Blue Valentine (2010)

Blue Valentine is a love story, but it's a strange kind of love story. It starts at the end -- at the end of love, that is. It moves back and forth between the beginning of love, and the end of it, leaving the middle something of a mystery. 

The movie begins in the morning, as Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling), puffy-eyed and tired, wake up with their young daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka) and start a working day. Their dog is missing, which is just the first thing that goes terribly wrong over the next 48 hours. 

Cindy is a nurse in a medical clinic; Dean is a house painter. They've been together about six years, but when the film toggles back to their first meeting, it's clear the years between have been hard on them. Cindy was in college then, and determined to become a doctor. Dean worked for a moving company. He was a nice guy, a loyal, sweet guy, which at that moment, was what Cindy most needed and wanted in her life. So what happened?

That is a question that writer-director Derek Cianfrance (who co-wrote the movie with Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne) is fundamentally not interested in answering. Blue Valentine is about the troubled beginning of the story of Dean and Cindy, and the troubled end, but it skips the middle. What happened in the middle? (Trouble would be the obvious guess.) In some sense, nothing happened, and that, the movie hints, is precisely the problem. For Cindy, something was supposed to happen. Things were supposed to change. Dean liked everything just as it was. Somewhere along the way, they pulled apart, got out of synch. 

The movie creates a sense of distress and discomfort by getting too physically close to the characters. The cinematography by Andrij Parekh is invasively intimate, going for closeups that cut Cindy and Dean into pieces -- part of a face, a torso, a thigh. It's a visual technique that heightens emotion and ups the anxiety level in a film already loaded with both. The backgrounds are only vaguely there -- they're cut into little bits too, into glimpses of a shabby home, a minivan, and the cheesy motel room where Dean tries in vain to rekindle their romance. This visual dismemberment and dissection doesn't especially reveal what's going on inside the characters, but it emphasizes that Blue Valentine isn't a portrait of a romance or a marriage so much as it is a post-mortem.  

The difficulty with the cut-out-the-middle approach to the narrative is that, while Dean and Cindy are well-defined in the scenes from their youthful romance, the people they become only a few years later -- he with his receding hairline, she with her weariness and frustration -- seem a little disconnected from their former selves. That may be partly a function, too, of how little time -- a couple of days in the now, a few months in the past -- the movie spends with them. A lot happens in that little time -- not all of it is revelatory, and some of it is not very surprising. Williams and Gosling, both very good actors, bring a lot of emotional intensity and nuance to their roles, which fills in some of the blanks, but also has the effect of leaving you wanting to know more.

But there is no more. Blue Valentine is less about how they got to their unhappy place, and more about that they got to be disconnected, disappointed, and discontent. 

13Feb2011

Sanctum (2011)

The 3-D in Sanctum is so aggressive and in-your-face it's more like 3 1/2-D. Hallucinatory, annoying, demanding, it all but yells "Look at this!" even when the thing it demands you look at is nothing particularly special. The story of Sanctum could have been told just as well without the 3-D effects. The real problem with Sanctum isn't the 3-D, however, but the one-dimensional characters. For most of the characters, that dimension is insufferable.

The plot is, according to the opening titles, "inspired by a true story." I'm going to guess that the screenwriters, John Garvin and Andrew Wight, embellished the truth a bit, because nobody ever has or ever could talk the way the characters in Sanctum talk. They don't converse so much as spout cliches and bromides, and offer such pearls of wisdom as "Panic's the vulture sits on your shoulder." Weird grammar aside, if a vulture were sitting on your shoulder, it would probably be appropriate to panic, but since Sanctum takes place almost entirely in a subterranean cave, there aren't any vultures about. Lucky for the vultures.

The story takes place in Papua, New Guinea, in a deep, heretofore unexplored cave system called Esa Ala. A team of Australian cave divers is exploring the caves. According to Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), the millionaire who is financing the expedition, "There's no other place on the planet left to explore." I highly doubt that, and I reckon there are lots of places left to explore, but this is the sort of hyperbole the people of Sanctum are given to. Carl is a jerk, in any case, and he brings his mountain-climbing girlfriend Victoria (Alice Parkinson) along on the expedition even though she has no diving experience. She has even less cave diving experience. On the other hand, expedition leader Frank (Richard Roxburgh) has loads of cave diving experience, which has made him an unforgiving S.O.B., a heartless fatalist, a lousy father, and quite unpleasant to be around. "We're bits of dust passing through," he tells the gang, by way of a pep talk. Frank's son Josh (Rhys Wakefield) hates his dad, and for good reason. The only guy who kind of likes Frank is Crazy George (Dan Wylie), who operates a remote-controlled submarine camera called Virgil. (Virgil was probably named after Virgil Brigman, a character in The Abyss, James Cameron's vastly superior underwater adventure movie. Cameron is an executive producer of Sanctum, which makes sense, given the combination of three things he loves: water, diving, and 3-D.) 

