Charlie Bartlett (2008)

Add *Charlie Bartlett* to the overcrowded roster of teen misfit dramedies. This one does not especially distinguish itself, although it goes for a quirky, offbeat kind of tone like the far better *Rushmore*, cribs some notes from eighties teen movie king John Hughes, and, with its massively wealthy, ennui-plagued teen hero, and prominent use of a song by Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens), manages to evoke *Harold and Maude*. All of that effort to be like other, popular movies, to be *liked* -- it's just so high school.

Which does, I suppose, make the movie and its exertions to be likable a lot like the title character. Being popular is Charlie Bartlett's primary goal. As the movie begins, Charlie (Anton Yelchin) has been expelled from another in what is apparently a long list of prep schools, this time for manufacturing and selling fake IDs. He's got entrepreneurial zeal, to be sure, and an overdeveloped sense of rebellion to match it. His mother Marilyn (Hope Davis), overmedicated to placid, emotional zombiehood, sends him to the school of last resort, the dreaded public high school. There, Charlie, who still sports a prep school blazer and briefcase, is predictably bullied and treated like an outcast. His family's on-call psychiatrist fixes him right up with a prescription for Ritalin, which Charlie soon realizes has a resale value that far exceeds any possible therapeutic worth. He teams up with school bully Murph (Tyler Hilton) to sell the drug, as well as assorted other psychoactive substances to which he has ready access thanks to his familiarity with psychiatrists who are quick to prescribe a pill for every ill. He sets up a school counseling center in the boy's room too, offering soothing, nonjudgmental words and pharmaceutical remedies for teen angst in all its forms. All of which makes Charlie extremely popular with everyone except Mr. Gardner (Robert Downey, Jr.), the stressed, ineffectual, can't-get-no-respect, alcoholic school principal, who also happens to be the father of Charlie's girlfriend Susan (Kat Dennings).

Downey is at first blush an inspired choice to play the conflicted authority figure in a movie about teen angst and rebellion. He was practically Mister Teen Angst and Rebellion back in the day, the guy every high school principal dreaded, but he's kind of wasted  in *Charlie Bartlett* as the Uncool Yet Secretly Cool Adult Guy. Or something like that. At any rate, his Mr. Gardner is in the thick of things when Charlie's pill-pushing and psychobabble result in a crisis, and then another crisis, and then yet another one. Even medicated teens get the blues.

Written by Gustin Nash and directed by Jon Poll, *Charlie Bartlett* is ultimately fairly bland, predictable, and more self-amused than amusing. The self-medicating adults say things like "there are more important things in life than being popular," to skeptical teens who in no way believe them; kids from broken families get naked, get high, forge unlikely friendships, and work out their problems, sort of. *Charlie Bartlett* had the effect of making me fondly remember better movies of the genre, while being itself almost completely forgettable.

25Feb2008

Definitely Maybe (2008)

A soon-to-be divorced dad has to have The Talk with his 11 year old daughter in the wake of a confusing school sex-ed lesson. Maya (Abigail Breslin) has questions, lots and lots of questions. Her dad Will (Ryan Reynolds) has few easy answers, but the lesson on the fundamentals turns into a lesson on the fundamental messiness not of sex, but of love, as Will weaves a bedtime story about the Three Loves of His Life, one of whom (he won't say which, and the names will be changed) is Maya's mom. 

Interwoven with Will's tale is that of another William, ex-president Clinton, which is an early clue that *Definitely, Maybe* will be a story of great expectations and great disappointment, high ideals and disillusionment, on both the political and personal fronts. There is plenty of uncynical comic sweetness and romance in *Definitely, Maybe*, but writer-director Adam Brooks doses it with enough irresolvably complicated, unsentimental realism to make it all decidedly yet appealingly bittersweet. Happily ever after, Maya already knows, doesn't always happen.

It all starts when Will, full of hope and political zeal, leaves Wisconsin, and his blond college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), to go to New York to work for the Clinton campaign, back in 1992. Some time between Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, Will meets Summer (Rachel Weisz), a sultry, slightly dangerous would-be writer in love with a much older, crankier journalist (Kevin Kline), and April (Isla Fisher), the apolitical, free-spirited, slightly kooky redhead who collects copies of *Jane Eyre*. Although each woman starts out as an archetype, they are ultimately distinguishable by more than their hair color, and their characters fill out quite nicely, even while Will remains something of a cipher. Breslin (*Little Miss Sunshine*) is the fourth woman in Will's life, and provides a lively counterpoint to Will, keeping his character honest, and preventing him from lapsing into self-pity and blaming. *Definitely, Maybe* is not the kind of movie in which the Wise Child is allowed to be utterly cynical about adult relationships, and so Will's task is to impart his tale of failed romance without shattering his daughter's faith in the possibility of love and romantic bliss. 

