Hereafter (2010)

As an actor, Clint Eastwood has frequently played characters who have a causal role in shuffling others off this mortal coil. As a director, he seems often to have death on his mind too, so it should come as no surprise that in Hereafter, he contemplates (or is it confronts?) death again. The difference is that Hereafter looks at death from the point of view of survivors, those touched (but not fatally) by death. Eastwood has looked at death from both sides now.

Hereafter, written by Peter Morgan (The Queen), engages in some tentative speculation about the afterlife, but the story, about three lives that intersect, coincidentally, in the aftermath of death, is more concerned with the living. Marie LeLay (Cecile De France) is a French journalist who survives the Indonesian tsunami (chillingly recreated); she has the classic near-death experience -- white light, shadowy figures who beckon her -- as she is submerged by the epic, killer wave. She's haunted by her experience and, like a good reporter, endeavors to dig deeper and find out more. George Lonegan (Matt Damon) has had about enough of the dead -- he's a psychic, apparently the real deal, who communicates with the dead on behalf of the living who long to speak once more with their dearly departed. He considers his "gift" to be a burden. His entrepreneurial (and exploitative) brother (Jay Mohr) tries to talk him into cashing in on his talent, but he'd rather keep a low profile and work in a warehouse. Marcus and Jason are identical twin brothers (played by Frankie and George McLaren). The two boys keep their family together (mum's a mess), and they've got a unique connection to each other that isn't completely severed when one brother is killed.

Eastwood, in his typical, understated way, makes a typically understated movie that's intriguing and moving, although oddly disconnected. Death, of course, comes for us all, and in that we are all connected, all one in the human condition. But that's not much to hang a narrative on, and in the end, Hereafter just kind of runs its course and fades out. It dies a natural, quiet death, so to speak, which is an atypical sort of death in the movies.

Despite the title's intimations of revealing a glimpse of the great beyond, it is scarcely concerned with the afterlife, and more concerned with life. Lacking any particular narrative momentum, the movie instead lingers on moments, on day-in-the-life stuff that happens to the characters. Marie can't focus at work, so she takes a leave of absence to write a book about the life and death of Francois Mitterand that turns into a book about death, and life after it. The movie follows her through a series of vignettes -- business meetings, intimate dinners, conversations. George listens to books on tape -- he's a big fan of Dickens -- and takes an Italian cooking class, where he meets flirty, sweet Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), who gives him a glimpse of what a "normal" life might be like. He is self-protective, seeking to shield himself from the voices of the dead, but it requires him to sometimes be cruel to the living. Shy, lonely Marcus longs to be with his protective brother Jason again, and seeks out a series of charlatans who claim they can communicate with the dead boy. The natural, solemn, sometimes awkward performances by the McLaren brothers takes what might have been maudlin material and makes it clear-eyed and melancholy, but not pitiful. 

The same is true of the rest of the movie. Eastwood deftly avoids the pitfalls of sloppy sentimentality -- a real danger given the subject matter -- and maintains a certain equilibrium, and a cool distance. The movie sympathizes, foremost, with the questioning, the curiosity about death, rather than with the grieving. It takes its lead, it seems, from the dead, who, when George speaks for them at least, are all business. They've got things to say, important messages to convey, but they're not gonna get all weepy and mushy, or waste time (which is odd, since it is presumably timeless there in eternity). Their message for the living: get on with your lives. And that, in the end, is what Hereafter does too -- its a quiet, unassuming, anti-nihilist reflection on living in the face of death, on continuing in spite of the inevitable. In the midst of life, we are in death, so carry on.

28Oct2010

RED (2010)

At 55, Bruce Willis is a little young to be playing a retiree. I thought 70 was the new 60, not the other way around. But no matter. Willis is Frank Moses in RED, and Moses is a retired CIA black ops specialist. Maybe the working lifespan (if not the actual lifespan) of a spook is shorter than average. 

