Atonement (2007)

Atonement is a handsome movie, filled with striking visuals and attractive people. Director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice), working from screenwriter Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel, has created a movie that's less emotionally engaging than it is intellectually and aesthetically interesting, which would be fine if Atonement were not meant to be, among other things, a romantic tearjerker.

The story follows star-crossed lovers Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). She's a daughter of privilege, enjoying idle days on an idyllic estate during between-the-wars England. He's the gardener, and the son of a housekeeper (Brenda Blethyn). Robbie and Cecilia are not so much star-crossed, really, as they are double-crossed by Cecilia's 13 year old sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan), an aspiring writer who, suffering a combination of puppy love, jealousy, sexual naivete, and a vindictive fictiveness, betrays Robbie, telling a lie that sends him to jail and sets off a family tragedy with ongoing repercussions.

Told in three parts, the story follows Briony's betrayal and its aftermath, for her and for Robbie and Cecilia. The first part of the story is the most engaging, owing in large part to an especially intense and self-assured performance by Ronan. Atonement succeeds in creating a tense drama that percolates the familiar British brew of class-consciousness, simmering sexuality, interpersonal misunderstanding, and villainy. This first part of the story is passionate and devastating in a way that the rest of the movie never quite recaptures. The story then follows a young adult Briony (Romola Garai), who becomes a wartime nurse, and Cecelia and Robbie, who are separated again when he goes off to fight the war. Although this middle section of the movie features several striking and memorable scenes (including an impressive five minute long tracking shot of the surreal scene at Dunkirk, during the historic evacuation there), it never quite clicks with the same energy or force as the movie's prologue. Partly it's that Knightley and McAvoy, although their characters pine for each other across the miles, never quite snap together as an onscreen couple, so their separation is less acutely felt than it is merely seen and understood to be tragic and poignant. At the same time, they are frequently in the middle of other tragic and poignant wartime incidents, and Atonement tries valiantly to create a sense of sweeping scale, of its characters being caught up in events far bigger than themselves, events which amplify the effects of Briony's fabrications, giving them a truly tragic dimension. All the heat and fire Atonement might generate are continually damped down though, in one way or another.

That emotional distance is interesting when the story's final and surprising revelation unfolds -- Briony is by then an old woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave with the same cropped hair and shapeless frock worn by the younger Briony) and a successful novelist. Atonement is, of course, the story of her attempt to redeem herself, and to atone for the sin she committed in her youth. And so, the meta aspect of Atonement, the intellectually interesting part of it, is the way Briony, a storyteller, goes about trying to make things right after her original storytelling sin, and how she does it not so much for the sake of Robbie and Cecilia, but for her own sake. What ought to be a shocking revelation, however, is not quite the gutwrenching surprise it might be, which is to say it is surprising without being gutwrenching, another instance in which the movie gets everything right except the feeling.

It's not for lack of trying. The music frequently swells to signify the emotional intensity that is lacking elsewhere in Atonement. Dario Marianelli's musical score is punctuated with the insistent percussive sound of a click-clacking typewriter. The typewriter-as-percussive-instrument is a clever conceit that is interesting at first but quickly becomes overbearing and overly literal-minded. Wright manages to capture a look and sense of place, even a sense of romantic possibility, in a way that often suggests other movies, particularly romances from the World War II era, which Atonement mimics right down to the clipped, rapid speech of its characters. The pitfall with that kind of homage is that it begins to look and feel like no more than homage, a genre exercise that leaves its characters, and its audience, feeling cold. Atonement is a period movie that evokes the movies of the period; it's a literary adaptation that remains faithful to its source; it is high-minded and literal-minded to a fault. In all that effort to be true to some other idea or ideal, Atonement never quite coalesces into something unique or outstanding or beautiful or moving in its own right.

17Dec2007

The Illusionist (2006)

In turn of the century Vienna, a magician enraptures audiences with his marvelous illusions. Orange trees grow on command. The laws of physics are temporarily suspended. Death visits a maiden, although she lives to tell the tale.

Eisenheim the Illusionist (Edward Norton) also angers a prince, one Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), who sees in the magician's work not an opportunity for amazement, but an annoying riddle to be solved. In attempting to show up the showman, the temperamental prince is instead made the butt of an elaborate, mythical joke. Even worse, Eisenheim steals the prince's girl, Sophie (Jessica Biel), although it might be said that she had been Eisenheim's girl all along. Sophie was Eisenheim's childhood sweetheart. They were torn apart by circumstances and socio-economic realities --he was the son of a poor carpenter, she was a duchess -- then brought back together by a chance encounter. (Although it's possible, within the elusive, illusion-packed structure of The Illusionist that there are no chance encounters.)

What follows from the prince's cuckolding is a cat and mouse game between Eisenheim and police inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), an amateur magician who admires Eisenheim but works for the prince. There is socio-political intrigue involving marital alliances and plots to overthrown the empire, there's a little romance, a little murder mystery. Eisenheim becomes rock star famous, and manages to foment revolutionary tendencies among Viennese spiritualists with his apparent ability to conjure the dead. For the "it's all about me" prince, Eisenheim's magic show becomes a personal and political threat.