Maya's task is to figure out which Miss Right turns out to be Mrs. Mom, but they're all good candidates, and *Definitely, Maybe* is refreshingly unchauvinistic in the way it doesn't turn any of them into harpies or homicidal maniacs. None of them are perfect, but none turns out to be fatally flawed in either, although it is clear that Will doesn't know any of them as well as he should, and that, coupled with uncannily bad timing on his part, makes his path to True Love (at least for a while), fairly strewn with obstacles and underutilized engagement rings.

*Definitely, Maybe* is, for all its sweetness and honesty, a little bland, a little too warm when it could stand a touch more hot and cold. But it's still smart and engaging and truthful enough about the confusing, chancy precariousness of love, with all its hazards and rewards, to count as a refreshing change of pace from what passes for romance and comedy, and romantic comedy, these days.

18Feb2008

Fool's Gold (2008)

It is a well-established fact that the sight of someone being whacked upside the head with a hard object is hilarious. There is probably a scientific explanation for it. Near instant access to repeated viewings of a good head-bonk is the real reason DVDs are so much better than VHS. 

It is my sad duty to report to the scientists of humorous head-whacking that they now have to explain how a movie in which Matthew McConaughey is repeatedly whacked on the noggin is so darned unfunny. *Fool's Gold* not only features numerous head-whacks, with such implements as a cane, a cricket bat, and a shovel, but it also features a crotch-whacking-with-shovel as well. If the head-whacking is the gold standard of whackings, the kibbles-n-bits whacking is the silver standard, and probably only because it is primarily utilized against one half of humanity, and primarily enjoyed by the other half. You can see funny examples of both types of physical abuse in a mere 30 seconds in Justin Timberlake's Pepsi commercial, and I heartily endorse that efficiently hilarious option over *Fool's Gold*.

This screwball comedy (at least I think that's what it's supposed to be) reunites Kate Hudson and McConaughey (*How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days*) who, despite their individual charms and undeniable good looks, are no latter day Kate Hepburn and Cary Grant. (For a superior exemplar of the screwball comedy, see Hepburn and Grant in *Bringing Up Baby*.) The plot of *Fool's Gold* concerns a 300 year old sunken treasure that McConaughey's Finn seeks somewhere in the Caribbean. An exploding boat, an attempt to murder Finn, and eventual rescue by a boatload of rowdy teens all conspire to make him late for his divorce. Not showing up for the divorce is par for the course, according to his ex-wife Tess (Hudson), who announces that she is returning to grad school, apparently to study history. Finn somehow convinces her that it is better to *live* history by finding sunken treasure. This after finding his way onto the yacht where Tess works as a steward for the marvelously wealthy but familially benighted Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland, well-tanned and no doubt enjoying a leisurely tropical vacation). Nigel and his jet-setting bimbo daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena) need some father-daughter time, and decide it would be fun to look for treasure too.

Thrown into this mix are a competing bunch of treasure hunters led by crusty Moe (Ray Winstone), a felonious rapper named Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart) who, after bankrolling a previous Finn expedition, now wants in on the action, and Bigg's assorted inept henchmen. Andy Tennant, who directed and cowrote this haphazard movie, throws in a couple of gay chefs too, mostly, I suspect, to make possible a scene late in the movie in which they struggle with a shotgun and scream "I can't cock it!" It's possible that was supposed to be funny too. 

There are boat chases, jet ski chases, derring-do involving airplanes, underwater fight scenes, harpoonings, stabbings, shootings, and the aforementioned cranial whackings and bits bonkings. Tess and Finn bicker, unconvincingly and pretty much humorlessly -- mostly about how immature and unreliable he is, while he, in his defense, counters that he's carefree! exciting! adventurous! All of which is true, and he also sports a nice, even tan (like almost everyone else in the movie) and is generally soaking wet *and* getting bonked in the head, all of which should add up to a rollicking good time. But still, there's something missing in *Fool's Gold*, a gaping hole that all the sunny tans, bikinis, bimbo and himbo jokes, and suggestions of great sex don't fill. The movie is frantic without being fun or purposeful, like it all started with a list of stunts, and a story was cobbled together around them in no particular order. *Fool's Gold* tells us -- at one point Moe literally says, "Now there's a guy who really loves his wife!" -- that Tess and Finn are still in love without providing any convincing evidence aside from airplane dangling on his part and a certain otherwise inexplicable foolhardiness on hers. It is otherwise inexplicable foolhardiness only because Tess is supposed to be exceptionally smart, which is also something that has to be literally pointed out by other characters, since tangible evidence is lacking.