Someone wants to considerably shorten Moses' lifespan in RED. RED is an acronym for "Retired, Extremely Dangerous," which is what Moses proves to be (hey, it's stamped right there on his file -- in red). When several heavily armed men break into his suburban Cleveland home to kill him, Moses comes out of retirement and lays some extremely lethal defensive maneuvers on them. This is not a terrible thing, because it turns out Moses was pretty bored in retirement. The whole attempted assassination thing kinda brightened his day a bit. After dispatching the assassins, he trots off to Kansas City, where he had a tentative date with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a bored federal employee in a pension processing office whom he had been kind of flirting with on the phone. With armed men trying to kill him, he figures he has to kidnap Sarah and take her with him, for her own safety. She grudgingly obliges, and admits that it's not the worst first date she's ever had. What starts out looking like another quirky Mr. Wrong romantic comedy soon morphs into something else -- an AARP buddy action comedy with a little love on the side.

Moses, of course, isn't the only retired assassin out there looking for a little excitement. So it takes little effort to persuade his pals to come in from the pasture and join him in figuring out what's going on and who's responsible. His old buddy Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), who is dying of liver cancer and spending his last days in a retirement home, wants to go out with a bang. (Will the movie oblige him? Who could say no to Morgan Freeman?) Paranoid conspiracy-theorist Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich, dialing up the crazy, even for him) has a conspiracy theory to contribute -- and he's right! Ivan Simonov (Brian Cox) is an old KGB frenemy who is so bored with the tedium of post-Cold War bureaucratic life that he's willing to switch sides. Victoria (Helen Mirren, having a fine old time) has a beautiful waterfront home in Maryland, but she really misses all the killing. Ernest Borgnine, who really is old enough to be retired (but happily, isn't), turns up a few times to wax nostalgic as the CIA's keeper of super-duper secret files.

Meanwhile, young CIA assassin William Cooper (Karl Urban) is hunting Moses, with a veritable army of heavily armed agents at the ready to wreak havoc. If this sort of thing routinely happens in the CIA, they do a really good job of keeping it quiet. Cooper doesn't know that the anti-Moses conspiracy concerns some long ago dirty business in Guatemala involving the vice president and his puppet master, a powerful defense contractor (Richard Dreyfuss) who bears a passing resemblance to a certain former, snarling vice president with a bad heart (insert joke about him actually having a heart here). That's about as political as RED gets -- the plot is really incidental. The point is simply this: "old" people shooting big guns, blowing things up, and laying a beatin' on young whippersnappers who dare to call them "grandpa." This is kind of how you imagine Clint Eastwood would spend his retirement, if he wasn't so busy making movies.

It is, of course, all in good fun, and RED, based on the comic books created by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, and directed by Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler's Wife) takes a cartoonish approach to the violence, and everything else. The good guys mostly recover from gunshots fairly quickly, the bad guys and their minions mostly get blown to smithereens. It's pretty simple, unsophisticated, zippy, and darkly funny. RED doesn't really have a message, or even much of a point -- there's nothing serious in there about the wisdom and value of elders, although apparently you can't discount experience as a serious advantage in the spy game. Having big guns helps too. And you're never too old to have fun vaporizing your enemies.

Maybe there is a mesage in there after all -- retirement is a drag, so don't despair, all you zoomers who watched your 401(k)s evaporate. You'll be happier if you just keep working.

21Oct2010

Let Me In (2010)

There is a certain anticipatory dread that accompanies the arrival of an American remake of a splendid foreign film. In the case of Let Me In, that dread is warranted, not because this is another sloppy, dumbed down, hyperactive remake, but because it is faithful to the original, a dread-steeped, marrow chilling story of the horrors of prepubescent adolescence.

Let Me In, based on the Swedish Film Let the Right One In (2009), in turn based on John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel, is a kind of vampire love story, but it departs radically from the dominant romantic vampire paradigm of the moment, with its lust, sex and noisy supernatural battles between werewolves and vampires (true of both the teencentric Twilight movies and the hyper-sexy, hyper-violent HBO series True Blood). Let Me In zeroes in on a different variety of pre-teen and pre-sexual anxiety and violence, exploring the rage and terror of bullied, tormented, 12 year old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose everday existence is filled with dread even before he meets the vampire girl next door. 

Owen's parents are divorcing, and he's lonely, bored and fearful. It's 1983, in Los Alamos, NM. Reagan is on TV talking about evil empires, and Culture Club and David Bowie are on the radio (and in the movie's soundtrack). Owen lives in a shabby apartment complex with his mother, and spends his evenings killing time in the snowy, bleak courtyard, gorging on Now-and-Later candies. His Now is something he's desperate to escape, but what Later does he anticipate in chilly Reagan-era America? Surely not the arrival of an interesting and mysterious neighbor, a 12 year old girl named Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz), who quickly informs him that they cannot be friends. For Owen, it hardly matters -- he'll take what friendship he can find, even if it's of a strange and tentative kind. Abby, for her part, feels protective of Owen, and he desperately needs a protector, as the bullies who torment him at school become increasingly vicious and predatory.