Based on a short story by Steven Millhauser, The Illusionist, written and directed by Neil Burger, is an entrancingly elaborate cinematic sleight of hand. It's also a thoughtful exploration of the nature of illusion, and the power of magic and the mind, set in a time and place -- Freud's Vienna -- where the mind was on everybody's mind. Depending on what you believe, and your tendency to wish for happy endings, the movie's finale may give away too much, or nothing at all -- the revelations come to Uhl, who may or may not be clever enough to have figured out what really happened.

What really happened remains the central mystery in this teasing, playful movie. So much of the story depends on the difference between seeing and believing, between what's objectively real and what's subjectively real -- both for the audiences in the film, and for audiences of the film. Are Eisenheim's parlor tricks real? Does he have the power to manipulate space and time, or just to manipulate the minds of his audience? (Either one would be a pretty neat trick.) These are, of course, key questions about the power of the cinema and its elaborate illusions as well, and that synthesis of onscreen/offscreen ideas is not lost on the filmmakers, who employ low-tech stagecraft and effects (with the technical guidance of the venerable magician and magic historian Ricky Jay) to recreate the film's historically accurate magic tricks. Eisenheim's elaborate ruses go beyond the visual, incorporating timely ideas and jokes, and timeless mythology and fairy tales. They go beyond the stage as well, and the puzzle that dogs the dogged Inspector Uhl is whether anything having to do with Eisenheim is not an illusion.

There is an interesting and illuminating interplay between Norton and Giamatti in The Illusionist. Both are really good, really interesting actors, with  very different styles that turn out to be quite complementary here. Giamatti's openness is revealing and engaging, making him an ideal sort of narrator in The Illusionist. He's rational, a thoughtful puzzle-solver, and a man who appreciates a good mystery. These might not be ideal qualities for investigating someone like Eisenheim. Norton, on the other hand, tends to be elusive and closed, with a face that reveals virtually nothing (or reveals only falsehoods), making the darkly secretive trickster Eisenheim an excellent counterpoint to Uhl. Together they embody the tensions, so much in play during the cultural, social and technological upheavals of turn of the century Europe, and so much at the heart of The Illusionist, between science and superstition, fact and fiction, the real and the ideal, the rational and the romantic.

4Sep2006

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

If you're contemplating a trip to the multiplex to see Snakes on a Plane, you pretty much know what you're signing up for. You will not be disappointed. Snakes on a Plane is chock-full of snakes. On a plane.

As the high-concept title suggests, Snakes on a Plane does not slither far from its B-movie roots, providing ample opportunities for serpents to have fangs-bared hissy fits, and put the bite, and the squeeze, on the particularly hapless passengers of one ill-fated redeye flight from Hawaii. As one would and should expect from a movie like this, passengers who are a pain in the asp are unlikely to get off the plane alive.

One of the great pleasures of Snakes on a Plane, aside from the chomping, hissing, slithering, wriggling snakes of course, is the presence of Samuel L. Jackson, who famously campaigned to keep the movie's awesome title after film execs tried to change it to the utterly uninspired and uninformative *Pacific Air 121*. Jackson won, and legions of fans got on board, turning the film into an internet phenom that spawned mini industries in unofficial t-shirts and bumperstickers. Web fans even managed to get a line of dialogue, too profane to be repeated in a family newspaper, inserted into the film, and convinced the film's producers to up the sex and gore quotient. With two snake attacks occurring in jetliner bathrooms, and the easy eloquence of Mr. Jackson, the Olivier of %$#@!, Snakes on a Plane handily earns its R rating.

Once you know there are snakes on a plane, it doesn't much matter how they got there, but scribes John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez put in the effort to create a modestly plausible explanation. A surfer dude named Sean (Nathan Phillips) witnesses a particularly brutal murder committed by ultra evil gang boss Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson). FBI agent Neville Flynn (Jackson), saves Sean's hash and sneaks him on a redeye flight from Hawaii, filled with unaccompanied children, a mother with a baby, honeymooners, a chihuahua, a baby and dog-hating businessman, and a germ-phobic rapper and his entourage, as well as not one but *two* flight attendants on the verge of retirement. Kim's henchmen fill the plane's cargo hold with deadly snakes and spray pheromones on flower leis to get the serpents riled up. Havoc ensues. Panic ensues. Agent Flynn is required to kick some asp and, inevitably, help fly the plane.

Director David R. Ellis (Cellular) gooses the film with snake-vision-cam, extreme close-ups, fast edits, salacious snake bites, and hundreds upon hundreds of tetchy snakes (some rubber, some CGI, and some the real McCoy). The action is fast-paced and to the point. The snakes are after the passengers. The passengers are scared, desperate and disgruntled. Some will act heroically, others will be jerks. The movie is alternately hilarious and nerve-jangling, and for one brief moment, it was even quite emotionally moving (don't worry -- it was a very brief moment).