The cast looks jolly good cavorting in the sand and zipping around the Caribbean, and the sun-soaked tropical locales look mighty inviting here in the dark, cold days of winter. For all that, and its breathlessly frenetic pace, *Fool's Gold* is still boring and tedious. It is an action-romantic comedy that has lots of action, but it is neither romantic nor funny, and apparently no amount of head-whacking can fix that. Although, for the sake of science, I'm willing to let them try.

11Feb2008

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Sinister sounds and chords ringing with foreboding, images of bleak, parched hills, and a title -- There Will Be Blood -- rendered in grim Gothic blackletter, all suggest horror. And there is violence, deep in the earth, where a solitary, single-minded man with a pickax scratches at the rocky belly of the hills. He's looking for silver, and he finds it, though not before the  earth exacts a price. The man, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), will eventually make the ground bleed and ooze liquid gold from deep wounds, clawing his fortune from the soil with his bare hands. The earth gives him a son too, an angel-faced boy, and tenderness and warmth oozes out of the hard, callused man. All this before a word is spoken in There Will Be Blood, a positively brilliant film by Paul Thomas Anderson. 

Set in California at the turn of the century, There Will Be Blood is loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! Has there ever been a more perfect metaphor for moral corruption than sticky, black, dirty crude oil? How perfect is it that this stuff that oozes from the bowels of the earth, from the hot hell beneath our feet, has inspired so much evil? It seeps into every pore of There Will Be Blood -- it is the intoxicating blood of the earth that poisons man's blood, and causes blood to be spilled. Anderson's movie ends in 1927, and has much to say about capitalism and greed (then and now), corruption and exploitation, about fathers and sons, religious zealotry and pious hypocrisy, broken trust, and revenge, and about blood -- the blood of the earth, the blood between family, the blood of the lamb. Anderson has crafted a riveting, intelligent, multi-layered, modern day Citizen Kane in this tale of a tycoon who literally pulled himself up out of the dirt. There Will Be Blood, which Anderson also wrote, is filled with indelible images vibrating with portent and consequence, and carefully chosen words that split open like onions to reveal layers of meaning. The musical score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, with a little help from Brahms and Arvo Pärt, veers from stark, savage minimalism to orchestral grandness -- the score is a work of original art in its own right, enhancing the film's emotional depth and mood, and demanding attention without taking any away from the rest of the film.

Plainview is played with fascinating complexity in a magnificent, mesmerizing, eerie performance by Day-Lewis. Even at his most monstrous, Plainview is an enigmatic and charismatic figure, and though he speaks in a authoritarian and stentorian manner, there is remarkable subtlety in Day-Lewis' performance. You can hear in that voice veiled threats, disdain, triumph, hatred, pride, and love. There's not an ounce of sloth in the hands-on, earthy mogul, but the other sins are well accounted for, seen in the hard glint of the eyes, felt in the aggressive, in-your-face body language, and heard in the long dusty road of a voice lubricated by crude oil and whisky. You can hear in that voice, through bitter, cruel words, the unexpected sound of a black heart breaking. Plainview's son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) is the perfect foil, an observant, quiet, gentle boy who stands at his father's right shoulder like his conscience, and is the object of utterly incongruous tenderness. H.W. is his father's moral compass, requiring, as children do, justification and explanation. The father's face, his jaw jutting out and his lower lip lifted in an almost perpetual frown -- the visible marks of his misanthropy -- crinkles and smiles around the boy, until a tragic accident breaks the bond between them, and breaks the magnetic needle that insistently tugged at Plainview's soul. 

