does her accent from To Die For and generally fails to look like the kind of woman a man would want to upgrade with a robot/lobotomy or whatever it is they are supposed to be. Bette Midler does her loud earthy shtick and Christopher Walken does his creepy weird-line-delivery shtick. Oh yeah, and Matthew Broderick throws down his super nebbish routine. Did I mention that the movie doesn’t even know if the housewives are being lobotomized, or turned into robots, or what? The one surefire lobotomy victim is the viewer after watching this dreck.
6) The Nude Bomb
Before Steve Carrell was tapped to do a remake of the classic Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created spy spoof TV show Get Smart, the show itself was turned into a movie in 1980 – the aptly named Nude Bomb. Only Don Adams, the original and best Maxwell Smart, returns from the TV cast. Sylvia Kristol better known as soft-core star Emmanuelle is the love interest (!). Vittorio Gassman gets roped in, presumable to pay the electric bill. Deserves the cone of silence.
7) Moving Violations
Police Academy mastermind Neal Isreal transported his already Xeroxed transposition of Animal House antics to traffic school in this comedy tribute to nepotism. Lesser-known Murray sibling John Murray is not asked to imitate brother Brian Doyle in this film but other brother Bill, to slim returns. He’s up against Stacy Keach’s brother James Keach who is tofurky to Stacy’s Thanksgiving meal. These two sibs are balanced out by Jennifer Tilly, who had not yet eclipsed sister Meg. Also, Don Cheadle shows up ever so briefly. It’s entirely a movie by association, if you liked Police Academy, Ghostbusters, and Mike Hammer, you’ll hate Moving Violations.
8) Heartbeeps
Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters star as robot domestics who escape and fall in robot love. Vincent Canby’s original review notes that “The makeup worn by Mr. Kaufman and Miss Peters looks formidably uncomfortable.” So do the actors and everyone remotely associated with this mess.Walks the fine line between boring and subtly disturbing.
9) Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Two of the most inexpressive actors in cinema, Chevy Chase and Daryl Hannah team up in what sadly is an action adventure. Even Chase’s vocal inflections in the invisible scenes are blah and poor John Carpenter is reduced to wishing Kurt Russell had been available in this listless special effects extravaganza. Sam Neill’s mole has more range than the leads and Carpenter seems to try to get him on camera as much as possible to no avail. Note how the trailer attempts to sell the film as a comedy and then undercuts the whole thing with " A John Carpenter Film"...
10) Zardoz
Ladies love Sean Connery but one look at his over-exposed furry body in the weird bondage-gear outfit he’s forced to wear in this pretentious sci-fi bloatfest and they may rethink the lust factor. Or not. It’s like parachute straps, a diaper, the mustache from the leather guy in The Village People, and boots and hair from Crystal Gayle all combined. If you can get past the look (and I can’t frankly) the movie is incomprehensible at best. Sample dialogue? “The gun is good… The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!” Did I mention that this comes from a flying stone head?
With my busy eastern media elite schedule I haven't had the time I'd like to give you, my tens of readers, the movie reviews that I've promised. So here are some capsule reviews of what I've been watched over the last few weeks courtesy of Netflix. I've also helpfully added the stars I gave them in my Netflix rating for easy unhindered digestion.
I Want To Live (1958) (3 Stars)
Susan Hayward plays what was once known as a blowzy broad in this early anti-death penalty flick. The first half hour where she goes from one seedy situation to another is great pulpy fun but her hard boiled overacting takes center stage by the more earnest second half. The inside look on how the process works for death row inmates holds some interest but the increasing desperation of her situation begins to seem more comical than tragic as we await the umpteenth call from the gov.
California Split (1974) (5 Stars)
Robert Altman's incisive and tricky buddy film was unappreciated on release but shines as one of his best movies. Elliot Gould is in full sardonically muttering Elliot Gould mold and George Segal is at his best as two inveterate gambling addicts going after the big score. As I got deeper into the characters- and this is a marvelous character study- the resemblance to John Huston's legendary Treasure of the Sierra Madre struck me. Two guys in thrall to a dream of deliverance through riches that becomes the empty pursuit of specie. Though Gould never goes to the extremes that Bogart does in the Huston film he is just as hooked on the chase. A terrific film.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) (4 Stars)
Ivan Dixon, who died earlier this year, was best known for his supporting role on TV's Hogan's Heroes. As a director though he made this fascinating and tough gem that subverts the blaxploitation genre and asks some tough political questions. In a set-up that clearly plays on the screens inside the minds of the McCain campaign at this very moment, the film takes the premise of the CIA recruiting blacks to divert scrutiny of their actions. The one guy who makes it through is tough and quiet and happily toils away making copies and doing other low level tasks while soaking up all of the counter insurgency methods the agency was honing overseas. Retiring with honor he goes to Chicago to become - you guessed it - a community organizer. Only he ends up passing his training along to black power advocates and gang members - teaching them to lay off drugs and get started making bombs. This section plays like a cross between Fight Club and Shaft before ending abruptly. Well worth seeing.
Hard Eight (1996) (4 stars)
This early film from Paul Thomas Anderson has the hallmarks of most of his work - beautiful framing and photography, characters that are more flawed than lovable, and a distinct milieu - in this case the gambling underworld of Las Vegas. Philip Baker Hall, one of Anderson's favorites, is terrific as the father figure card sharp to John C. Reilly. Reilly is more of a problem - he finds everything that's whiny and irritating in a dipshit character. It becomes hard to see why Hall would give two squats about him, even after the later plot machinations grind through. Tipping this into an extra star though is a brilliantly jaded turn by Gwyneth Paltrow - it's perhaps her best performance and very different than what she's typecast as now. Then there's the delicious turn by Samuel L. Jackson as a particularly annoying friend of Reilly's.