Although Snakes on a Plane is a direct descendant of disaster flicks like Airport, and its comedic spawn Airplane!, I couldn't help but be reminded of United 93 while watching Snakes on a Plane, because, despite the obvious differences between a finely-crafted semi-tongue-in-cheek movie about snakes on a plane and a very serious, very arty movie that reenacts the actual hijacking of an actual plane, there are some striking similarities between the two movies. Snakes on a plane and suicidal hijackers on a plane are similarly scary, and while the latter are not likely to bite a guy on his, er, little friend, the human emotions involved, and the potential consequences, are pretty much the same. Now, that's about as timely and politically relevant as Snakes on a Plane can possibly get (aside from a reference to a particularly venomous Middle Eastern snake) because, although it would be quite a serious matter if *your* plane were full of an international assortment of irate snakes, it is somewhat harder to take seriously the idea of slithering serpents bringing down a jumbo jet. 

That notwithstanding, the passengers of Pacific Air 121 have to wrest control of their flight from a bunch of angry snakes. They have the unflappable, decidedly not ophidiophobic Agent Flynn, a no-nonsense representative of our government (although he is more "my man!" than The Man), which gives them a distinct advantage over anyone on a Samuel L. Jackson-free airplane when it comes to fighting terror in the skies. And if there's one other thing you've gotta know going into a movie called Snakes on a Plane, it's that in the Snakes vs. Sam Jackson smackdown, my man in the Kangol hat is gonna prevail.

21Aug2006

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

The dysfunctional family is the bread and butter of indie movies, be they comedies or dramas. Back in the day, they showed up pretty regularly in serious and seriously funny mainstream movies too. Those would be the days when the Hoovers' 70s vintage, school bus yellow Volkswagen bus wasn't a vintage bus at all, but a reasonably recent vehicle. The VW bus, the symbol of a more freewheeling time, has its own mystique, and has been a vehicle of deliverance, discovery, and disaster for passengers who, like the Hoover clan, take to the open road, with all its promise and peril. The road trip movie, too, is a mainstay of the indie movie. Pile a dysfunctional family in a VW bus for a road trip and you've got all the makings for a low budget collection of cinematic cliches. Point that family in the direction of a child beauty pageant and, well, things might get ugly in a very sitcommish way.

Turns out they do get pretty ugly for the Hoover clan, but Little Miss Sunshine, despite a premise that sounds entirely unoriginal, is a caustically funny, persistently melancholy, unexpectedly fresh and spirited little movie about the pursuit of dreams, and a family on the move and on the verge. 

The Hoovers are on the verge of financial ruin, thanks to dad Richard's get rich quick scheme to sell his get rich quick scheme to the masses. The masses, apparently, aren't interested. Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a would-be motivational speaker whose message, a nine step program for success in everything, verges on emotional abuse when he applies it to his kids. The family is on the verge of emotional collapse too. Mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) has just taken her brother Frank (Steve Carell), a suicidal Proust scholar, under her wing and into the Hoover home. Frank is fresh from a failed romance and career-destroying indiscretion, and winds up bunking with his teenage nephew Dwayne (Paul Dano), whose only words of comfort are a hastily scribbled note that reads "Please don't kill yourself tonight." Dwayne, an avid Nietzschean, hates his family so much that he has taken a vow of silence and hasn't spoken in nine months. His 7 year old sister Olive (Abigail Breslin), a cute little dumpling with big glasses and even bigger ambitions, rarely stops talking, and has dreams of beauty pageant glory. Helping her in her quest is Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a crusty old curmudgeon with a taste for porn and heroin.

Olive's unexpected ascendance into the Little Miss Sunshine pageant competition results in the entire family piling into their decrepit VW bus for a hasty trip from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. There are roadblocks along the way -- car trouble, financial trouble, marital and family troubles -- that both threaten and strengthen family unity, such as it is. 

For Richard, his daughter's quest for pageant glory is an occasion for life coaching, nutritional counseling, and the application of the nine steps. Nobody calls him Dick, but they really should. The rest of the family circles the wagons to protect Olive from a cruel world and her own quixotic dreams, although they don't do the same for dad or Dwayne, who, as it happens, really need the protection more. Porn and Proust collide in a convenience store; dreams of freedom -- from worry and want, misery and necessity -- collide with reality on the road to California, as they do on the road of life. Like other families before them, the Hoovers are heading for California in search of a dream, but they may be traveling in the wrong direction.

As road trips tend to do, this one brings out both the best and the worst in the Hoovers. The VW bus ought to be the poster car for unexpected engine trouble, as anyone who has attempted a cross-country trek in one knows only too well. But for that very reason it's also a symbol for the very American do-it-yourself spirit, a roll-up-your-sleeves and get-er-done optimism that well describes the Hoovers. It's an optimism that isn't necessarily grounded in reality, of course, and reality for the Hoovers, as it is for many contemporary Americans, is that disaster and ruin are one missed exit, one lost opportunity, one wrong turn away.

The screenplay by Michael Arndt is brisk, light-footed if not always lighthearted, and crammed with funny moments, absurd sight gags and dialogue that zips from the profane to the profound. Little Miss Sunshine was directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who make a smooth transition here from music videos to feature films. The movie isn't flashy or particularly stylish, but there's nothing wrong with filmmaking that doesn't call attention to itself, especially when it's enhanced by exquisite comic timing, a careful navigation through wildly swinging moods, and a deft avoidance of false sentimentality. Little Miss Sunshine is grounded by excellent performances across the board, a breezy absurdity, and an unexpected insightfulness that transcends the familiar and predictable. 