While Frank and his team are down there exploring, a cyclone floods the caves, trapping them inside, and forcing a grueling, miserable, claustrophobic, and deadly trek through terra incognito. Also aqua incognito. Lots and lots of aqua. (It would be a good idea to not order the large drink if you're going to see this movie.) They climb, crawl, swim, dive, rappel, grunt, yell, complain, cough, argue, and one by one, one way or another, die. 

Director Alister Grierson and cinematographer Jules O'Loughlin do an effective job of creating a sense of confinement and doom, and there's some lovely underwater camera work. I appreciate, as well, the effort to explore the mindset of the danger-seeking adventurer, and the different moral landscape encountered in the bowels of the earth, where a mercifully quick death may be the only help available. I could appreciate it much, much more if it had been executed with some insight, subtlety and sensitivity, rather than with bombast and banal platitudes. If only it could have been done without all the cliches, the stereotypes, and the laughably bad dialogue, I might have actually cared whether any of the characters lived or died. A silent, non 3-D version of this movie would be better, so it'll be passable entertainment on DVD, with the sound turned off, particularly for anyone interested in knowing how many different ways there are to die in a big, watery cave. Falling and drowning are the major ones, but you'd be surprised how many lethal hazards there actually are down there.

6Feb2011

The Mechanic (2011)

I suppose there could be, in fact, professional hitmen of the sort portrayed by Jason Statham in The Mechanic. Cool, detached people who are paid to kill other people they neither know nor care about. As long as there are people out there who need killing, and people who want them killed, there will be other people willing to do the deed. The movies, however, seem to be rather overpopulated with professional assassins. Just last year, George Clooney played one in The American, a movie with more than a few superficial similarities to The Mechanic. Clooney's movie offered much less bang for the buck than The Mechanic, which provides a lot of bang, and not much else. 

One consequence of the abundance of elite assassins in movies is that they inevitably must turn on each other. Apparently there aren't enough of us non-assassins who need to be whacked to keep the pros in gravy. Or at least, there aren't enough of us so worth killing that anyone is willing to pay for it. I suppose that's good news. It's a pretty safe bet that in any movie about an assassin, he or she will eventually become the target of another assassin, usually hired by the very same low-down double-crossing people who employ the first assassin, which is what happens in The Mechanic. Which is to say that if you've seen one movie about an elite hitman, you've seen The Mechanic. (You might also have seen the1972 Charles Bronson movie on which The Mechanic is based.)

Statham is Arthur Bishop, an assassin who specializes in murders-for-hire that don't look like murders. Drownings, heart attacks, and apparently random street crimes are among his specialties. He's knowledgeable, efficient, and discreet, and he is rewarded handsomely for his skill and lack of qualms. But in case the audience has any qualms about the murder-for-hire biz, the victims of Arthur's expertise are all cartoonishly and vaguely bad people who might deserve to be professionally and efficiently dispatched. Arthur fancies himself an aesthete, living in a spectacular house in a Louisiana swamp, listening to his hi-fi, and rebuilding a vintage car. ("Mechanic" is a euphemism for assassin, but Arthur's also an actual mechanic, which might have seemed more interesting on paper than it is on film. The extent of his automotive activity is to give a socket wrench a couple of twists.) Arthur's detachment extends to his sex life: he prefers the uncomplicated company of prostitutes, although he pays them well. 

Arthur's tranquil life gets complicated when he gets an assignment he doesn't want: killing a personal friend (he doesn't have many of them). Then there's another complication: the dead man's son Steve (Ben Foster), not knowing who killed his father, wants to learn Arthur's trade. The kid doesn't have much going for him, so Arthur takes him under his burly wing. Much of The Mechanic involves Arthur teaching Steve the ropes, in a series of assassinations that don't go as smoothly as planned. Murders that go off without a hitch are kind of boring, I guess. The ones that go badly end up in fisticuffs and shoot-outs and spearings, with people rappelling down skyscrapers and getting thrown through windows and other exciting stuff. Steve, who lacks Arthur's sangfroid and nose for trouble, tends to get into difficulty rather more than is healthy for an assassin who plans to make a career of it. Steve, with his emotional neediness and daddy issues, is also more interesting and sympathetic than Arthur.