Smiley Face (2007) (1 Star)
Anna Faris is an attractive and game comic actress in search of a vehicle to really shine. This ain't it. A stoner comedy full of jump-cuts, every cliched "stoned" POV shot in the book, and a mis-judged central performance that hits one spaced-out note interminably, this is one to skip. What's most shocking is that this sub-par take on the far superior Go was directed by the talented Greg Araki, who should know better. Watch Harold and Kumar instead.
Poor Ben Stiller. His big budget action spoof Tropic Thunder is a high-concept spoof that centers around a hollow, one-dimensional actor who is paired with a far more talented method type who seems to be stealing the movie they are starring in out from under him. As in life.
Stiller directs and stars in this loud Rambo send-up but the movie belongs firmly in the hands of the incredible Robert Downey Jr. - in blackface no less. Stiller creates the idea of a character but he rarely gets deeper than a few set beats - there's barely anything there to relate to let alone laugh at. Most of the chuckles he gets are visual rather than intrinsic character-based laughs. Most of the time he simply looks like a constipated greyhound. The difference between his performance here and the execrable Heartbreak Kid is Stiller's wide-eyed innocent boob routine.
Downey on the hand chomps on his character of an Australian uber-Method actor who dyes his skin in service of playing a Jim Brown-esque Seargeant just like he chomps on his prop cigar. His commitment to the character of an actor who's commitment to character is total is...well...total. Where Stiller expresses emotions by either scrunching or smoothing is forehead Downey is all about the eyes. There's a scene in which his entire head is covered and all you see are those orbs and he makes it funny, just with what he communicate ocularly.
Some other reliably funny folks like Jack Black as a rotund cross between Eddie Murphy and Larry the Cable Guy and Steve Coogan as a hapless first-time director have to make the best of some pretty spotty material.
There's also been a great deal of chatter about Tom Cruise in the film, who plays a vulgarian Hollywood executive of the sort that keeps moving Valkyrie around the release schedule. It's a funny, creepy character but it hardly needs the screentime. It is a nice change for Cruise who essentially plays the same asshole redeemed by his sense of community in every damn filmbut it adds little to the movie. I did mention it's creepy right?
A good microcosm of the entire film can be found at the beginning with a series of fake previews that had the elderly couple behind me fooled ("Boy there sure is a lot of crap coming out this fall") . Stiller's is kind of standard issue action sequel parody- not much more than a sight gag. Black's is chucklesome - fart humor to the nth degree with a sprinkle of condescension. Downey's is utterly brilliant, with he and Tobey Maguire as monks in a Brokeback Mountain wink.
It would have been interesting to see Downey rather than Black take a page out of the Eddie Murphy playbook. I believe he could have played all the characters in Tropic Thunder and squeezed more juice out of each role. As it stands the film is mildly amusing but little more.
Jacques Tati gave everything he had to 1967’s Playtime, at the time one of the most expensive movies ever made in France. For his trouble it was a commercial failure and a mixed-bag critically, closing the door on Tati’s reign as the master of postwar French comedy. Seen today on the new Criterion Collection remaster (or as Terry Jones points out, ideally in 70 mm) Playtime emerges as a unique masterpiece. It’s one of those movies that makes you laugh sometimes and you’re not even sure why.
It’s really three films in one, the first being an extended riff on modernist architecture as a tool of control. Yes it’s funny, and strange, and off-putting and fascinating and wistful. It’s like being raped by the Seagram’s Building. The mid section takes the anomie into a home patterned on the same show-all principles as the mid-century workplace. It’s the most alienating part of the film as the sound is entirely provided from the outside, as is the perspective. Part three is an elaborate farce set in an ultra-modern restaurant/nightclub – where people play. The external regimentation and behavioral modification imposed by the architectural style of the restaurant is gradually undermined by the increasingly anarchic people who interact with it.
This is heady stuff but it’s often breathtaking. The movie loosely follows a gaggle of American women tourists in group visiting Paris. What they are shown are a series of shopping opportunities in international style settings that could be buildings and hotels anywhere in the world. The “real” Paris is the flower seller on the corner who one woman tries to photograph - only to be foiled by French kids dressed like American greasers, Japanese tourists, and finally a fellow American who wants to take her picture while she’s taking the shot. The poor woman keeps getting puzzling glimpses of Parisian landmarks like the Eiffel Tower reflected in opening doors and advertising posters but she’s trapped with her group in these steel and glass boxes.
Tati’s alter-ego M. Hulot is on hand weaving his way through the film reflected by look-alikes and mistaken for others. Just as the glassy buildings all reflect and refract images into multiples and duplicates Hulot is multiplied and duplicated. His unsuccessful attempt to keep an appointment is marked by elegant chrome and leather chairs that mimic gastrointestinal distress when they are sat on and a stunning vision of cubicle anticipating box-like offices on an open floor as seen from above – the kind of image Terry Gilliam built a career on.
There are other gags that imbed themselves in the cerebellum to be unpacked later – this is an incredibly dense film full of widescreen imagery with very few close-ups and a full busy frames. During Hulot’s visit to his old Army buddies apartment a man undresses obliviously in full view of the street through his windowed wall. We watch him through the glass at the same time we can see his female neighbor through her glass wall staring at her TV in interest. The witty framing makes it looks as if she’s watching her neighbor strip avidly.