Abby is pale and peculiar, a barefoot child who looks poorly cared for by her weary, middle-aged guardian (Richard Jenkins). He acts as a procurer, an unwilling serial killer whose task is to find blood for Abby -- she's a vampire -- and thus to keep her hidden from the world. He's not very good at killing, which brings him to the attention of a dogged police detective (Elias Koteas), investigating the recent rash of what he suspects are satanic cult killings.

The film is evocatively dark and shadowy, and the cinematography by Greig Fraser beautifully communicates the isolation, bewilderment and directionlessness of Owen and Abby, two kids who, for different reasons, find themselves uprooted, unmoored, unsettled, and vulnerable. Moretz (Kick-Ass) and Smit-McPhee (The Road) are both hauntingly effective in their depictions of the very specific isolations of Abby and Owen, and their mutual, quietly desperate yearning for non-sexual intimacy and love.

Let Me In was written and directed by Matt Reeves, whose last film, Cloverfield, was a hot mess, a tiresome, gimmicky faux home movie about the destruction of New York -- and a handful of stupid, annoying characters -- by monster. Let Me In -- although it makes somewhat more liberal use of special effects than its Swedish predecessor -- is more evocative of the angsty, yearning TV drama Felicity, which Reeves co-created, than Cloverfield. The director's affinity for stories of adolescent intensity and fragility is ideally suited to the eerie, moody Let Me In, a delicately, emotionally haunting horror story that is only incidentally about vampires, and at its heart is about the horrors of being twelve (and even worse, for Abby, forever twelve). Let Me In resists mythologizing vampires and youth -- two things pop culture is perpetually intent on mythologizing and glamorizing -- and in so doing, it is memorably, poignantly chilling.

The Social Network (2010)

          A movie about Facebook sounds, to me, about as interesting as Facebook itself. Which is to say, not very. I'm a bad Facebook friend. I don't obsessively check Facebook to find out what's going on with my "friends." I completely reject the use of the word "friend" as a verb. Once a noun, always a noun, that's my motto. I don't update more than a couple of times a year. Until I saw The Social Network, I had never really thought much about Facebook, but suddenly, I wondered: how the heck does Facebook, a free site, make all those billions of dollars? Turns out it's advertising (how mundane!), and turns out I never even noticed the ads on the right side of my Facebook page. They are either really good ads, subtly worming their ways into my subconscious mind, or they are really bad ads that have utterly failed to attract my notice. (Whatever algorithm Facebook is using to ascertain which ads will make me click is a little off. For instance, I noticed an ad there for Christian Louboutin shoes. While it’s true I wear shoes, and in fact like shoes very much, Christians are several notches above my paygrade. And the heels are way too high for me.)

            The Social Network is no Facebook ad. The movie immediately grabs the attention, with a barrage of dialogue -- penned by Aaron Sorkin -- that's fast, sharp, smart, and combative. The conversation the movie drops into is between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), future billionaire and Facebook founder, and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). They're in a bar, and rat-a-tat-tat, rapid fire words fly across the table -- some of them hurt, some of them are meant to hurt, some of them are just further evidence, for Erica, of Zuckerberg's obsession with status, and his thinly veiled disdain for her lack thereof (she only goes to Boston University, while he's at Harvard). There is always collateral damage when Zuckerberg starts talking. Erica sums up his character in one word. The fight, and the beers he drinks, and his quest for vengeance have Zuckerberg blogging into the night, and then taking it out on every female student at Harvard. He creates a website publicly ranking them all as hot or not. It's mean-spirited, it’s an instant hit, and it crashes the university's computer network.