Under the direction of Simon West (Con Air), The Mechanic is a pretty good looking movie, with briskly paced and sporadically imaginative action. (In one scene, Arthur and another hitman go at it on an airport shuttle bus, turning various bits of quotidian transport into deadly weapons.) That's not really enough to make this movie worth watching. One problem is Arthur. He is not interesting or likable. You wouldn't want to spend time with the guy. While the movie tries to make an issue, of sorts, out of the ethics of assassination (hey, every profession has its professional ethics), if Arthur is capable of deep thought about such things, he doesn't let on. Statham is a fine physical specimen, but aside from a lot of intense glowering, he doesn't betray any emotion. He's like a pilot light that never gets lit -- nothing gets to Arthur, and so, there's really nothing to Arthur. Foster is better as the callow, reckless, and emotionally ragged Steve, and Donald Sutherland is quite good in a small role. Sutherland keeps getting cast in little roles in unmemorable (or terrible, or occasionally good) movies -- would somebody please give this guy something worthwhile to do?

If we wait long enough, all the movie assassins will eventually kill each other, until there is only one left. Maybe Donald Sutherland will play him.

30Jan2011

The Fighter (2010)

Boxing movies tend to have a pretty rigid and predictable structure. Down and out fighter gets beat up and knocked down, in the ring and by life. Fighter works hard, fights back, gets a shot at a comeback, redemption, and... gets beat up and knocked down again before triumphing in the end. This is also the basic structure of most kung fu movies, and most sports movies too. (But not most sporting events. Just ask the New York Jets.) It's more or less the basic plot of The Fighter, based on the true story of "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a welterweight boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts whose career conveniently followed a course made for movies. 

Micky's bouts in the boxing ring are a cakewalk compared to his family life. Start with his motormouthed half brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a once-promising boxer whose career peaked when he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, an accomplishment he is quick to recount to anyone who will listen. Micky grew up idolizing his big brother, and remains loyal to Dicky even though he's a crackhead. With Dicky as his trainer, and his mother Alice (Melissa Leo) as his manager, Micky's chances of success are slim. To call Micky's family dysfunctional -- in additon to Dicky and Alice there are his seven furious, fractious sisters -- is an understatement. Micky's a fairly quiet, passive guy. It's easy to imagine him spending his whole life never getting a word in edgewise, and getting shouted down every time he tried. He's not so different as a boxer -- he lays on the ropes, and takes a beating, wearing down his opponent and waiting for a chance to strike. The question for Micky, the central question of The Fighter, is whether Micky will ever find it in himself to get off the ropes and fight his family.

There are good reasons to think he should. Family matriarch Alice clearly favors Dicky. Dicky, for his part, is more interested in his own comeback than in guiding his little brother. Micky's a surrogate, fighting not so much for himself but to give his grandstanding brother a second chance at glory, and it's not at all clear that anyone has his best interests at heart. Enter Charlene (Amy Adams), Micky's girlfriend, a scrappy, tough-talking barmaid who stands up to Alice and her seven daughters when Micky can't. She can also throw a mean punch when she has to.

The Fighter is less about boxing than it is a love story, a family drama, and a complicated tale of fraternal love and sibling rivalry. It's crazy, funny, sad, profane, and sometimes profound, and a nimble, lively, psychologically complex story. There are really a multitude of fighters in The Fighter, and the obvious one, Micky Ward, is the least pugilistic of the bunch.

Bale's performance -- he seems to reinvent himself for every role -- is quite extraordinary. He's gaunt, wild-eyed and energetically frantic, revealing not only the ravages of Dicky's drug addiction, but also the athlete he once was. Dicky runs, punches, spars, and never stops talking, as if willing his body to do things it really shouldn't be able to do. He's a clown, a raconteur, a fighter, a mama's boy, a mentor, a charmer, and smarter than he looks -- he never stops thinking about strategy, even though most of his personal decisions, impaired as they are by drugs and drug-seeking, are quite bad. 

Leo's Alice is in the dubious company of other mythically terrible movie mothers -- she chain smokes, she badgers, she storms, she hurls kitchenware, she denies and defames, she roars. She undermines Micky's career even while she exploits it for money and attention. Micky, it is clear, can never be better than his big brother in Alice's eyes, and whether she does it intentionally or not, she sees to it that he never quite succeeds. Only Charlene dares to face down the harridan and her vulgar, vicious daughters who, between them, use enough hairspray to keep the ozone hole open for business. (That the family cooperated with the filmmakers is interesting, to say the least.)

Wahlberg's performance is quiet, like Micky. He seems to be waiting for something, and watching from the outside as Charlene and the Ward and Eklund families duke it out. What they're fighting over is, of course, Micky's destiny. Micky's personality, and Walhberg's performance, parallel the progress of the story, which is, in the end, about a quiet, passive, non-aggressive man who finds the fighter in himself, and finally discovers something worth fighting for.