14Aug2006

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Like the dysfunctional brains of its characters, A Scanner Darkly is sometimes confused and adrift. The movie, adapted by Richard Linklater from Philip K. Dick's novel, follows a handful of Substance D users. Substance D, a.k.a. "Death" is a pharmaceutical nightmare, a feel-good drug that eventually produces hallucinations, brain damage and serious cognitive dysfunction. In the not too distant future, in a fascist America not too different from present-day America, Substance D users are everywhere, including the police department.

Officer Fred, an undercover narc assigned to infiltrate a Substance D distribution network, is also a user. Under the "scramble suit" that obscures his identity from everyone, including his fellow officers, he's Bob Arctor, who may or may not be involved in selling D. Fred is assigned to keep an eye on Bob -- he (Fred) watches surveillance video of himself (Bob) on a bank of monitors in a generic, flourescent-lit office. Confusing, to be sure, and Bob/Fred isn't really sure who he is or what he's doing a lot of the time.

A Scanner Darkly employs the same interpolated rotoscoping animation technique that Linklater used in Waking Life. It involves tracing over live action images, and results in a wiggly, liqueous, surreal but real look that suits this kind of trippy headgame story. Rotoscoping preserves the visual aspect, the movements and facial expressions, of an actor's performance, while also allowing for interesting visual alterations and enhancements of the characters and backgrounds. The characters in A Scanner Darkly often look like they're floating slightly off the ground, and there's a kind of 3D effect, where people both blend into and stand out from their surroundings. It's a perfect visual metaphor for characters coming unmoored from their lives and the world. 

Beneath the animation, with its chunky slabs of paint-by-numbers color and Play-Doh-y squishiness, are terrific performances, particularly by Robert Downey, Jr. (no stranger to drug abuse problems himself) as the shifty James Barris, and Woody Harrelson (himself a happy hemp activist) as Ernie Luckman. Barris and Luckman live in Bob's house and spend most of their days in frequently hilarious flights of drug-induced paranoia, able to leap from small inconveniences to vast conspiracies in a single bound. Freck (Rory Cochrane) is an occasional hanger-on, an ultra-paranoid D user who experiences continuous and horrifying hallucinations. Bob (Keanu Reeves) struggles to keep the two halves of his brain, and his identity, together. His brain is literally splitting in two, he's told, the two halves involved in a hemispheric battle for dominance. But maybe what he's been told isn't true. The scramble suit he wears creates a constantly shifting external identity, a vague, blurry jigsaw puzzle of faces and bodies that never form a cohesive whole, just as Bob and Fred share the same body but seem to remain vague and blurry to each other. Reeves' vocal mannerisms are reminiscent of *The Matrix*'s Agent Smith, although his confusing experiences are more like Neo's, which adds another intriguing twist to his character.

Dick purportedly wrote A Scanner Darkly after his own nightmarish experience with drug abuse and rehab in the 70s. What, precisely, the story is about tends to be obscure, and there's a drifting looseness to the film's narrative that lets it spin in multiple directions at once: Fascist states that monitor our every move, turning us all into narcs ready to turn on each other, and eventually turn on ourselves; A cautionary tale about the horrors of drug addiction and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex; The soul-dullification and mass delusion of the suburban lifestyle; Cognitive dissonance and the confusing nature of "reality." There's a psychedelic grab-bag of ideas contained in A Scanner Darkly, and the movie is at its best when it drifts with the different currents and undercurrents, and gets temporarily caught in swirling eddies before being spit back into the random, meandering flow. A Scanner Darkly is most interesting when it makes the least sense, and least interesting when it does make sense, at the end, when the tangled strands of the story are pulled together into a tight explanatory twist.

10Aug2006

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Curmudgeons are so rarely appreciated that it is with a bit of relief that we might regard the latest incarnation of the ever-so-curmudgeonly Mr. Darcy in the umpteenth adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. A sarcastic pill with a stick up his butt, Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) has plenty of pride, although it is perhaps just a cover for his cripplingly antisocial shyness. He more than meets his match in Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley), which is, of course, the whole point of Pride & Prejudice -- meeting one's match. Lizzy's as quick with a sharp quip as Darcy, and almost as disinclined to play the match game, although, as a young woman in 18th century England, unable to inherit a penny from her father's estate, she has little choice.

The Bennet family is in a constant tizzy. With five marriageable daughters and no sons, the family's home will pass into the hands of an unpleasant male cousin, Reverend Collins (Tom Hollander), a boring, diminutive parson, and a man of undeserved self-importance, who comes to call at the Bennet home, trolling for a wife. He sets his sights on Lizzy, to the delight of Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn), a woman so desperate to marry off her girls she seems to think of little else. The first line of Austen's book is: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." That notion, that marriage is a business, a pecuniary matter of mergers and acquisitions, is ever on the mind of Mrs. Bennet. That she loves her daughters there can be little doubt, but it is her business to see them all form advantageous alliances, i.e., to marry money. Mr. Bennet (an amused and amusing Donald Sutherland) is a loving and patient husband and father, but he doesn't share his wife's mercenary enthusiasm for business. 