            A few months later, Facebook is born, but not before Zuckerberg makes a few more enemies. By the end of the story, he'll have made even more, and betrayed his best (and only) friend. The irony, the paradox, the incongruity of the story is that the man who launched millions of online friendships has no friends, no people skills, a level of social ineptitude and insensitivity that's almost pathological. Zuckerberg comes across as the smartest guy in the room, but also the most clueless, someone who, if he cares at all about other people, doesn't (or can't) show it. Eisenberg, who typically plays affable nerds and losers (Adventureland, Zombieland) is anything but affable here -- he plays Zuckerberg as someone who's intensely, competitively brainy, but missing certain essential character traits -- a sense of decency, loyalty, empathy, a conscience, the ability to listen. You know, the sorts of things one would look for in a friend. Confronted with uncomfortable truths, or socially difficult situations, or people he thinks are beneath him (that’s almost everyone), Zuckerberg goes eerily blank, like he's withdrawing into that void in his soul. The Social Network is the story of a man who, pathetically motivated by petty revenge, creates a medium for human beings to connect with one another, and Zuckerberg simultaneously reaches out to and pulls back from human contact, while the movie thoroughly resists trying to make him attractive or sympathetic or even self-aware. Every time he opens his mouth, something awful comes out. The only person who seems to really get Zuckerberg is Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the Napster and Plaxo creator who is a slick, slippery, paranoid Svengali-like business guru to him. Parker manages to insinuate himself into the Facebook fold just in time to cash in.

            The Social Network  is based on Ben Mezrich's book *The Accidental Billionaires*. It interweaves the account of Facebook's beginnings with two depositions for lawsuits against Zuckerberg. His best friend and Facebook co-founder and financier Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is suing him. So are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, playing both as comically perfect creatures -- rich, handsome, athletic Harvard men), who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea when he created Facebook. Cameron and Tyler represent the old elite, born into privilege, hobnobbing with royalty, reeking with class and status. Their adversary represents the new elite, powered by microchips, with the online masses at his back.

            Sorkin's script is a great one -- it crackles with intelligence, wit, emotion, and psychological insight. Director David Fincher, drawn as always to dark material, creates an intensely heady, brainy modern-day tragedy that hits on Shakepearean themes of friendship and betrayal, human frailty, ruthlessness, power and ambition, loneliness. The Social Network builds momentum as it moves through the astonishingly meteoric rise (there's yet to be a fall) of Facebook's fortunes. Fincher toggles back and forth between a dark and oppressive Harvard (it's never looked so gloomy on film, all shadowy and cold) and brightly lit corporate offices where Zuckerberg faces his accusers and their lawyers. How to make an interesting movie about words, computer code, ideas, cloud relationships? Fincher and Sorkin do it, first by capturing the thrill of creativity and genius as a small cadre of visionary computer hackers conquer the world with one really simple, really big idea, and then by creating an uncomfortably close, disquieting account of the casualties, of the real, flesh and blood friends who get slaughtered. The movie tells a particular version of the Facebook origin story (a fictional one, according to Facebook, Inc.), and it's utterly fascinating, hurtling through the details of how the biggest club in the world (one in 14 humans are members) got started in a dark, angry dorm room at Harvard University. The Social Network is a digital age morality tale, a tale of cruelty, betrayal, triumph. We see daily the maliciousness and viciousness of mobs cloaked in the anonymity of bits and bytes. The Social Network suggests that the callousness was a kind of original sin, written into the code by the creators. They unleashed a monster, the evil twin of the webtopian unifier of humanity. Zuckerberg didn’t create the monster; he just created a new place for it to hide in plain sight, surrounded by friends.

07Oct2010

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)

It can be a great distraction to have read the book when you see a movie adaptation, and I don't often do it. But the youngster and I have read Kathryn Lasky's fine Guardians of Ga'Hoole: The Capture, the first book in a 15 volume series about an heroic young barn owl named Soren. The first three books have been adapted into the animated movie Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. The movie is sufficiently different from the books that it's best judged on its own terms -- the characters have the same names, but the story is stripped of much of its psychological depth and horror, to make for a zippier, streamlined adventure movie that ends with an epic, violent battle. The first book is dark and bleak, but hopeful, with a sophisticated socio-political theme. The tone of the movie is quite different. It is still frequently dark and menacing, but considerably simpler, and the timeline far shorter, so as to pack three book's worth of story into a 90 minute film.