The restaurant sequence features several giddy highpoints. A plate glass door shatters but the doorman keeps holding the knob and opening and shutting the “door” for patrons, the air conditioning makes a woman’s skin ripple like silk, a model airplane wilts like a Freudian nightmare.
The cinematography is luscious, as much as Tati is musing over the spaces we create and how they hem us in; he’s also as seduced by the Mies Van Der Rohe style buildings against the sky, the way the lights wink on at dusk, the sleek lobbies and furniture. The colors are steel grays, navy blues, myriad tones of slate – all of which sound like they’ll be flat but they vibrate with the intensity of a shimmering pool. The production design is never over-the-top. The same crested chair backs that look so cool when you first see them in the restaurant end up leaving crest imprints on the backs of men’s jackets. It’s a wonderful sly joke in a world where life was becoming increasingly production designed.
It’s intriguing and perhaps overly determinist to look at the film through the prism of the riots that would rock France and many other countries the following year. Like the patrons in the restaurant who begin to dissemble the architecture to make their own reality and who obediently dance to whatever tempo the band plays society feels like it teeters on the edge by the end of Playtime.
The last, short sequence of vehicles caught in a roundabout, with a carnival like tune playing on the soundtrack and a woman bobbing up and down on a motorcycle like a little girl on a carousel horse is delightful and haunting at the same time. Everything is restored to its manmade orderliness and controlled chaos, all of the machines and buildings and buses are children’s toys, designed by children with the arbitrariness of youth.
The opening scene of Charlie Wilson’s War hits a giddy high that promises the kind of balls-out gonzo politics movie that Bulworth and a very few others have delivered. Texas Congressman Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, is ensconced in a hot tub with two strippers, a Playboy bunny, and a guy pitching a Dallas knockoff set in Washington DC. The whole time he keeps straining to figure out why Dan Rather is on the TV across the room dressed as a Mujahadeen. The rest of the movie has a hard time catching up with this intro.
Tom Hanks has gained a certain Mount Rushmore quality, and I don’t just mean the fleshiness of his jowls. He’s a modern Gary Cooper, the American icon who stands for mom and apple pie. I’m still not sure quite how it happened, probably somewhere between his “aw shucks I ain’t got a brain” turn in Forrest Gump and his everyman leader with a rifle role in Saving Private Ryan. So it’s nice to see him channel the Tom Hanks of Bachelor Party and TV’s Bosom Buddies.
That is to say that he’s an actor blessed with comic rhythms both goofball and martini dry, even as they’ve been misused in the Colonel Sanders’y misfire of the Coen Brothers flop The Ladykillers or left on the shelf in his dour big haired perf in The Da Vinci Code. It’s good to see him back, this time with a down home Texas swagger and a sly intelligence lurking in the recesses behind the folds of his puffy face. His famous charm is key to the Charlie Wilson character and it works, mostly better than the film which is directed by wunderelder Mike Nichols.
While the movie pretends to be a love story between Wilson and icy bible thumping texas millionairess Julia Roberts or between Wilson and the Afghan people, it’s really a romance between Wilson and gruff impolitic CIA wild card Phillip Seymour Hoffman. When those two meet up the sparks fly and they find a fun dizzying rhythm that lifts the whole film.
Unfortunately politics, stock footage and Roberts keep butting their way in. Roberts has a head of hair straight out of the Palookaville theater wig department but she wisely endows her character with bitchy self-righteousness. She’s developed more acting chops than were readily apparent at the beginning of her career. The flipside is that you don’t particularly want to spend time with her.
You do want to spend time with the wonderful Amy Adams as Wilson’s smart clipped assistant. She’s like a feisty self-aware Tracy Flick all grown up and in DC. Most of this is conveyed through Adams expert choices -- character on paper is more of a wisp.
Having read the entertaining book it was relatively easy for me to keep up but the hijinks keep grinding to a halt for awkward exposition. “Why are you telling me things I already know?” Roberts inquires with an impatient purr. Hank's doesn't respond "It's not for you, it's for that durn audience honey..." though he should.
Everything rushes to a conclusion and then slows again so that we get the point that rather than having fun watching Hanks be a charming boozing horndog and Hoffman be a rude boozing horndog, we should be thinking about the unintended consequences of our actions.
A better screenplay would have planted more seeds and allowed the thought to grow organically rather than to have it pop out of a character's mouth but that's not this film. In some ways it's too faithful to it's source material. The verbiage and overexplanations crowd out what works.
Still the offscreen cameos by John Murtha and Rudy Giuliani and scenes like a Hank's first meeting with a bug-planting Hoffman hint at the wacky darkness that could have been if they had just jettisoned those pesky facts and gone for all-out satire.
The story goes that the idea for Monsieur Verdoux, based on a real case, was given to Charlie Chaplin by Orson Welles. Chaplin neglected to credit Welles onscreen until after the film’s premiere in 1947 – just in time for an onslaught of negative reviews.
It’s easy to see what reviewers found so unsettling about the film in those immediate years after World War II. Though the meat of the plot is similar in essence to the kind of thing Britain’s Ealing studious turned out to such acclaim in the 50s – The Ladykillers obviously comes to mind, it’s delivered in a sandwich of social criticism that betrays deep cynicism about the war just ended and the many more to come.
This is not the sweet lovable Charlie of his classic work though he’s every bit as good at winning the audiences sympathy even when doing something rotten. So harsh is the ultimate judgment of the film that it contributed greatly to Chaplin’s blacklisting and estrangement from the United States.