The Fighter, filmed in Lowell, is appropriately gritty and grimy, with the hardscrabble working class town looking as desperate and ground down as its fabled son Dicky. Director David O. Russell nicely captures the shabby weariness of this former industrial town, and the poverty that blighted it in the 1990s, when this story takes place. Russell (*Three Kings*, *Flirting with Disaster*) doesn't make anything pretty in The Fighter -- not the town, or the people. The fights are brutal, and that goes double for any fight involving Alice and her flock of harpies. Russell's directing style is energetic and fleet-footed, and the movie is lively, thoughtful, hilarious, and moving, and frequently veers in unexpected directions. Russell aims to reimagine the boxing movie with The Fighter, to both conform to boxing movie conventions, and to upend them. In doing so, he both satisfies the expectations of the genre and moves beyond them, to create a movie that's richly complex, moving, and genuine.

24Jan2011

The Green Hornet (2011)

I had a Hornet car once. It was green. I also had, simultaneously, a cat named Kato. I didn't name the cat; he was named by a friend who was a Bruce Lee fanatic. Lee played Kato in the 1960s Green Hornet TV series. But the durably long-lived Green Hornet himself dates back to a 1930s radio show. In virtually every version of The Green Hornet (radio, movie, TV, comic book), the Hornet is the alter ego of Britt Reid, do-gooder publisher by day, vigilante by night, aided by his faithful sidekick/chauffeur/manservant Kato.

As imagined by star and screenwriter Seth Rogen (who co-wrote the movie with Evan Goldberg), the 21st century Britt Reid is a layabout, a hard-partying, fast-talking, spoiled brat who inherits a newspaper when his stern father (Tom Wilkinson) dies. Britt discovers the amazing talents of his father's car mechanic and personal barista Kato (Jay Chou), a skilled engineer, artist, and inventor. Britt engages in some vandalism, gets into hot water, and hatches a scheme to become a masked crimefighter who poses as a criminal. It's not really clear why he feels it necessary to pose as a criminal, but the plot is the weakest link in The Green Hornet. It barely makes sense, but it also barely exists.

The Green Hornet has a cool car, called Black Beauty, that's tricked out with nifty features like machine guns, flamethrowers, missiles, and bulletproof glass. (My green Hornet didn't have any of that stuff, which is probably for the best, although we will never know now.) Kato, the brains behind the Green Hornet, and also the brawn, created the car, the name, and the masks. He also does all the crimefighting while Britt does all the talking. Britt talks pretty much nonstop, is generally inept, and frequently requires rescue, since he lacks even the most rudimentary of crimefighting skills. The running gag of The Green Hornet is that Britt Reid is a doofus superhero who can't do anything right, and his sidekick does all the work. And gets the girl.

The girl is Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz), Britt's overqualified secretary. The Green Hornet's nemesis is Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz), a criminal kingpin suffering a midlife crisis. There's also a corrupt district attorney (David Harbour) who turns out to be a villain as well.

A lot of action movies lack characters. They're filled with explosions and fights and car chases, and the people in them have plenty to do, but they lack dimension as characters. The Green Hornet is full of car chases and fights and explosions, and the characters have loads of personality, although, strangely, they don't have much to do because the movie is a more or less random series of incidents that are connected primarily because they've been spliced together by an editor (Michael Tronick).

And yet, The Green Hornet can be fun. Rogen, who can be fairly irritating, uses that quality to good effect, since Britt is a fairly irritating guy whose principle accomplishment is that he irritates bad guys. He should be called The Mosquito. Rogen and Chou (a major Taiwanese pop idol) have a funny, loose rapport. Chou speaks as slowly as Rogen speaks quickly, and is low key, quiet, and graceful, while Rogen is loud and awkward. Waltz, who was terrifically funny and terrifying as Colonel Hans Landa in *Inglourious Basterds*, is funny in The Green Hornet too, although he's playing a character who is like a lite version of Landa. Chudnofsky is merciless, and surrounds himself with yes-men (no-men don't last long); he's an insecure criminal mastermind, one who worries that he's not scary enough, and ponders ways to be taken seriously. He's not so different, in that way, from Britt, who also just wants to be taken seriously.