Soren (voiced by Jim Sturgess) is a young barn owlet who lives with his parents, his older brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten), and his adorable fluffball of a baby sister Eglantine (Adrienne DeFaria). One day, Soren and Kludd fall from the family's tree, and are kidnapped by patrols from St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls. They're taken to a barren canyon, where they and hundreds of owlets of many species are held captive and "moon-blinked," a form of brainwashing, and forced to work. St. Aggie's is a concentration camp for the Pure Ones, evil owls with a delusions of superiority bent on destroying all the inferior owl kingdoms. Kludd sides with his captors, but Soren and a tiny Elf owl named Gylfie (Emily Barclay) escape and seek help from the legendary Guardians, a mythical band of noble protector owls said to live in a vast Ga'Hoole tree. Their traveling companions are a snooty, singing grey owl named Twilight (Anthony LaPaglia), and goofy burrowing owl Digger (David Wenham). Kids who like knock-knock jokes will think Digger's a hoot.

Legend of the Guardians is beautifully and vibrantly animated, and creates a really nice, immersive, bird's-eye-view sense of flight with its effective use of 3-D. The characters (most with Australian accents and mostly voiced by Aussie actors) are nicely expressive, although they've got more visual depth than psychological depth. Excellent CG animation is the rule rather than the exception these days, so the visual quality of the movie alone is not enough to recommend it. On the other hand, the CG *Roadrunner* cartoon short that precedes the movie is pretty comprehensively lousy and artistically pointless. It looks like a poorly rendered video game. (I've never been a fan of that pesky bird anyway.) 

Director Zack Snyder has a strong and original visual style, as demonstrated in 300 and Watchmen (although both of those movies, which blended live actors and CG, looked a lot better than they were, taken as a whole). Legend of the Guardians is Snyder's first fully animated movie, and it exhibits some of the director's stylistic flourishes, including ample use of slow motion, and an emphasis on bold action over conceptual or symbolic content. The story as told in Legend of the Guardians moves briskly, motivated more by plot than ideas -- older and more sophisticated youngsters with a sense of history might appreciate the political subtext, but it is not particularly prominent or important in the progress of the story, so younger viewers will have no trouble keeping up, and will be charmed by the heroic characters and funny sidekicks. The movie doesn't particularly dwell on the emotional impact of the rather distressing developments in Soren's young life, and regularly lightens things up with humorous interludes. The drawn-out climax, however, while not visibly bloody, is violent enough to warrant parental caution.

26Sep 2010

Going the Distance (2010)

Going the Distance combines the bromantic comedy and the romantic comedy in a snappy, unsappy package that is a refreshing change for the genre. Romantic comedies typically go one of two ways, divided (supposedly) along gender lines. The "chick flicks" are sweet and slapsticky, with a cute, bickering couple who don't know how right they are for each other. The bromances are rude and crude, but deep down kinda sorta sincere, and, I suppose, meant to get the guys into the theatres without too much fuss. Team Apatow specializes in the latter, and Adam Sandler dabbles in them. Going the Distance manages to successfully combine the bromance and romance, with a cute couple (Justin Long and Drew Barrymore) who are kept apart not by some manufactured, only-in-the-movies plot development, but rather by something uncomfortably familiar and real: their jobs.

Garrett (Long) works for a record company. He loves music, but hates his job (because he loves *good* music). (There's a lot of good music on the movie soundtrack, by the by.) Erin (Barrymore) is a summer intern and aspiring newspaper reporter at a New York City newspaper. She's getting a late start in her career, and has apparently hit her stride just as newspapers are massively downsizing. When she and Garrett meet, she is just weeks away from going back to San Francisco to finish grad school, and he is fresh off his latest breakup (apparently he has commitement issues). They meet drunk and surly, but are brought together by their mutual love of vintage video arcade games and cheesy 1980s movies (and dope). Next thing you know, he's running through the airport to tell her... well, just to tell her he hopes he can see her again sometime. Post-9/11 airport security has really taken all the rainbows and unicorns out of airports. Erin and Garrett have their heart to heart chat at the check-in line, the uninspiring threshold that is the scene of the modern day airport farewell.

Going the Distance is enough of a genre-bender to get the airport scene out of the way early in the movie, and to make it but a teaser for the real complications that follow from this hopeful, against the odds romance.

And the odds are bad. Erin wants to live in New York, wants to be with Garrett, but economic forces beyond her control (the recession, the job market, the slow dying of old media) keep her in California, where she lives with her clean-freak sister (the hilarious Christina Applegate). Garrett is tethered to New York by his job, but also by his close relationships with Box (Jason Sudelkis) and Dan (Charlie Day), his weird, potty-mouthed buddies (for her part, Erin can swear like a sailor -- and drink like one -- too). 