Chaplin plays the title character, a former bank clerk now out of work thanks to the beginnings of the great depression. Unable to find work to support his crippled wife and young child he falls back on his charming way with women, older women of some means in particular. He then fleeces them for their money, usually dispatching them to the great beyond once his goal is achieved. He does a great bit of business throughout the film as he counts the money he gets from his victims, fingers whirring through the stacks of francs as only a bank clerk’s could.
That this is all quite funny is a testament to how great a comedian Chaplin is. His lilting voice, fastidious mustache (here long and thin- he’s no longer the little tramp) and trim compact frame are a constant contrast to his older, often larger marks. A hint of the social commentary to come is in his nonchalant use of an incinerator at the start of the film to hide the evidence of one of his victims – a queasy echo of the Nazi’s atrocities.
Of course complications begin to crop up – the police begin to catch on but more importantly a young Martha Raye is Charlie’s nest intended and she just won’t help him out at ll. Unlike his other victims she’s brassy and crude and less likely to take all her money out of the bank just because he tells her there’s a panic. Steve Martin’s interpretation of Inspector Clouseau in the execrable Pink Panther remake owes much to Chaplin's Verdoux, just as the loud brashness of Bette Midler finds some of it's genesis in Raye’s perf.
Chaplin discovery Marilyn Nash shows up halfway through the film and again at the end and there’s more heat with these two than with the token scenes with Verdoux’s family. Nash is utterly adorable in her floppy hat and hand me down clothes and gorgeously elegant in her limousine at the end. Chaplin can't seem to help but make eyes at her.
The film does go on a bit too long and the tonal shift into outright social criticism grinds the gears a bit. Chaplin’s insistence that his murders were only the response of a small businessman doing on a small scale what big business did all the time with millions still feels like a contrived excuse. Some things are still better shown than told. It’s a recasting of all we’ve seen in a completely different light. Still it adds an unusual element to the film and stamps it as the work of its genius writer/directer/star -- anyone else would have been told to reign it in. Though the effect is jumbled it still makes this film that much more treasurable - it's unique combination of elements like Verdoux, are irresistible to those that are prone to its charm, sting in the end or not.
The original version of The Heartbreak Kid was an all-American story of Charles Grodin trading up on his honeymoon from Jeannie Berlin to WASP goddess Cybill Shephard. The remake, starring Ben Stiller, is so loath to lay a glove on its leading man that it bends over backwards to try and explain why a guy would do such arotten thing.
For one thing it’s more of a sideways trade in the new one. Stiller, looking like a constipated greyhound throughout, is cajoled into marrying by a suite of obnoxious types including pre-pubescenet twin boys who taunt him for being a “fag”, Rob Corddry who is too much of a prick to fulfill anyone’s notion of a best friend, and Stiller’s own father, played by Jerry Stiller – his own father.
Stiller the elder is outfitted with a Woody Woodpecker coif that looks like a colony of red dye number 2 was dispatched from the maraschino cherry factory, and a series of overbearing lines regarding “pussy.” His arc hits a stomach churning low in a Las Vegas hot tub with a topless lass whose grotesque huge fake mammaries bob upon the surface like discarded waterwings. Here at least is the root of Stiller the younger's evidently deep fear of all things woman.
He marries Malin Akerman, a gorgeous sunny-smiled blonde. The film then proceeds to use every centimeter of her delectable body as a talisman of fear and subjugation. No orifice is left unexplored in Stiller’s downright abject terror of this bombshell’s frank sexuality.
Watching the overexplicit sex scenes I was torn between the desire to tap Stiller out and take his place and the desire to throw a robe around the game Akerman and declare enough's enough already. I like nudity as much as the next guy but when it’s in the service of a punchline involving Stiller’s disgust at the thought of seeing more of her clitoris we’ve entered a zone that only a trained psychiatric professional can plumb.
The other attempts to make Akerman seem worth ditching – a massively deviated septum, no career ambitions, not the brightest bulb on the string, seem a bit petty and over-designed to draw attention away from the fact that the one with a real problem is Stiller. There is a glimpse of a real movie in the idea that even a va-va-voom looker like Akerman can seem lacking if the chemistry isn’t there – but this is overshadowed by the need to push her into a monstrous characterization that seems badly out of proportion. I felt sorry for the actress and the character.
Stiller instead finds comfort with Michelle Monaghan who is just as fetching as Akerman but in a more tomboy brunette fashion. More importantly she doesn't pressure him for sex. Monaghan generates chemistry all right, but it’s all on her own. She’s the only one who comes out of this mess unscathed but you want to shout at the screen like a horror film “Run run, before it’s too late! The guy can’t deal with a woman’s sexuality!”
It’s fascinating that a movie dedicated to so much graphic loathing of Akerman’s body is able to display so much of it and get an R rating from the MPAA. Were she spreading herself for sensuous pleasure rather than a punchline there’s no doubt this would be a porn, I can only imagine what was left on the cutting-room floor.
Clive Owen has a deep honking voice that’s like Alan Rickman with a headcold. In Michael Davis' giddily hyperviolent Shoot ‘Em Up it’s used primarily to deliver the kind of bon mots found in a mid 80s Schwarzenegger vehicle , but no matter. The filmmakers, star, and probably the hair and makeup people are well aware of this. In fact, hyper self-awareness is the hallmark of this film – a cynical discourse about cynicism in which everything save a giant winking eye is deployed as a tipoff that all involved are in on it. On a certain level this is a much more committed spoof on a typical MichaelBay flick starring say, Nicholas Cage, than Team America was.