There Will Be Blood is a fable of American capitalism, captured at a pivotal moment of appetite and discovery. It's the kind of story that, in decades past, was the subject of heroic movies, movies in which the conquest of people and the planet were considered admirable, even if the conquerors were less than perfect specimens of humanity. In a thousand small ways, the moral of that story has changed. There Will Be Blood is premised on the idea that avarice and competitiveness are so ingrained in our national soul that it corrupts every relationship and every person, including the shifty, spooky, evangelical preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who vexes Plainview and haunts his schemes, and who is every bit as ambitious, covetous, and rapacious as the businessman. The story is set in the past, but the film is rooted in the present, informed by modern wars, land grabs, and treacheries inspired now (as then) by the lust for oil, informed by the insidious entanglements of piety, prophets, and profit, and piety for profit. Yet for all its epic and provocative themes, for all the expansiveness of a story that spans three decades, There Will Be Blood remains strikingly, captivatingly intimate, an exciting, visionary, perfect movie told in small, bold, devastating strokes. I haven't stopped thinking about There Will Be Blood since I saw it, and I can't think of a thing that's wrong with it.

4Feb2008

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2008)

When a friend visits Jean-Dominique Bauby in his hospital room, he relays the latest gossip from Paris: "Jean-Dominique is a vegetable." Bauby wonders what sort of vegetable he has become: "A carrot? A pickle?" His friend doesn't hear these floral ponderings, but from the view inside Bauby's head, it's clear that he's anything but a spud. Which is not to say he isn't in a pickle. Bauby was once the editor of French Elle magazine, but in his early forties, he suffered a massive stroke that left him with a rare condition known as "locked-in syndrome." It is aptly if cruelly named -- his mind, as active as ever, is like a caged bird, trapped within an immobile, completely paralyzed body. He is able to blink his eyes, which becomes his only means of communicating with the outside world.

Specifically, he has a left eyelid. To prevent infection, his right eye is sewn shut in a gruesome scene early in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the glorious and unflinching film based on Bauby's memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. The scene is especially blood-curdling because, like much of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it is seen from within, from the point of view of the owner of that unlucky eye. Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood lock the viewer of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into Bauby's small prison, looking out through the same small window, with only Bauby's overactive mind as companion. But what a funny, lively, imaginative companion he turns out to be. And he has lovely visitors: his patient, doting ex Celine (Emmanuelle Siegner), the mother of his three children and a woman who clearly still loves him; his speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze), and eventually, Claude (Anne Consigny), the assistant who takes the dictation of his left eye and helps him write his book. It is some time in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly before the film escapes the perspective of that liminal eye, and gives us a full view of Bauby and the world outside his mind.

That world is greatly diminished, but it was once quite full. Bauby was (and in his mind at least remains) an unapologetic sybarite, enjoying a life of glamour, good food, fast cars, and beautiful women. The butterfly is Bauby's metaphor for his airy, flitting, high-flying mind -- a mind that is astonishingly liberated by the loss of its earthly container, and all those earthly pleasures. It would be trite to describe The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as a film about the human spirit triumphing over adversity. More accurately, it is about the soul breaking free of its constraints -- constraints imposed from without and within. As Bauby comes to see, he is not the only person imprisoned by circumstance, or an unwilling body, or by self-forged shackles, nor is his current state entirely new -- it's different from his old life, but not less free.

The butterfly is an apt metaphor for Schnabel's film, with the filmmaker finding his own freedom in Bauby's imaginative flights of fancy. Even when he is at his most self-pitying, Bauby's words are comical, witty, ironic, and poignant, roaming freely across the full range of human emotion and human experience, free-associating through memory and desire, fantasy and invention. The richness of his inner life makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a film that is not, ultimately, sad or depressing, but rather wise, lyrical, moving, and joyful. In giving substance and reality to the wanderings of the mind's eye, Schnabel, working with the ingenious cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, creates a visual world rich in metaphor and spirit, looping freely through time and space, unconstrained by the fetters of plot and straightforward narrative. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, not surprisingly, dreamlike in its logic as it weaves a tangle of neuronal threads, knots, and loose ends into a vibrant, shimmering, luminous cloth of transcendent and subtle beauty.

28Jan2008

Cloverfield (2008)

The copy-and-paste feature of the personal computer is brilliantly useful and, unlike so many things about personal computers, an actual timesaver. It must have saved Drew Goddard, the screenwriter of Cloverfield, a whole hell of a lot of tedious typing, since the screenplay of said movie amounts to about 75 pages of people screaming "Oh my God!" over and over and over and over (movie critics can use copy-and-paste too). Goddard would have had to type those words thousands of times had he been using an actual typewriter, and he might have realized it wasn't worth the effort. Just imagine Orson Welles typing "Oh My God" 10,000 times in Citizen Kane. There would be no "Rosebud," and we would be all the poorer for it. We can perhaps count ourselves lucky that Welles didn't have a PC, and unlucky that so many screenwriters now do.