The movie, directed by Nanette Burstein and scripted by Geoff LaTulippe, takes the classic romantic comedy conundrum -- Will they or won't they? Can they or can't they? -- and makes it meaningful and realistic. A continent is a big distance to travel, but the more difficult terrain Garrett and Erin have to navigate is vastly more significant: it's the land where you follow your dreams (in an individualistic, uncompromising way), and make a living, and find your true love, and live happily ever after. Having your cake and eating it too (and never getting fat from eating all that cake) is the American dream, and it's just the sort of dream that a reporter like Erin might write a nice feature about. Of course, it'll be about how that dream is dead, or dying, or something like that. Going the Distance is smart enough to take that dream seriously, but also to recognize it for the quixotic fantasy it is, and to recognize, as well, the way movies push that delicously sweet, cakey ideal. Going the Distance ices the cake with a big dollop of reality, but it's also charming and funny, and the characters are appealing enough that, gosh darn it, you really hope those two crazy kids can find that happy ending, even if it means racking up the frequent flier miles.

12Sep2010

The American (2010)

George Clooney specializes in two kinds of roles of late: rascals (see Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen), and a-man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do types (Up in the Air, Michael Clayton), and sometimes both (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Burn After Reading).  In The American, he's a man's-gotta-do type, an assassin, a lone gunslinger, and an artisanal gunsmith who goes by several names, including Mr. Butterfly. 

He works for a slippery character named Pavel (Johan Leysen), who sends him an assassin named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) who needs a very special rifle for a job. He doesn't know what the job is, and doesn't care, but he plans to quit the business when the assignment is finished. Unknown assassins are gunning for him, so he hides out in an Italian mountain village where he meets a nosy priest (Paolo Bonacelli), drinks coffee, exercises, works on the rifle, and eases his loneliness with a prostitute named Clara (Violante Placido). He's understandably paranoid, given that someone is trying to kill him. 

The American is directed by Anton Corbijn (Control), and adapted from the Martin Booth novel A Very Private Gentleman. Corbijn, a photographer and music video director, has an artistic sensibility when it comes to lighting and composition. There's a beautiful visual precision to the movie. The languorous pace of the film, and the unnerving way the camera tracks through lovely, lonely landscapes, enhances its menace. It slowly and subtly builds tension throughout, creating a sense of something sinister lurking in the cobbled alleyways of Mr. Butterfly's village hideaway, in the sun-dappled forests, in a quiet (too quiet?) cafe. Some of these places are utterly benign, but the movie is disquieting, discomfiting in a way that makes the viewer uneasy, like Mr. Butterfly, of things that are too perfect, too tranquil, too picturesque. 

The American is quiet, contemplative, and meticulously crafted, much as Mr. Butterfly is quiet and contemplative, and a meticulous craftsman. What is never entirely clear is what Mr. Butterfly, or the movie for that matter, is really contemplating. He says little, and little is betrayed by Clooney, who plays this role as a mostly grim-faced, scowling, strong but silent type. The American is a character study disguised as a tense yet leisurely thriller, but by the end of the film, not that much is really known about the character under study, except the obvious. This is perhaps by design. Mr. Butterfly's survival depends on his ability to be anonymous, to blend in, to disappear, but his camouflage may be too good. What he lacks, and what he longs for, is human connection, yet the movie holds him at arm's length. This may be a perfect example of a movie that is aesthetically and narratively indistinguishable from its protagonist: attractive, taciturn, anxious, polished, proficient, distant. 

5Sept2010

Get Low (2010)

In a movie career of nearly five decades, Robert Duvall has gone from playing a menacing, mysterious hermit (Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird) to playing a menacing, mysterious hermit In Get Low. And everything in between, of course: cops, robbers, cowboys, soldiers, astronauts, doctors, Joseph Pulitzer and Josef Stalin. In Get Low, Duvall delivers another memorable performance as Felix Bush, a Tennessee recluse who decides to throw himself a funeral.

Get Low is based on a true, unlikely story that has become the stuff of legend. Felix "Bush" Breazeale was a Tennessee farmer who, in 1938, made headlines when he decided to have a funeral party while he was still alive to enjoy it. Thousands attended. Life Magazine covered the event.