The set-up is absurdity as meta-narrative, with carrot-munching hitman Owen (resemblance to Bugs Bunny is purely intentional) and lactating hooker (don't ask) Asia Argento (untroubled by much in the way of acting chops) becoming surrogate mum and dad to a baby wanted by an anti-gun Democratic Presidential candidate for it’s life-giving bone-marrow. With me so far?
The pro-gun folks want the baby dead so that they can stop the anti-gun folks from gaining power and they’ve hired a scenery demolishing (in every way) Paul Giametti to lead an endless serious of counter-hitmen against baby and quasi –parental units.
The filmmakers fully revel in the incongruity of an ultra violent Hong Kong style shootout flick which purports to be in favor of gun control. It helps that the pacing and editing keep everything moving at a good, ahem, clip, so just as you’re saying “Oh, C’mon!” Another absurdly balletic feat of pistolry unfolds before your eyes. Unlike a typical Jerry Bruckheimer/ MichaelBay crapfest it’s also possible to discern who is shooting who and where in every scene.
As the setpieces mount (an aerial sequence with parachute wearing assassins is one of several highlights, as is a demonstration of the proper time to unbuckle your seatbelt in a collision) so does admiration for the sheer balls it takes to see this giddy farce through to its conclusion.
Tonally there is a sweet tang of mid 80s b-movies such as John Carpenter’s They Live or The Hidden – the sweet smirk of over the top silliness primed with low-budget violence. There are knowing references to other cinematic gunslingers throughout – from Eastwood to Tarantino to John Woo – for cinephiles who are tuned in to that sort of thing. The scene where Owen tenderly explains the workings and parts of a pistol to the delighted infant is a hoot. So are the constant musings on whether guns are phallic substitutes and other stuff usually left to undergrad classes with titles like “Sam Peckinpah and Impotence: The Gun in Cinema.”This is without even venturing into the love scene that is punctuated with multiple gunshot wounds to the baddies.
This is not a film for the masses but if you’re the sort that chuckles at a gratuitous extra spurt of fake blood or the sight of a stairwell full of endless thugs in suits dutifully running upstairs to hit their target (not the only time this film brings to mind the Fistful of Yen sequence in Kentucky Fried Movie) this ones for you.
Film rarely does justice to literature. Stranger Than Fiction gives it a go and it’s a pleasant, even warm experience in the hands of a fine cast and competent director Marc Forster. What it fails to do is to thrill with the possibility of the written page or indeed the moving picture.
Some critics dismissed this film as Charlie Kaufman lite and it’s easy to see how they came to that conclusion. The set-up – a boring IRS auditor begins to hear his innermost thoughts and his everyday actions narrated by a British woman’s voice who eventually reveals his impending doom – is right up Kaufman’s alley.
The difference is that Kaufman, as in Adaptation, is compulsive about exploring every nook and cranny of implication embedded in his high-concept screenplays – something screenwriter Zach Helm resolutely doesn’t do. To be fair this may never have been their intention – much of the film’s pleasure is in spending time with the cast, giving it an endearing hangout flick quality. To make this work the shaggy dog nature of the story ought to come to the fore as in David O. Russell’s similarly absurdist I Heart Huckabees. Forster takes his premise deadly seriously though, which leaves us with yet another Hollywood film that lectures us on the Importance of Living.
Will Ferrell is curiously button-eyed and doughy as the numbers obsessed auditor – he’s like a glum teddybear. The movie throws him cupid-lipped, tattooed, be-dimpled Maggie Gyllenhaal at her most appealingly fierce and goofbally as his love interest, a baker who refuses to give the government tax money for things she doesn’t believe in. There are a few warm sparks of repartee between these to but the film never gives them the space to get that fire going in a satisfying way. Having thrown them together there just isn’t enough for them to do in the weak screenplay.
Dustin Hoffman has become the go-to guy for off-kilter wisdom of the elders and he comes through as the literature prof recommended by hilariously prim shrink Linda Hunt. Hoffman is terrific to watch, his scenes with Ferrel have a satisfying crackle that never seems to find a place anywhere else in the film. Again a rhythm is established but it gets lost between the plot machinations.
Less successfully is the teaming between Emma Thompson – wonderfully twitchy and tetchy as the author of the book in which Ferrel’s Harold resides – and Queen Latifah as some kind of assistant that feels more like a storytelling device than an actual character.
Forster is still too polished and Hollywood a director to find the weirdness underlying much of the material here. His illustration of Harold’s number mania is cute but also overly familiar – Fight Club and A Beautiful Mind were here first. More importantly, it’s a fussy bit of business that adds nothing to the film – the money and time spent on the effects would have been better used on a third draft of the screenplay. The big emotions that the characters finally reveal feel unearned – especially Thompson's. There isn’t enough struggle against fate from Ferrel (oh to see Spike Jonze at work with this) and Gyllenhaal brings tons of heart to a role that remains resolutely more idea than character.
Still, Stranger Than Fiction is a pleasant enough diversion, nowhere near as serious as it would like to be but not a disastrous mess either. As a trifle it does in a pinch, too bad the title is a tease. A little more strangeness would have done a world of good.
The 80s were a time of innocence, joy, and philandering bosses of vague sexuality that rip off their companies for mucho dinero. But enough about Michael Milken . The film at hand is Weekend at Bernie's, a 1989 sort-of classic that strains hard to be a Blake Edwards type farce about two nudniks who get invited to the boss's place on "Hampton Island", a sort of amalgam of the Hamptons and Fire Island, only to show up and find him dead. Plot contrivances lead to them faking his continued good health. Hilarity ensues.