Director Michel Gondry (Be Kind, Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) makes his first foray into action movies, after a career making quirky, brainy, highly imaginative movies and music videos. The Green Hornet shows little of Gondry's usual lightness and inventiveness, but it pops up from time to time in some of the more imaginatively staged action sequences, like the extended car chase that literally stops the presses when it ends up at Britt's newspaper offices. Gondry's goofy, slapsticky approach to kung fu fighting and bromantic comedy enlivens The Green Hornet, but the movie is an atypical entry in the director's oeuvre, one that offers few opportunities for the quirky beauty and emotional intensity of his best work. Gondry's affection for the characters shows, and he gives Britt and Kato lots of cool, unusual toys to play with, but as a director and writer, he tends to work with trippy, unconventional narratives and stories that slip and slide between layers of reality, and The Green Hornet really needed someone with the will to bend its freewheeling riffing into a more conventional narrative. (This movie features slapdash, anemic 3-D. It was not originally filmed in 3-D -- the studio decided to convert some scenes to 3-D in post-production, and it's nothing to write home about. It's a scam to get a few extra bucks out of the audience.)

16Jan2011

The King's Speech (2010)

Cruel fate conspires against poor Prince Albert, son of King George V. He grows up with a stammer, but, being the Duke of York, he is sometimes required to speak publicly. That humiliation is bad enough, but then radio comes along and amplifies his every stutter and agonizing silence, and sends it to the four corners of the British Empire. Fortunately, he is in little danger of ascending to the throne, as the crown is to sit on his brother David's head. But his brother, the man who would be King Edward VIII, is head over heels in love with an American divorcee. He famously abdicates for love, thus sticking Albert with what feels like a crown of thorns. Oh, and there's a world war looming, too.

Fate has a sense of humor too. The King's Speech, directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler, recounts how Albert reluctantly ascended to the throne and grew into the role of king with a little help from a quirky therapist. Albert, or Bertie (Colin Firth) as he is known to his family (he has no friends), has sought numerous cures, from numerous quacks, for his speaking problem. His patient and sympathetic wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), the future Queen Mum, finds an unorthodox speech therapist named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian who promises to cure the monarch. He also promises to ruffle the royal feathers by insisting, among other things, that therapy sessions be held in his shabby office, and that he and Bertie be on first-name terms. Bertie finds him irritating and impertinent, but also effective.

Lionel's plan is to dig up and expose the root of Bertie's problem, something the reserved, private prince prefers not to do. What follows is part comedy, part therapy session, part odd couple story as Bertie and Lionel talk and confide and bicker. Lionel, whose opinion of the monarchy is low (though he holds Bertie in high esteem) occasionally oversteps his bounds. Bertie resists Lionel's efforts to probe into his painful childhood and family life, until circumstance -- that troublesome, impetuous, lovestruck brother -- forces him to confront everything all at once: his past, his future, Hitler. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, indeed.

For all that heaviness, for all Bertie's anger and anxiety, The King's Speech is a mostly lighthearted movie that primarily aims to entertain, and so it does. There's a bit of a history lesson squeezed in for good measure, but the hammy (in a good way) performance by Rush, and Firth's ability to maintain a stiff upper lip while letting fly with a stream of stutter-free expletives (which inexplicably earned the sex-and-violence-free movie an R rating) make this an enjoyable romp through a dark period of history.

The movie gives little time to the crisis that was nearly Bertie's (and maybe the monarchy's) undoing: brother David (Guy Pearce), and his affair with Wallis Simpson (Eve Best). In only a few scenes, the movie slyly hints at the perhaps perverse nature of their relationship, the unconventional power dynamic between them, and David's unwillingness, or inability, to give up Wallis for honor, for power, or for country. Pearce reveals much about David's temperament, his intemperance, his imperiousness, his whingeing and sense of victimhood, and his cruel torture (both intentional and unintentional) of his brother. There's an interesting movie to be made about *that* guy (and if they cast Guy Pearce to play him just as he does in The King's Speech, all the better). If the monarchy is good for nothing else (and that's a distinct possibility), it's good at producing dysfunctional families and high drama.

The King's Speech is a film that's eager to please, even when it must delve into the royal family's unpleasantness. The movie creates an effective sense of Bertie's options diminishing -- he seems forced to navigate many long, narrow corridors, and to confront an increasing number of microphones that, in the way that inanimate objects like 1930s mics can do, seem to scowl at him. (Unlike most dramas about royals, The King's Speech abjures palatial opulence, making the monarchs look practically middle class.) There's a growing sense of both necessity and desperation, and Firth's portrayal reveals King George VI to be a man who will do what he must for his country, even speak to it. The title refers to Bertie's speech in general, but also in particular to a crucial speech he must broadcast, informing England and the world that they are going to war against Germany. It's an important, defining moment, both for the man and the country, and The King's Speech effectively and movingly shows how the two are one, their fates intertwined. The king's little story of overcoming personal adversity will be mirrored in the courage and solidarity that Britons famously exhibited during the war. In some ways, the stories that The King's Speech implies but doesn't tell promise to be even more interesting than the one it does tell, but it is nonetheless a poignant and interesting personal drama, and a diverting, fun, juicy historical drama as well.