Cloverfield is a faux home movie about the destruction of New York by scary monster. You know how the perfect YouTube video is about three minutes long? Anything longer than that and the mind begins to wander from the cute frolicking kittens and the humiliating Japanese game shows, and even Jersey grrrl Chunky Pam starts to lose her lustre. Cloverfield takes that YouTube post-reality, post-verite, post-Blair Witch penchant for self-documentation/aggrandizement and turns it into a (barely) feature length monster movie in which the video camera-wielding twenty-somethings are so dull, featureless, and stupid that you'll be relieved to see that a monster is annihilating Manhattan with great efficiency, and will get to them forthwith.

Not that you'll see all that much of that monster. Uber-producer J.J. Abrams (Lost) likes to keep his scary beasts obscure. When it does finally show itself, the Thing That Ate New York is a kind of Geigeresque reptilian critter, a glossy, high-tech, depsychologized Godzilla without the big dino's rubber soul. But back up about an hour and it turns out that the thing that really kills in Cloverfield is boredom, and specifically, a lifeless going away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is departing for a job in Japan. The party is hosted by Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and Jason's significant other Lily (Jessica Lucas). They are all mildly attractive in a more or less indistinguishable way. The lackwit behind the video camera is Rob's pal Hud (T.J. Miller), who is at first a reluctant videographer, but later embraces the role with such enthusiasm that he manages to keep on shooting (at eye level, no less) even while frantically running from the monster, while traversing the rooftops of crumbling skyscrapers, while... you get the picture. If only he could have stopped screaming "Oh my God!" while shooting his end of the world video for posterity, and had the presence of mind to say something intelligent by way of narration. It must be said, however, that Hud's screaming is no less interesting than anything anyone else has to say in Cloverfield.

The monster is indiscriminate in killing the no-name cast, which is a small mercy of Cloverfield. The characters are both vapid and obtuse, which is, as always, a winning combination in motion picture entertainment. While the city crumbles around them in a massive cloud of dust tackily reminiscent of 9/11, Rob and his pals decide to buck the trend, and common sense, and head uptown to rescue Rob's ex-girlfriend, who is, according to her cell phone message, grievously wounded and trapped in her high-rise apartment. Why Rob's friends and a random hanger-on from the party decide to follow their brainless leader on his quest for something like redemption and/or true love is anybody's guess, but clearly these young adults don't have the sense to know when it's time to get the hell out of Dodge. Thanks to Hud's mad documentary skilz, the rest of us get to tag along too. "People will want to see what happened," Hud says. Well, actually, maybe not.

  Aside from the vaguely realized YouTube-gen, everybody's-a-celebrity-and/or-papparazzi idea -- the movie's only laugh comes when Lady Liberty's head rolls down the street and everybody whips out a cell phone camera to capture the moment -- Cloverfield is basically a little exercise in coupling high-tech special effects with faux low-tech camera technique. Director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Michael Bonvillain keep the camera moving and jiggling constantly, which is necessary to maintain the film's home movie conceit, but also rather tiresome. Cloverfield clocks in at a mere 84 minutes, which would ordinarily be quite economical, except that there's only about 20 minutes worth of plot here, and virtually no dialogue (discounting the repetitive screaming). By YouTube standards, it's about 81 minutes too long.

21Jan2008

The Bucket List (2008)

With Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in it, *The Bucket List* has a promising cast. Too bad the movie doesn't let these two do anything novel or particularly interesting. Nicholson plays Edward Cole, a rascally, oft-married, self-absorbed billionaire CEO who runs hospitals. Ha ha, he winds up in one of his own hospitals, only to find out he can't have a private room because it's company policy. He grudgingly shares a room with Morgan Freeman's Carter Chambers, a brilliant autodidact and self-sacrificing auto mechanic who gave up his dreams of higher education to provide for his family. Carter is yet another saintly character for Freeman, who has already played God twice. (He ought to branch out a little and play a devil for a change.) Edward is cruel to everyone and an almost insufferable egomaniac, but he's more interesting than Carter, whose most pronounced quirk is that he loves to watch *Jeopardy!* and always knows all the answers. Like Edward, Carter has terminal cancer. The two men bond over their disease, apparently, since they have nothing else in common except geographical proximity. They write a "bucket list," a list of things to do before they kick the bucket, and set out to do them.