Said nudniks are played by Jonathan Silverman as the uptight Mathew Broderick-y Richard and brat pack supremo Andrew McCarthy as icky conniving buddy Larry. McCarthy's performance is the more startling of the two, a full on Ratso Rizzo-voiced concoction of sleaze in a sport jacket that seems ported in from a distant acting class in Queens.
Really, the French do this sort of tasteless farce better. When you're reading subtitles you don't have time to think about things like oh, it's a hot weekend and isn't the dead guy starting to stink? or what, no rigor mortis? Terry Kisor who tellingly gives the standout performance as the titular dead boss, Bernie, lolls and drapes his way through the film like a pile of rags - marvelously hard to do. He probably would have chosen to play him as more of a stiff if he had known he would have to do the same routine in the sequel, Weekend at Bernie's II. Yes, it was that big a hit. The sequel was, of course, D.O.A.
I've been on a Sam Fuller kick lately, partly from being engrossed in his lively autobiography. This underrated American director has a thriving cult and I suppose I can be counted as a member. You could do worse as an introduction than Eclipse's The First Films of Sam Fuller, out now on DVD.
The budget priced set consists of his first three films (duh) and like many multi-film sets the overall quality varies. None of the three are stinkers but only one is a mind-blowing lost classic. Let's dispatch with the others first.
I Shot Jesse James (1949) is a fine debut for the novelist soldier turned screenwriter/director. The relation to real life history is Hollywood scant as John Ireland plays Robert Ford as a petulant lovesick asshole and Reed Hadley plays a Jesse James full of backslapping bonhomie. The titular shooting takes a backseat to the rivalry between he and prospector turned sheriff John Kelley for a lady singer. There are several good scenes here, like Ford taking part in a staged re-enactment of the shooting in a rapt theater full of slack-jawed patrons but the pacing is gummy and scenes that are meant to build tension barely skirt unintended humor.
His second film, The Baron of Arizona (1950), is yet another unhistorical history piece and is hampered by a poorly conceived framing device. Vincent Price is the scheming land grabber who creepily finds a young girl, fakes her royal bloodline, and then waits till she's barely old enough to marry her and become the Baron of Arizona. Price is at his hammy best and there are several sequences that find him plumbing the wry humor inherent in going undercover as a Franciscan monk to forge records that are kept in the Abbey. Still, Fuller still hasn't caught the fine art of pacing.
It's on his third film, The Steel Helmet (1951), that his genius emerges from the very first shot of Sgt. Zack emerging from a field of dead bodies. It's no accident that this is the film of the three that is clearly drawn on Fuller's own harrowing experiences in World War II, experiences he would bring to The Big Red One which made my list of the best war movies ever. The Steel Helmet could easily find a berth on that list. Set during the then-current Korean War, this is a brutal unsentimental anti-war film that never stoops to preaching. It also happens to rip the guts out of the rampant racial prejudice that existed in the first war in which American troops were fully integrated. The scene in which a captured North Korean tries to turn a Japanese-American and a black soldier against their own country is incendiary stuff indeed for 1951 -- neither American soldier can dispute the facts of racism at home, even as they love what America stands for.
At the heart of The Steel Helmet is the relationship between gruff cigar-chomping Sgt. Zack and a young South Korean boy he nicknames Short Round. No this isn't the prequel to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom but you can see what inspired Spielberg and Lucas with this pairing and how woefully inept they were at creating the same chemistry in their 80s homage. This Short Round may correct Zack by saying "I'm not a gook, I'm a South Korean!" but the vet still throws the kid down to the ground several times when the enemy fire starts to the immortal line "Eat rice kid!" The unknown actor Gene Evans, who plays Zack, is magnificent and utterly believable as the seasoned war weary dogface.
The gorgeous black and white cinematography by Ernest Miller and a strong ensemble cast all do their part to make this a bleakly exhilarating film from beginning to end, a must see. Eclipse is Criteron's no-frills budget line so aside from a pristine transfer their aren't many extras, not that you need them. At the affordable list price, consider the first two films as the extra and spring for The Steel Helmet.
Notice I said "film" in the headline and not animation. Oh Wall-E, like the rest of Pixar's films is the result of gloriously detailed brilliantly rendered computer animation all right. There are people who loathe animation, who think it's kid's stuff, or that it's not serious. Those people are idiots. OK, I've said it. I'll grant that the likes of Happy Feet, the umpteenth Shrek film, and Kung-Fu Panda have muddied the waters but a film like Wall-E is proof that no medium brings the possibilities inherent in motion pictures to life better than animation. To paraphrase a paraphrase - to hate Wall-E is to hate cinema. It has as much to say about who we are as any of last year's best picture nominees -- it has heart, humor and deep emotional resonance.
The touchstones are Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as you may have surmised from the too-cautious ad campaign. Now include Stanley Kubrick (not just of 2001 but also of Dr. Strangelove), Ridley Scott, a dollop of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, even a pinch of Terry Gilliam to get the real picture of this dark, satirical enchantment of a film.
The plot is simplicity itself -- Earth, in the future, is a wasteland of abandoned cities and garbage piled higher than the skyscrapers. Only two creatures survive -- cockroaches and a lone robot still toiling at it's trash compacting task. Wall-E (for it is he) also has a penchant for odd offbeat finds -- Rubik's cubes, a old videotape of Hello Dolly!, a lightbulb, that he uses to decorate the inside of his shelter. The image of him trundling through the abandoned cityscape strewn with detritus is suffused with melancholia. Watching him as he watches the fuzzy old film is heartbreaking.