9Jan2011

True Grit (2010)

Vengeance may be a dish best served cold, but the actual serving of it tends to be a hot mess. This is especially true when Joel and Ethan Coen are involved, as they have, over the years, specialized in tales of killings and crime where things tend to go awry, with violent consequences. In True Grit, a remake of the 1969 film that starred John Wayne and Kim Darby, there are a lot of killings, and most of them are pretty messy. Death doesn't come quick and painless when knives and rifles are involved. True Grit is based on the novel by Charles Portis, and as before, its a comic Western that goofs around with the heroic Western archetype. When John Wayne played US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, he played against an archetype he'd embodied for much of his career. When Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, he shuffles and stumbles and slurs, and exhibits little of the dignity one might expect of a storied lawman. On the other hand, his "one-eyed fat man" surely looks like a fellow who spends days in the saddle and weeks sleeping in the dirt, with nought but a bottle of whisky for company. It's probably a lot closer to the reality of being a frontier lawman than the classic movie image of clean-shaven men in buckskin suits and boots with jangly spurs.

There is a fellow in buckskin and spurs in True Grit. That'd be Texas Ranger LaBeouf, a pretentious man with a big mustache and a high opinion of himself. That opinion is not shared by Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who compares the fashionable lawman to a rodeo clown. Mattie is a 14 year old girl from Arkansas, who has hired Rooster Cogburn to hunt down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the miserable, no 'count man who murdered her father. LaBeouf (who pronounces his name "La Beef," in the Texas way) is also tracking Chaney, and has in mind to collect a large bounty for him back in Texas. Mattie seeks justice and vengeance for her father, and she's heard that Cogburn is not particular about whether he brings outlaws back dead or alive, which suits her just fine. She wants Chaney dead, whether it's by the bullet or the noose, so long as it's in Arkansas.

Revenge is sweet, but Mattie is not. She's smart as a pistol, and all business, whether she's negotiating the sale of some ponies to a crooked horsetrader, or settling on Cogburn's fee. She's tough through and through, and she won't be trifled with, which makes she and Cogburn kindred spirits of sorts. Steinfeld is terrific in her feature film debut (I predict an Oscar nomination), playing Mattie as a humorless but nonethless hilarious, steely little fast talker who makes up for her small size with a very sharp tongue. Bridges and Damon are also quite good -- Damon's LaBeouf suffers numerous indignities, and turns out to be more complicated than he at first seems.

The script by the Coen Brothers is terrific -- wordy, witty, funny, profound, taking numerous digressive detours and meandering along on an unexpected trail to revenge and redemption. This is a Western uncharacteristically built on words -- these are characters who tallk and tell tales, who weigh and consider and negotiate, whether it's about the price of a horse, or the worth of a human life.

The Coens' previous Westerns (No Country for Old Men and, arguably, Raising Arizona), were set in modern times, but in True Grit, they work within the Western genre in a more traditional, though still revisionist way. In some ways, True Grit is a step backwards from No Country for Old Men, which, for my money, capped off the genre. True Grit shows that the Western well hasn't totally run dry -- there is still more to say on the subject of outlaws and lawmen, complicated good and unrepentant evil. The movie isn't particularly stylized or quirky, which is to say that it is not a typical Coen brothers movie, although I'm not sure there is a typical Coen brothers movie anymore. They have matured into very complete and complex filmmakers -- good storytellers, masters of the visual, with a sense of history and purpose, and also a sense of humor. There are no cheap laughs in True Grit, and the Coens don't make fun of the characters. There are odd flourishes here and there, and strange characters who turn up from time to time. But what makes True Grit unique and so interesting is that it's a serious and thoughtful film about serious people who mean to lay some Biblical, eye-for-en-eye wrath on a ne'er-do-well -- the movie can be violent and bloody -- but it's also extremely funny and entertaining. That's not an easy combination to pull off, but in True Grit, it is pulled off to perfection. 