Luckily, since Edward is filthy stinkin' rich, nothing is out of reach. Too bad these two geniuses, with the world at their feet, can't come up with a list that isn't full of cliches. Drive a race car; go skydiving; get a tattoo; climb the mighty Himalayas. This is a list for a dying twelve year old. At least half of *The Bucket List* is spent in the hospital, which is perhaps the best indication of just how anemic and uninspiring the list turns out to be. They see a fair number of the seven wonders of the world, but those wonders have rarely seemed less wonderful. *The Bucket List* winds up being a kind of road trip/travelogue, with screenwriter Justin Zackham throwing in a smidge of self-help book philosophizing to give this feel good/feel bad movie a teensy bit of meaning. 

As might be expected, the wise Carter has much to teach Edward about the meaning and value of life, etc. During their spanning-the-globe adventure, Carter is the tour guide, a font of historical and geographical knowledge, as well as an expert on the sage wisdom of the ancients as regards the afterlife. It's no surprise that the movie arranges it so that Carter's got a thing or two to learn as well, although his character, who up and leaves his loving family behind for a last hurrah during his final days, is not especially believable, and the lessons he learns would fit quite nicely on a "Thinking of You" Hallmark card.

Director Rob Reiner might want to take a lesson or two from his former, brilliant self (see *This is Spinal Tap* and *The Princess Bride*) and put "make another great movie" on his own bucket list. *The Bucket List* can go on his list of movies that should have been (but probably could not have been) better.

 14Jan2008

Juno (2007)

If you can get past the first half hour or so, when the dialogue is just too mannered, too studied, and too overwritten to be believed, and then get past the way that Juno MacGuff, a cute, quirky 16 year old who finds herself in the family way, speaks with the frankness of a four year old (often about the same bodily functions that so fascinate four year olds), then you might find *Juno* a funny and original comedy, despite its borderline After School Special plot. 

You might. What *Juno* has really got going for it are a handful of terrific performances by actors who manage to transcend the sitcom-my tendencies of the movie, to muscle through the cutesy-poo hipper-than-thou stuff to actually find the tender heart buried under all the punchlines. For starters, there's Ellen Page as Juno MacGuff, a mouthy teen, named for a Roman goddess, who relishes the role of outcast, but not as much as she thinks she does, and who finds out she's not as smart as she thinks she is either. Page, more than anyone in *Juno*, has to act around the sarcastic, too-clever words that come out of her mouth to create a believably human character, and she manages it, flipping quickly from childlike naivete to juvenile hubris to semi-maturity. It's a performance that really saves the movie from itself. Juno's dad and stepmom, respectively, are played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, and you could hardly find a pair of actors who are better at playing funny-serious -- they both bring the right combination of warmth, weariness, tenderness, sass, and wisdom. 

So, Juno has impulsive sex with her dorky-but-sweet pal Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and gets pregnant. After briefly entertaining the possibility of an abortion, Juno decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. Her parents are actively supportive, with reservations. Paulie is quietly supportive. Her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), a cheerleader, is cheerily supportive. The "desperately-seeking-spawn" adoptive couple she finds in the Penny Saver, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) are thrilled. Then Juno is thrilled to discover that Mark is not as square and uptight as his tidy suburban home suggests -- he's actually a cool musician who watches gory horror movies and swaps CDs with Juno. Eventually, despite all the support and enthusiasm, Juno's perfect plan runs into complications, and she finds out she's not as mature and capable as she thinks she is.

As coming-of-age-through-crisis stories go, *Juno* does not break much new ground, although first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody brings a new voice and a post-feminist perspective to potentially melodramatic old-school material. There's evidence of emerging maturity in the writing of *Juno* -- as the movie progresses, the dialogue gets more believable and less forced and mannered, so there's a kind of coming-of-age for the screenwriter as well as the heroine going on. Director Jason Reitman (*Thank You For Smoking*) leans too heavily on quirky alt-folk songs to set the tone at the start of the movie, and doesn't do enough to reign in the off-putting, overly jokey dialogue. As the tone and mood of the movie change, becoming warmer and more intimate -- on a meta level, the director comes of age in *Juno* too -- it also becomes more believably real, so that it can all end on a note of refreshing honesty and unexpected emotional depth.

07Jan2008

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