His routine is suddenly broken by the arrival of a rocket ship which mysteriously deposits a new robot, a sleek shiny iPod in comparison to Wall-E's dented and pinged lawn mower looks. Her purpose is mysterious but, without using actual words (ok maybe one) we get a clear sense of gender and even of the two robots discovering each other and their unique personalities.
The second half of the film takes an unexpected turn not signaled by the advertising, and I'm loathe to spoil too much. I will say that the human race didn't all die (though there is significant ambiguity over whether they all lived.) Their ancestors' lives are a brutally on-target satire of American-style consumerism. The words "Stay the course" are uttered and despite director Andrew Stanton's denials there are poignant echoes of some very recent leadership failures.
Did I mention that the film is funny, and the robot love story is utterly charming, and that Fred Willard is in it? Wall-E is the best film of the year so far, which is damning with faint praise indeed. It's more than that though, one of the best of the last decade, a future classic, a triumph of cinematic art. Go see it, and leave the kids at home.
Screenwriter Scott Frank's debut in the director's chair The Lookout suffers, oddly enough, from a screenplay (by Frank) that isn't as clever as it thinks it is and leisurely editing by Jill Savitt. On the plus side of the ledger are some excellent performances all around, most notably by Joseph Gordon-Levitt who seems just a few roles away from a breakthrough.
Gordon-Levitt plays a self-satisfied high school jock who plows his convertible into a combine through sheer lunkheaded recklessness killing two friends and badly wounding his pretty girlfriend. The accident leaves him with one of those brain injuries beloved by noir screenwriters and rare anywhere else. He has difficulty remembering things and has particular trouble with causality. Jeff Daniels plays the blind man who lives with him in a sort of disabled persons half-way home. Daniels is a welcome presence, finding just the right amount of wryness and concern. Carla Gugino shows up all to briefly as a counselor.
As the film unspools Gordon-Levitt becomes entangled in a far-fetched bank-robbery scheme by creepy Matthew Goode and naively sexy Isla Fisher. It's one of the more interesting underdeveloped points that through the eyes of these characters who remember him from high school, Gordon-Levitt seems like something of a conceited asshole before the unintentional lobotomy.
Unfortunately this turns out to be no Memento despite Gordon-Levitt's habit of labelling things and making notes to himself. Rather it takes on the quality of an afterschool special designed to encourage people who've suffered brain trauma to engage themselves in seedy neo-noir situations as a means of therapy.
The aforementioned editing makes things worse by squelching whatever surprise and tension there is -- the film itself seems to be in a sort of stupor. Here's hoping that Gordon-Levitt, like his character, finds a better class of people to run with next time.
The ingredients of Iron Man , Jon Favreau's new popcorn flick for fledgling Marvel studios, seem like standard issue superhero stew. On paper it sounds exactly like Batman Begins, or Spider-Man. Big budget film with a quirky cast of over-talented actors explore the origins of a superhero as they discover their hidden powers, learn to harness them and then take on a villain who used to be a mentor. Ho-hum. Except Iron Man proves that as Mick Jagger once warbled, "It's the singer, not the song." The movie is a delightful romp with almost every element perfectly judged, not least of which is tone.
The secret weapon is Robert Downey Jr. who brings his sardonic knowing line readings and wounded eyes to bear on every scene he's in (at least sans maak, which thankfully is a good chunk of them). After winning (CORRECTION: as a commenter pointed out Downey was nominated but did not win) an Oscar for Chaplin, the well documented substance struggles, starring in unsung films like Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang and A Scanner Darkly and being the only thing worth watching in dreck like The Shaggy Dog Downey, like his character Tony Stark, finds redemption here. He's ably joined by a surprisingly likable Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings way more than necessary to the character sketch that is Pepper Potts (!). Her chemistry with Downey is terrific and their scenes crackle with energy. Jeff Bridges shows up bald of pate and hirsute of chin. He seems to be a distant cousin of William Hurt's character in A History of Violence but where Hurt chomps on the scenery and the catering truck for good measure Bridges underplays with a glint in his eyes. Terrence Howard doesn't have a lot to do but he does it all well.
Favraeu imports some political commentary into the genre though it's jumbled by the needs of plot and action. Will the idea that the United States armed the very same Afghans who we are fighting sink in for Americans who have tuned out the string of po-faced Iraq and Afghanistan flicks that have come out over the past two years? Does it matter? When Downey's water-boarded by the Afghan bad guys, are we supposed to connect to our own actions in the so-called War on Terror?
Who cares when Iron Man shows up to show us what a peacekeeping mission is supposed to look like. Save the villagers from the warlords! It's a flashback to when some of us thought that using NATO to quell the fighting and genocide in Bosnia was a blueprint to responsible superpowerdom in the 21st century. But enough politics, I've already given them more thought then the movie does. It hardly matters when you see Downey's chiseled goatee and delightfully louche delivery, or the suited up Iron Man going up against a couple of fighter jets.
The effects are very good and believable for the most part. I had a nice contrast with Marvel's other big film this summer when we were treated to a preview for Ed Norton in The Incredible Hulk. Everything went swimmingly and looked intriguing until the big green guy shows up and he looks just as phony and computer generated (if not more so) as he did in Ang Lee's try at the franchise. Possible mitigating factor: Tim Roth's in it.
Back to Iron Man, it's a hoot to watch Downey live out every man's mid-life crisis fantasy -- car porn galore, supermodel arm candy, a high-tech modern bachelor pad, Gwynyth Paltrow pining for you, and a neat suit that lets you kick ass while doing good. It's a grown-up's regressive playpen and boy, is it fun.