Neither does Lizzy, who finds herself unaccountably attracted to the surly Darcy, not knowing that he is similarly smitten with her. Neither cares about money (he doesn't have to, having plenty of it), or the business of marriage, and neither seems to care for the other, which is, of course, the story's greatest source of tension and delight. When two smart, gorgeous people, born to be together, refuse to fall in love, it's almost unbearable, like watching a bomb being defused -- there will either be an explosion or there won't, a kiss or none at all, but oh, the snipping of all those crossed wires!

The plot, of course, creates plenty of crossed wires, and gives Lizzy ample reason to dislike Darcy: he's filthy rich, there are abundant rumors of caddish behavior, and he interferes in the romance between Lizzy's sister Jane (Rosamund Pike) and eligible, wealthy and willing bachelor Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods). But if circumstance keeps dousing the flames of love, it keeps fanning them at the same time, putting Darcy and Lizzy in frequent, and frequently uncomfortable proximity.

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach work a remarkable amount of Austen's book into the movie, and keep the prejudicial misunderstandings coming quickly enough to hold would-be romance convincingly at bay. The dialogue, much of it taken straight from Austen, is crisp, snappy, and deliciously witty. Knightley and Macfadyen play Lizzy and Darcy like a Tracy-Hepburn pair -- the verbal sparring is smart, fast, and sassy, with a delectable undercurrent of erotic tension. They're equals, in fact and in each other's eyes, even if their social positions could hardly be more unequal. Knightley's performance is fierce, vivid and smart. Macfadyen must face comparison to what is widely viewed as the gold standard of modern Darcys -- Colin Firth's portrayal in the BBC miniseries. He's more than up to the challenge, with a splendid Darcy who is openly churlish, but secretly a dewy-eyed romantic. 

The movie makes the most of the nuanced social criticism and proto-feminism in Austen's work, turning Lizzy's stubborn quest for love and romance, pursued in spite of her sex's utter financial dependence on men, into an almost quixotically heroic undertaking. In her stalwart refusal to settle for a merely convenient union, she strikes a blow for love and self-respect. Lizzy's sisters are another matter. The demure Jane aside, they are a giggling, silly pack, constantly on the prowl for handsome men in uniform. Impish troublemaker Lydia is the sister most likely to bring scandal upon the family, and Jena Malone plays her as a giddy, callow teen, largely oblivious to the social forces at work in her world.

Pride & Prejudice is filled with the usual buzzing dances, elegant drawing rooms, and period costumes, but the settings are as lively and vivid as the sparkling cast. The Bennet home is as shabby as it is warm, and any girl who dares to venture outside (as Lizzy is wont to do) will generally come back with a fair amount of mud on the hem of her dress. The movie breathes life into the period, which is a great relief after so many stuffy, airless, high-minded literary adaptations. Pride & Prejudice is as action-packed as any romantic comedy, and every scene is filled to the brim with meaningful conversation, manners, pomp and circumstance. The director, and cinematographer Roman Osin keep the camera moving, swirling around the characters, creating the sense that country life in the social season is as lively as any city club scene. Everyone is on the prowl, whether they mean to be or not. Georgian England is depicted as a veritable meet market where hearts and minds are equally engaged, although whether the heart should follow the mind, or the mind should follow the heart is really the heart of the matter. Pride & Prejudice, a smart movie that makes the heart leap and skip, is a vote for the latter.

5Dec2005

The Country Bears (2002)

The Country Bear Jamboree has been a Disney theme park attraction for decades. Well, perhaps "attraction" is too strong a word for those corn pone robotic bears, but they're every bit as amusing as It's A Small World, and somewhat less fun than that spinning tea cup ride. But what Hollywood genius saw a cinematic void, a void that could only be filled by a bunch of singing, guitar-picking, thumbless animatronic bears in overalls?

Whoever he is, that genius is responsible for The Country Bears. The movie to theme park metamorphosis is commonplace, but this is the first time I can recall the process working in reverse, and try as I might, I just can't see the point. Killer roller coaster movies, sure, but the Country Bear Jamboree? That's a head-scratcher. The Country Bears posits a universe in which humans and animatronic bears coexist peacefully, and it's kind of freaky and hard to accept outside the confines of Disneyland. (Don't get me wrong, I coexist pretty peacefully with the bears in my backyard, but I don't dress them up in Sears Roebuck clothes and sit them down at the dinner table.) Anyway, the movie is not weird enough to be really interesting. It starts off promisingly as a goofy mockumentary riff on The Last Waltz and This is Spinal Tap, only with music by John Hiatt performed by stage-diving animatronic bears and filtered through a Disney sensibility. But that only lasts about five minutes, and then the movie gets goofy in a not so good way.