25Dec2010

Black Swan (2010)

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is part melodrama, part horror movie, a dark, gothic tale of obsession, madness, and fragility as personified by Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a young ballerina with a New York ballet company. Nina's years of dedication, of pain and practice, and singleminded pursuit of perfection come to fruition when she is offered the lead role in a new production of Swan Lake. In this reimagined take on Tchaikovsky's classic, Nina will play dual roles: the tragic white swan, and her evil twin black swan. The ballet company's artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) likes to seduce his prima ballerinas -- Nina's fragile ego and timid demeanor leave her ill-prepared for his mind games. Further complicating her ascendancy are a free-spirited (i.e. slutty) new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis), who has black wings tattooed on her back, and Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder), the bitter ballerina forced into retirement and cruelly cast aside by Thomas. Nina's mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) messes with her head too -- she's a former ballerina who now lives through Nina's career, and she is by turns smothering and supportive, controlling and caring.

Aronofsky, working from a script by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin, transcends the backstage drama cliches: the professional and sexual rivals, the imperious director, the controlling stage mother, the dressing room treachery. He also embraces those cliches, and the ballet-specific ones too, focusing on the pain and physical suffering endured by Nina -- the ugly wounds that seem a requisite part of producing beauty in ballet (starvation, broken toes). There's more than the usual pain for Nina: strange grotesque wounds, mysterious scratches that appear on her back, fingers that bleed and peel. She hears voices. She sees doppelgangers, mirror images, twins, and encounters new parts of herself. She is consumed by her role as the Swan Queen -- the transformation is destroying her physically and mentally.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique shot the movie with a handheld camera using grainy filmstock and video, giving the images both intimacy and a sense of being off-balance, a little dizzy and disturbed. The camera frequently follows Nina closely from behind, seeing what she sees, as she sees it, and experiencing dance through her. The technique adds emphasis to what is really going on in Black Swan -- as the spinning, pirouetting dancer spins out of control, she loses her grip on what's real and what's not (leading up to a trippy triple-twist of an ending). Once the movie slips inside Nina's mind, it takes flight. Pain, sex, fear, repression, ecstasy, blood, violence -- there's a dark malevolence to Black Swan, a vision of art as more than suffering. This is art as simultaneous self-creation and self-destruction. As a dancer, Portman is good enough to pass, and she's terrific as the timorous, tremulous, repressed Nina. Nina is a difficult character, one who is largely passive, absorbing praise, criticism, love, hatred. She dances  perfectly but, as Thomas tells her, without passion. She pours her passion into *being* a perfect dancer, but there's nothing left for the stage, or for her life off-stage. 

Black Swan inevitably calls to mind Powell & Pressburger's exquisite The Red Shoes (1948), another ballet movie in which life imitates art. It also calls to mind Aronofsky's last film, The Wrestler, and his first, Pi. Aronofsky specializes in obsession, self-inflicted pain, madness, and characters driven to extremes in pursuit of big dreams. What Black Swan is not is a rarefied or reverent look at the world of ballet. It depicts ballet, or at least this ballet company, as crushing, cutthroat, mutilating, and emotionally and physically brutal -- no place for a good girl who still sleeps in a pink bedroom full of toys. Black Swan is sometimes shocking, sometimes sexy, funny, and moving. As he often does, Aronofsky successfully mixes highbrow and low art in Black Swan, to make a psycho-horror-drama that doubles as ravishing arthouse artist's tragedy. 

20Dec2010

The Tourist (2010)

It is no easier to make a dull movie than an exciting one, generally speaking. But it can't have been easy to make a movie as lacklustre and wan as The Tourist with megawatt stars like Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, both eminently watchable actors. And yet, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), working from a script he co-authored with Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) has done just that. That's a whole lot of filmmaking talent gone meh.

But wait, there's more: Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, Steven Berkoff, and Rufus Sewell are also in The Tourist, and none of them manage to liven up the joint either, which is really quite remarkable. Venice, however, looks swell. I'm sure it's a lovely place to make a movie, which is, I suppose, reason enough to do it, even if the movie is The Tourist.

Venice is the setting for most of the action in The Tourist, a mystery-thriller about an ordinary guy getting mixed up in international intrigue and a case of mistaken identity, instead of having a nice, quiet little vacation abroad. It's the kind of film Hitchcock might have made (and did make), only Hitch would have made it a lot more fun and entertaining than this. Jolie, decked out in an assortment of formfitting retro dresses and elbow-length gloves certainly dresses the part of the old school femme fatale as Elise Clifton-Ward, a mysterious woman being followed by Interpol. She poses, she postures, she vamps, she's in love with a criminal. So she boards a train from Paris to Venice, and following instructions she receives in a letter from her lover, Alexander Pierce, she finds a fall guy in Frank Tupelo (Depp), a sad, timid math teacher from Wisconsin. 

Elise takes Frank to a luxurious hotel. Things get more complicated from there -- Venice is crawling with bad guys who think Frank is Pierce. Pierce stole money from said bad guys -- a lot of money -- and they want it back. So they want Frank. Meanwhile Scotland Yard wants Pierce because he owes back taxes on the stolen money.