Screenwriter and Director Billy Ray seems to have a thing about the truth. His previous film Shattered Glass looked at the true story of newspaper plagiarist Stephen Glass and his latest, Breach, explores the last few months of freedom for real-life FBI traitor Robert Hanssen. Both films have the same fatal flaw in that Ray is unable to enlighten us as to why these people practice to deceive.
This is exacerbated by the underlying moral tone to the filmmaking -- Ray wants us to know that lying is bad! And yet the main practitioners -- in Breach especially so -- are so much more interesting onscreen than the people whom the audience's sympathies are expected to stay with.
Chris Cooper gives another finely layered performance as Hanssen, a complex man who appeared to love his country with a deep moral fervor, was deeply religious and harshly judgemental of gays, Democrats and women who wear pants. It's a tricky performance , all lizardy eyes and scowling brow. But you also understand how Ryan Philippe's character, tasked with getting dirt on Hanssen, would come to respect him after a time. Anne Archer, as Hanssen's wife, is terrific in the limited screen time she's given, convincing as a sensual deeply spiritual women who perhaps harbors a dark side. I could have watched a whole movie centered on these two, exploring the faces they put on in public and their deeply private contradictions.
Unfortunately Philippe may respect Hanssen but we don't come to respect Philippe, who wears his serious dark hair and level boy scout gaze throughout the film. Too much of the film is spent on his struggle to understand why his superiors want him to investigate this seemingly tight-assed moral guy for pornographic e-mails and his anguish over having to keep his true agenda from his wife. His character is essentially bland and underwritten and Philippe doesn't bring a hell of a lot more to it. It doesn't help that Caroline Dhavernas is so very good in the equally underwritten and cliched role of the wife who doesn't appreciate her husband's secrecy. It's a tiresome cliche to have the goody-goody crimefighter in movie after movie come home to a woman who just doesn't get their goody-goodiness dedication to their job (see American Gangster for an extreme example of this). The movie asks us to celebrate Philippe's resignation from the Bureau as a triumph for truth but in fact it's a cop-out for truthiness.
Laura Linney is on hand as Philippe's superior agent who we are meant to see is a Good Person who has to do Bad Things. She asks callow Philippe if his glimpse into her spouseless catless life is what drove him out of the Agency and though he demurs that's certainly the arithmetic set up by Billy Ray. Philippe essentially resigns because he doesn't ever want to lie to his wife, who is by the film's standards too upstanding to care that it probably would help her not to know what he knows.
Linney's sharp insightful acting rescues what could have been a flat character -- her lines have the force of weariness and resoluteness. Her very aliveness in her role undercuts Philippe's supposed heroism, no matter how hard the screenplay tries to convince us otherwise.
The problem is that it's an inherently unconvincing screenplay. Too often we learn about Hanssen because someone tells us, and then we are given little glimpses over time. In lieu of anything resembling investigation on Philippe's part we get a couple of standard spy scenes of him beating the clock while getting something out of Hanssen's office, or stalling him while others pore over his car. Meanwhile Linney plays the part of Agent Exposition, telling us what we are supposed to take as fact without the film ever showing us and letting it unravel.
This all may be as it played out in real life, but that doesn't mean it makes for a compelling film. Here's the trailer:
Atonement could have been made by no other people than the British, and it's fitting that it won the BAFTA award. Pity that it is so fatally flawed. Essentially the film feels like every British movie cliche in a blender -- cheerfully cynical cockney war buddy, ornate country mansion, class barriers, snotty kids, World War II, etc. etc. Unfortunately no one actually turns the blender on so rather than pureeing this mess into something swallowable it all sits around together without actually congealing.
This is especially sad in that it begins with such promise. The first 45 minutes is the tight little story of a jealous little girl who tells a horrible lie, one which seperates her upper class sister sultry Keira Knightley from hunky lower class scholar James McAvoy. With the woodsy drawing rooms and parlours, proper mustaches and so forth there is a definte Merchant-Ivory-ness to the proceedings but the set-up is suitably engrossing.
No doubt the real heat in the passionate performances by Knightley and McAvoy are a big factor, as is the creepy stare of little Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. There is enough subtle intrigue from the surrounding players and residual goodwil towards the star-crossed lovers to have propelled this into all sorts of second and third acts.
Which makes the wet squib of Joe Wright's film (and for all I know, the Ian McEwan novel it's based on) all the more shameful. Wright is a talented director as the first part of the film and a bravura 4 and a half minute, one take shot set during the Dunkirk evacuation during World War II attest. The goodwill of the setup is spoilt, first by the war scenes which ultimately lead nowhere, then by a draggy sequence with Romola Garai as a now 18-year old Briony Tallis -- she of the dreadful lie. Garai seems parachuted in from another movie -- her performance is fine but it never connects us with the younger actress nor with the rest of what transpires.
Finally we are really sent down the chute by a too-clever-by-half wrap-up featuring glorious Vanessa Redgrave. The post-modern ending leaves a poor taste in the mouth, feeling like a screenwriter's thematic triumph but a filmgoer's wasted time. The sort of thing attempted in the end has to be handled just right to come off but Wright shows that as tecnically capable as he may be, he just doesn't have the control over this material to make it work. Stranding performances as solid as McAvoy's and as downright excellent as Knightley's in the morass of the second half of this film is nearly unforgivable.
Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey is uniformly excellent as is the Oscar winning score by Dario Marianelli. Atonement gets 2 out of 5 British flags. Sorry guv'nor...
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