Beary Barrington (voiced by A.I. robo-boy Haley Joel Osment) is a bear cub, adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Barrington (Stephen Tobolowsky and Meagan Fay), his human parents. He's got a bratty human brother Dex (Eli Marienthal) who, in a fit of sibling rivalry, tells Beary he doesn't belong in the family. Beary, an obsessive fan of the defunct Country Bears, a once legendary country-rock outfit, runs away from home and heads straight for Country Bear Hall, which appears to be fairly close by, as pilgrimage sites go. With the exception of Dex, no one seems to take any notice of the fact that Beary is a bear in kid's clothing, or that he rides a bus, or that his head is three sizes too big and he looks like an escapee from a theme park attraction.

Beary finds that his beloved Country Bears have fallen on hard times, and Country Bear Hall is on the verge of bankruptcy. A mean old banker, Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken), is threatening to demolish the place. Beary persuades Country Bear leader Henry (or maybe it was one of the other bears -- I'll be honest, I couldn't really tell them apart) to reunite the band to play a benefit to save Country Bear Hall. Thus begins a bear odyssey, a musical road trip, a boy bear's journey of self-discovery -- in a bus driven by a man named Roadie (M.C. Gainey) and his faithful chicken. Roadie is the only human member of the Country Bears, and it isn't clear from the movie that bears can do anything other than perform menial tasks and play music, which may or may not be the same thing in their case. Meanwhile, the world's most incompetent police officers, Hamm (Daryl "Chill" Mitchell) and Cheets (Diedrich Bader), thinking Beary has been kidnapped, are in hot pursuit of comic relief, which, sadly, eludes them entirely.

In addition to the fake-furry ursines, The Country Bears features such notable Homo sapiens as Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley (appearing as themselves, and supplying the singing voices for duetting bears Trixie and Tennessee), Brian Setzer, Xzibit, Wyclef Jean, Elton John, Willie Nelson, Queen Latifah and Don Was. They all gamely play along with the joke, which essentially is that these completely unrealistic looking, huge-headed bears were once a highly influential group of popular musicians.

The Country Bears is pretty low octane amusement, although there are a few half-decent musical numbers (notably, Christopher Walken playing the 1812 Overture with his armpits). All in all, this is a movie that is not good. Shoehorned into the promising and could-have-been-funnier mockumentary is the standard Disney adoptee identity crisis, and a feel OK message about the meaning of family (a lesson all them good ol' bears has got to learn). The bears are kind of creepy in their robotic affectlessness, which renders the supposedly heartwarming tale rather less so. The Country Bears bravely swims upstream as it eschews modern, hip, realistic computer animation for a much cruder, ickier, hairier, low-tech kind (courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop), which is to say it stays bafflingly true to its theme park forebears.

29Jul2002

The Newton Boys (1998)

It's traditional in movies to save the biggest bang for the climax, and well it should be. Anti-climactic climaxes just aren't very satisfying, and spilling the beans too early doesn't leave an audience much to anticipate. Director Richard Linklater takes that tradition one step further in *The Newton Boys*, however. He saves the best part of the movie for the closing credits. There, in footage from a documentary film and a 1980 Johnny Carson show, two real-life Newton boys, octogenarians Joe and Willis, show their legendary right stuff, the outlaw spirit that made them the most successful bank robbers in US history.

It's just as well that Linklater, who penned the script with Claude Stanush and Clark Walker, saved the best for last, because those old fellas dull what little shine there is to their bland fictional counterparts in *The Newton Boys*.

What *The Newton Boys* has in spades is a good-looking cast, twinkling mightily for lack of anything better to do. Linklater, whose indie film credits include the charming *Before Sunrise* and the stultifyingly boring *SubUrbia*, specializes in subcultural immersion talkies, films with characters who hang around doing nothing much in particular other than gab all night long. With *The Newton Boys*, he's out of his element, venturing into the action-filled crime spree genre without contributing much in the way of action. There isn't even that much talk in *The Newton Boys*, an episodic tale that features too much whooping and boys-will-be-boys male bonding that always ends up with the fellas piling on top of each other.

The story goes like this: in the 1920s, the Newton brothers, Willis (Matthew McConaughey), Jess (Ethan Hawke), Joe (Skeet Ulrich) and Dock (Vincent D'Onofrio) team up with explosives expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam) to rob a string of 80 banks from Texas to Toronto. They're all charming and cocky, and they never get caught, stealing cash and hearts everywhere they go. Latter day Robin Hoods, they steal from the banks (and bank insurers) and give to themselves. "It's just one thief a-stealin' from another," says the real-life Willis. the Newtons' final, fateful heist is the biggest train robbery in US history, which they almost pull off.

Willis' love interest is Louise Brown (Julianna Margulies). Glasscock's wife Avia (Chloe Webb) shows up from time to time as well, mostly to bat her eyes suggestively at the marital thrills of having nitroglycerine around.