In the hands of Aaron Schneider, a cinematographer directing his first feature, and screenwriters Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, Get Low is part backwoods tall tale, part solemn tale of redemption, part low-key comedy, and part mystery.

Bush lives in a rustic log cabin in the woods, with only his mule Gracie for company. He's feared by the locals who take seriously his threat to shoot trespassers. He's a mysterious bogeyman about whom little is known. When he receives news that an old acquaintance has died, it gives him something to think about. He decides to throw himself a funeral party, and invites the entire county to come and tell their stories about him. He finds a desperate funeral parlor director named Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), who is happy to take Bush's "hermit money" and throw him a grand soiree. Quinn and his assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) become Bush's party planners, publicity agents, stylists, and chauffeurs, but not his confidants. Bush keeps his motives close to his vest, even with Mattie (Sissy Spacek), an old flame who knew him before he was a secretive loner. As the story unfolds, the mystery deepens, but it becomes apparent that Bush has his own story to tell, and he's looking for a way to tell it. In his pre-death, Bush leaves his solitude, and rejoins the community -- the life -- he so long shunned. 

Get Low is unexpectedly offbeat, charming, and funny as it meanders along towards a sentimental and not entirely unexpected conclusion, dropping numerous hints along the way of the coming revelation, of a distant tragedy, and a lost love, and Bush's redemption. The performances by Duvall and Murray save the movie from mawkishness -- both men bring ornery, lively wit to their characters. Duvall is fascinating as Bush, a man of few but carefully chosen words. Duvall teases out the quirky, twinkling sense of humor, the deep old hurt, and the emotional volatility behind the ZZ Top beard. Even though the movie can't help but telegraph, well in advance, where it's going, Duvall makes Bush a character who is captivating enough to make it worth following him. Murray is dodgy and sly as ever -- Quinn is almost as mysterious as Bush, and to the very end, it's impossible to know if he's on the level, or up to no good. Both men bring an acerbic edge, and a measure of authenticity and richly human complexity to their performances, which elevate the movie and pull it back from its occasional cornball tendencies. 

2Sept2010

Nanny McPhee Returns (2010)

When last we visited Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson), she was helping frazzled widower Mr. Brown (Colin Firth) to manage his unruly mob of children in Victorian England. Nanny McPhee was a stern, menacing and mysterious figure who dispensed disgusting medicines to malingering little ones and found ways to give wicked kids a taste of their own medicine too. Though she dressed (more or less) like Mary Poppins, she was warty and blobby and had unfortunate teeth. She did not sing. But she was patient and loving, although for Nanny McPhee, love means teaching children to do what's in their own best interest (and to be kind and helpful and all that).

Nanny McPhee is back, warts and all, in Nanny McPhee Returns, although the setting is now the English countryside during World War Two. Nanny McPhee (Thompson) looks none the worse for her decades of caring for misbehaving miscreants. This time around, she's summoned to assist Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a frazzled mother  who does her best to keep the family farm afloat while her husband is off fighting in the war. Her three children, Norman (Asa Butterfield), Megsie (Lil Woods), and little Vincent (Oscar Steer) are a bit naughty, but they turn into violent monsters when their haughty, snooty cousins arrive from the city. Cyril (Eros Vlahos) and Celia (Rosie Taylor-Ritson) are ill-mannered brats who instantly judge the farm to be a sea of poo, and their cousins to be poo-wallowing hayseeds. Meanwhile, Isabel is constantly pestered by her brother-in-law Phil (Rhys Ifans), who wants her to sign over her family's half of the farm. Phil's got some hilarious heavies (Sinead Matthews and Katy Brand) leaning on him for the deed to the farm. As has become traditional in *Nanny McPhee* movies, illustrious British thespians make right fools of themselves playing English caricatures. To wit, Maggie Smith is family friend dotty old Mrs. Docherty (who has a secret identity) and Ralph Fiennes turns up as a stodgy, stern, stiff upper lip military man.

Nanny McPhee Returns, written, like the original movie, by Thompson, lacks some of the menace and also some of the charm of the first movie, but this might be in part because the story's essential mystery is gone. The movie's a bit tamer too -- as directed by Susanna White, it lacks the acid colors and vinegary bite of the first movie and opts for a more muted, earthy palette to go with a slightly gentler approach to herding children. One hates to think that Nanny McPhee is becoming a soft touch! 