The plot is fairly preposterous, but it ends up being fairly predictable too, which is far worse. A preposterous plot I can get behind, as long as it entertains and surprises. The Tourist goes through the motions of an exciting thriller -- dinner on a train, boat chases through the canals of Venice, rooftop pursuit, jumping onto a canvas awning efficiently combined with crashing into a fruit stand -- all the old chestnuts are there, but there is never a moment in the movie when it's possible to believe that either Elise or Frank is in genuine peril. 

The real problem with The Tourist, though, is that no one involved (except maybe Jolie) seems to know that this is not a movie to be taken seriously. The Tourist could have been livened up considerably with some zingy dialogue, a little witty patter, some comic romantic tension. Frank is awfully morose for a man being pursued by mobsters, Interpol, and Scotland Yard, while mixed up with a gorgeous dame who gets in all kinds of trouble -- he seems enervated rather than energized by the whole experience. He's the straight man to Jolie's vamp. Depp's no slouch in the vamping department himself (e.g. Captain Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter), but someone forgot to tell him that this much glamorous, cliche-riddled nonsense needs a leading man who knows that the straight man can't be played with a straight face.

12Dec2010

Fair Game (2010)

There are two stories in Fair Game, one big picture, one little. They're both about ambition, trust, devotion to truth, reality. Both are stories familiar in their generalities, and in their specifics. And both are stories about what happened to Valerie Plame Wilson.

Valerie (Naomi Watts), you may recall, was the CIA operative outed by the Bush Administration after her husband Joe (Sean Penn) accused the White House of dissembling about weapons of mass destruction during the march to war against Iraq. Joe Wilson, a former US ambassador, had gone to Africa at the behest of the CIA, investigated the alleged sale of the infamous "yellowcake" uranium, and found no evidence that Iraq ever bought any nuclear material. The conclusion of Valerie and her team of analysts at the CIA was that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. When the president, in his State of the Union address, claimed otherwise, Joe went on the warpath, ultimately accusing the administration of lying in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. Then, the story goes, Valerie's identity as a CIA spook was revealed -- her career at the CIA destroyed -- in order to discredit her husband.

Fair Game recounts all of that, but then shifts focus to create an intimate portrait of a couple facing a life-altering attack. As Valerie's career disintegrates, her marriage begins to collapse under the strain. What's interesting about Valerie and Joe is not that they are exceptional, but rather that they are, in a lot of ways, a fairly ordinary couple. Joe's older, already retired from his first career, now a stay-at-home dad starting up a consulting business. He gets the bulk of the childcare duty -- they have young twins -- while his younger, globetrotting wife, her career still in its ascendancy, works late in the night at a high-stress, demanding job. Temperamentally, they're quite different -- he's an idealist and a hothead for whom being right is more important than anything. He never leaves a dinner party without getting into at least one argument, while his cooler, more reserved wife bites her tongue and is good at keeping secrets. Joe spends his days in a righteous fury, tilting at windmills with all his might. His best weapon -- the truth -- is no match for White House operatives who decide what's true, and bend reality to suit their political purposes. Valerie, levelheaded, calm, and persuasive, is accustomed to analyzing data and interpreting reality. As ambitious as she is, and as devoted to the truth as she is, she's a team player, and understands that hers is not the final word. As the story is told in Fair Game, she gets caught in the crossfire between Joe and the White House.

Fair Game, written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (based on memoirs by Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson), and directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith), requires quite a bit of set-up, which the movie moves through briskly, with both Joe and Valerie hopping from one global hot spot to another. It helps, watching the movie, if you're already familiar with the basics of what happened in the Plame affair, and the political import of it all. The world is, of course, still dealing with the fallout of the Bush years, but Fair Game chooses to focus primarily on the personal consequences for the Wilsons. They are, in the big picture, small potatoes, just more collateral damage in the Bush Wars. But, as Fair Game reveals, no target was too small to be in the crosshairs of the venal, mendacious Bush operatives Scooter Libby (David Andrews, hatefully smooth-talking and self-satisfied) and Karl Rove (Adam LeFevre).

The movie mixes video clips from the Bush presidency (carefully selected to inflame old sentiments anew), with Liman's juddering handheld camera footage to create an unsettling, immediate sense of the floor falling out from under the Wilsons, and the end of the world as we knew it. Fair Game is a gripping, infuriating cloak-and-dagger political thriller about how all politics is personal, and how the petty, vindictive personal stuff and the neo-con world order stuff collided in the attack on the Wilsons. 

5Dec2010