Aside from a few inspired visual moments, and the aforementioned pulchritudinous cast, there just isn't a whole lot to *The Newton Boys*. They rob banks. They get drunk and whoop and holler and pick up girls. They drive a lot and wear big hats because they're from Texas, dagnabbit. the boys do have a few misadventures, thanks to Willis' dangerous tendency to be simultaneously spontaneous and greedy. McConaughey really gleams, flashing pearly white teeth, his eyes bright with passion and mischief. Likewise the rest of the cast, twinkly and charismatic as all get out, but it's all for naught because they might as well be posing for a portrait for all they have to do. Actually, the movie does feature several old-timey shots of the boys posing for portraits, scenes serving as little more than filler and unimaginative movie shorthand for a time period apparently corresponding to the early days of photography. It's unnecessary and redundant since the titles constantly remind, sometimes to the day, exactly when each incident transpires.

The characters are one-note, constant and unchanging from beginning to end, which makes for very little conflict, except the occasional tiff over Willis' reckless ways. They're all wholesome and fresh-faced, without a hint of darkness or rancor -- that's certainly a switch from typical movie outlaws, but it leaves the Newton gang looking blander than white bread. Everybody acts like their lives are fun and adventure-filled, but there is no evidence to support that in the movie, other than a twangy fiddle and banjo music score cued to enhance every heist and getaway. When the boys finally run afoul of the law, at last injecting some potential drama and conflict into the plot, it's every bit dull as the rest of the movie.


The old Newton boys were pretty darn witty and interesting in the clips at the end of the movie, and when a couple of 80 year old geezers are more lively than your movie, it's time to make a different movie. *The Newton Boys* is a case where art imitating life would have improved the art.


30Mar1998

Primary Colors (1998)

After the media feeding frenzy over that certain White House intern, there's something oddly refreshing about *Primary Colors*, which, (wink wink) isn't *really* about our President. Based on the roman a clef by Joe Klein (aka Anonymous), which, in more innocent times (way back in 1996) was considered quite scandalous (before we learned *way* more than we ever wanted to know about the commander-in-chief's alleged poling of the populace) *Primary Colors* follows southern governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta) as he mounts a campaign for the presidential nomination amid rumors of sexual dalliances and draft dodging.

What's refreshing about director Mike Nichols' movie is the sense of unguardedness about the characters, something only achievable because *Primary Colors* is, for all its similarities to reality, a fiction. D.A. Pennebaker's brilliant documentary *The War Room* (1993) was more interesting, more insightful, a true behind the scenes, fly-on-the-wall perspective on political campaigning, but its real life stars could never be as guileless as their fictional counterparts -- fresh and full of ideals as they were, the folks running Clinton's first campaign were still pretty darn smart and wily. You never saw the future first lady throw keys at her husband's head, or swear like a sailor at the very sight of the man who couldn't help but wallow knee deep in the sins of the flesh (too many donuts, too many women).

Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson) embodies what *Primary Colors* is about, and it isn't scandal, or political spinning or unbridled ambition, but about compromise, and settling, about the ethical debate between moral absolutism and a utilitarian consequentialism. As unflattering as *Primary Colors* might be to the Clintons, it gives them (or their fictional counterparts, at least) some credit for trying. It's hard to imagine their Republican opponents engaging in ethical debates at all -- there's still a tiny touch of wide-eyed idealism about the movie and the characters, a recognition that moral choices are only hard for those who have morals to begin with.


Representing the lost cause of moral absolutism is fresh young Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), preppy grandson of a famous civil rights leader. He's shanghaied into the campaign, but he's a true believer, and, for a while at least, believes that Stanton is the real thing, a man of the people, for the people. Henry is mighty bland compared to the colorful characters in Stanton's inner circle: good ol' boy political strategist Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton) and Libby Holden (Kathy Bates), the "Dustbuster," a raging idealist who cleans up the dirt on her friend the candidate, but tries to keep her own hands clean while she does it.

Travolta has the Clinton thing down -- the voice, that throaty, choking-back-emotion tenor with a tremor, the slippery charm and charisma, the sincerity and cynicism, the gleam of purpose in those dewy eyes, the insatiable appetite for attention. It's a fine performance, irritating and ingratiating, promising and disappointing -- so like the real thing. Even Stanton's wife doesn't know when to believe him anymore, and, like everyone else, she's forced to cast her vote based on the man she hopes her husband can be, and throw up her hands when he falls far short of expectations.

Thompson's Susan is dynamic, ferocious, foul-mouthed, ambitious and frustrated at having hitched her wagon to such an inconstant star. Whether it's the American accent or the characterization, Susan speaks through clenched teeth, as if those teeth were the last barricade to be breached by the cynicism and political practicality that she's forced to spit out because she can't quite swallow it herself. Elaine May's witty script saves some of the best zingers for the embattled, cuckolded Susan -- when she lashes out, it's satisfying, and evident just who is the better, smarter half of this political, marital union.

The ethical crisis (following an assortment of bimbo crises) that sparks the soul-searching Henry to question his involvement in the campaign is almost an afterthought -- little more than a resolution to the character's narrative arc. The more interesting ethical debates are sprinkled throughout the movie as sneaky little occasions that turn out to be quite momentous from a personal, rather than political, perspective -- situations when ideals are compromised with seemingly little thought, as if the sheer momentum of the political campaign swept away all morals, negated all character and soul, dragging the candidate and his operatives so close to the goal that they hardly remember why they wanted to get there in the first place. But *Primary Colors* is never unremittingly cynical -- Stanton, despite his flaws, does remember: when he has a heart to heart with the counterman at a donut shop, when he gets swept away in a reverie of unforgotten purpose, when he regrets his own moral lapses but forges ahead, unapologetically, anyway.