The movie goes for a broad, slapsticky brand of comedy, involving a great deal of barnyard animal waste, and Nanny McPhee makes more liberal use of her unspecified supernatural powers -- she can make children want to behave, but she can also make a motorcycle fly, and, for that matter, she can make pigs fly too. The movie makes more liberal use of compter-generated special effects as it hurtles through the plot and the life lessons. Nanny McPhee Returns, like its predecessor, is chockablock full of twists and turns and antic, frantic activity, embracing the kitchen sink approach to storytelling. Nanny McPhee is always the calm eye of the hurricane,  while everyone around her swirls and spins and frets and breaks things, and burps. Did I mention the burping blackbird? His name is Mr. Edelweiss, and he figures prominently in the story's wacky conclusion.

My 8 year old companion to Nanny McPhee Returns is a huge fan of the nanny, and she was not disappointed by the sequel. It's funny, and sweet, and endearingly quirky, with cute kids, cute pigs, and much agricultural mayhem. 

Eat Pray Love (2010)

Julia Roberts is immensely likable in Eat Pray Love. She's as likable onscreen as Liz Gilbert, on whose memoir the movie is based, is on the page. Funny, charming, witty, self-deprecating, neurotic, brutally honest about her own shortcomings, fully aware that she might rightly be accused of whining at times. Anything less and the reader or viewer might come away thinking this Liz Gilbert character is a little spoiled and full of herself -- who gets to take a year off to find herself and, by the way, travel to Italy (to eat), India (to pray) and Indonesia (to fall in love)? (The love part was a surprise -- the eating and praying were premeditated.) Writer-director Ryan Murphy (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Salt) has managed to preserve much of Gilbert's charm and sense of humor, as well as her supple and straightforward language in the movie adaptation of Eat Pray Love.

There's something very retro about the navel-gazing wanderlust of this sensual, picturesque travelogue and spiritual quest. Eat Pray Love is, in its way, an Easy Rider or On the Road for the modern thirty-something woman (the Neil Young songs on the soundtrack add to the retro mood). Gilbert is in search of peace and enlightenment, but also liberation and autonomy, and what she hears, constantly, is not the mantra of feminist liberation, but of marital bliss and coupled contentment. She is interrogated about her single status (she's recently, painfully divorced) in Italy; she comforts a friend on the verge of an arranged marriage in India; she's told she needs to get laid in Bali. That she's in search of something other than love puts her at odds with the Hollywood tendency to place romantic love first and foremost among the things women desire and need to find fulfillment and feel whole. "I am woman, hear me roar" has been replaced by "Get thee to an altar, spinster!" Yet here's Liz Gilbert, smart, capable, single, and determined to figure out how to move past needing a husband or boyfriend to get right with herself.

The book was glorious in its descriptions of the sensual pleasures of the mouth in Italy -- the food and the language. Likewise the movie, which revels in the luscious indulgence of linguini and lingua. The book was wonderful in India, where Gilbert spends time at an ashram and encounters Richard from Texas (Richard Jenkins), who nicknames her "Groceries" and speaks in  homespun aphorisms layered over deep spiritual wisdom. I thought the book petered out when Gilbert landed in Bali, and unexpectedly fell in love. The movie, on the other hand, is just getting warmed up when Javier Bardem arrives to light up the screen as Gilbert's charming Brazilian paramour Felipe, and Hadi Subiyanto steals scenes as the adorably toothless medicine man Ketut. What gets slighted in the movie (in favor of the Indonesian happy ending) is the ashram interlude, which was the soul of the book and gave the fullest exploration of Gilbert's spiritual quest, her soul-searching, and her inner struggle to love (herself, her god, her world) without being the object of love. I could have done with a whole lot more of Richard from Texas too -- reading the book, I always pictured Richard as M.C. Gainey, but Jenkins totally owns the part with his warm, funny, natural performance.

Eat Pray Love is not an entirely unconventional movie adaptation -- it's a little more superficial than the book, and a little less insightful (in a nutshell, a little light on the "pray"). But it's the exceptional movie that can do enlightenment and capture numinous, divine experience as well as movies can do love and food and the sacred love of food. This is a minor complaint, because the movie is, all things considered, warm, genial, and delicious, a nicely balanced blend of the serious and the sensuous, with beautiful scenery and unconventionally beautiful people.