In the end, *Primary Colors* is entertaining but insubstantial: it doesn't have much to say that the American people don't already know about politics, or our weirdly dysfunctional style of celebrity democracy, or moral compromise. The movie doesn't shatter any illusions that were still intact, nor does it lean especially hard on the pres, the press, or the people. That scandals buzz around Jack Stanton like flies says something either about the candidate or about the flies, but *Primary Colors* doesn't really want to commit to saying much about either. Like Robert Bennett said about that legal brief (you know the one), it's like cotton candy -- when you bite into it, there's nothing there.


23Mar1998

The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)

Some movies get made because a writer or director has a personal vision, a story that wants to be told. Some movies get made for money. Then there are the movies in which neither art nor commerce are apparent motivators. They're made just because they can be, because the effects technology exists. With relatively new digital effects technology now widely available, we're in a period in which a lot of these latter movies are being made, with results that are generally as uninspiring as the movie is uninspired. *The Man In The Iron Mask* is just such a movie.

Writer-director Randall Wallace adds enough soap to drown the oft-told Alexandre Dumas pere tale in suds. Wallace postulates that the man in the mask is the twin brother of King Louis XIV (Leonardo DiCaprio), an unfortunate lad named Phillippe (also DiCaprio, of course) who had the misfortune to be born second. Whisked away at birth, Phillippe is imprisoned while still a tender, dewy young teen, locked in the horrible mask and forced to live in wretched conditions in an island prison. Naturally, the experience only strengthens his native nobility, while Louis, spoiled young king that he is, spends his days chasing tail, and being imperious and uncaring.


The movie is far more interested in Musketeers than the titular man in the mask, however, since inner torment and all that don't require a lot of swashbuckling and special effects. *The Man In The Iron Mask* plays like a literal sequel to The Three Musketeers, a sort of where-are-they-now followup that allows the old boys one last moment of glory -- and provides numerous opportunities, none of which are wasted, to say "One for all and all for one." D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne), now the top Musketeer, watches his king with disdain, but undying loyalty. The three musketeers, meanwhile, have all retired from the king's service. Aramis (Jeremy Irons) is a devout Jesuit priest; Porthos (Gerard Depardieu, broadly buffoonish) spends his days wenching (there is no shortage of pouty wenches in 1662 Paris, apparently) and lamenting his lost virility; Athos (John Malkovich) plays Mr Mom to Raoul (Peter Sarsgaard, executing a hilarious, pitch-perfect vocal impersonation of Malkovich), the fine young son who is about to join the Musketeers. This France abounds with different accents -- English, French, American (although the USA didn't exist for another 120 years) -- but consistency and authenticity are secondary concerns in *The Man In The Iron Mask*, as are character and drama. Secret passageways, gruesome tombs, flatulent Musketeers and hokey speeches take center stage, along with a supremely corny take on knee-jerk nobility and patriotism.

After establishing that Louis is a vain womanizer and a very bad king, the plot slowly lurches forward. The filthy peasants of Paris riot because they are starving and the king distributes rotten food. Louis orders them shot. Then Louis sends Raoul to the front so he can make time with his comely fiancee Christine (Judith Godreche), with whom Louis appears to be genuinely in love. Will the king's treachery never end? It's all too much for the disillusioned Musketeers, who plot to switch Louis with Phillippe, busting the poor boy out of prison with surprisingly little effort.

Phillippe emerges from the mask looking like wolf boy, but after a shave, a bath, and a bit of lip balm, he's a beautifully androgynous, milky-skinned young thing who, aside from the tenderness in his eyes, is a dead ringer for the king. DiCaprio is much more convincing as the wounded bird Phillippe than as bad boy Louis -- the imperious bed hopper seems more an imposter than the timid, confused prisoner. The cumbersome dialogue doesn't help -- Louis' come ons include such absurdities as "I hope you realize there is more of me to love... than a crown." Phillippe doesn't fare much better, forced to utter such inanities as "I wear the mask, it does not wear me."

DiCaprio really sinks his teeth into the role of king once Phillippe arrives in the palace, however, playing against himself with zest. Unfortunately, this, and all the other interesting parts of the movie are saved for the last ten minutes. Louis loses his kingly cool, lapsing into screaming hissy fits, his voice rising an octave as he shrieks at the pretender who, maddeningly, oozes nobility, royalty and loyalty with moist, puppy dog eyes which, although she won't admit it, makes the Queen Mother (Anne Parillaud) like Phillippe better. A few dozen more "One for alls," a bit of swordplay, a wowser of a soapy twist and a lot of straining for emotional effect, and everything is right in France again.

This is the umpteenth screen version of *The Man In The Iron Mask*, and the only justification for this inane adaptation is to take advantage of special effects that put the twin DiCaprios together onscreen. It's a perfectly executed effect, but not enough to justify the rest of this dreary, ridiculous movie.

16Mar1998