The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

IMDb link

viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (**3/4)

I’ve not read either of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels—only excepts from each—but he obviously doesn’t go in for subtlety. The first, Everything Is Illuminated, is written in an ersatz syntax parodying that of an an Eastern European immigrant. The second, adapted here by screenwriter Eric Roth (Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and director Steven Daldry (The Hours), is told in the voice of an extremely bright 12-year-old.* They’re mysteries wrapped in tragedies, and not just any tragedies, but the Holocaust in the first case and 9/11 here. (Oskar is played by Thomas Horn, a newcomer who definitely knows how to convey smarts, having been a Jeopardy Kids Week champion.)

Young Oskar’s father has died on what he refers to as the “worst day”; he happened to be in one of the Twin Towers. That fact figures in the story, significantly but peripherally, as when Oskar insists, to his mother’s (Sandra Bullock) consternation, that without a body there can only be a “pretend funeral.” The deceased, played by Tom Hanks in flashbacks, is the sort of dad who insisted that New York City had a now-lost “sixth borough” and from time to time produces “evidence.” The flashbacks are meant not to convey that he was a kook, but that he invested his son with a sense of wonder. One wonders if he also invested him with the sense of superiority the character conveys.

The mystery has to do with a key left behind. Armed only with a name — Black — and New York City phone books, Oskar (who’s a little Asperger-y) begins a systematic search for the lock that fits the key. (As with many New Yorkers, he seems not to consider the possibility that some people live in places outside the five boroughs.) I suppose there are brainy kids who might be like this, but must Oskar be so irritating? (Probably this is not Horn’s fault.) He irritates his mother; he irritates the staff in his building; he irritates the mute old man (Max von Sydow) who boards with his grandmother in an adjacent building. He’s indeed extremely loud. Now, I don’t mind flawed heroes. The heroine of the recent The Hedgehog, for example, who is the same age as Oskar and possibly even brainier, is flawed, but she’s not as irritating. Also, that movie less transparently— pun intended—tugs at the heartstrings.

Some people will surely find this extremely, incredibly manipulative, and I don’t entirely disagree. But I’m going to say just barely that I liked it, because I liked the mystery of it and how it’s resolved, because von Sydow is as winsome as the boy is irksome and because Bullock seems like a real mother and not Sandra Bullock being Sandra Bullock. I don’t think the movie comes close to being worthy of its Best Picture Oscar nomination, but it’s diverting if the above caveats don’t distract you.

*However, he is quite incorrect in claiming that there are more people alive today than have ever lived before. Not even close, as it turns out.

IMDB link

viewed 1/12/12:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/20/12 and 1/30/12

Reign Over Me (***1/2)

? A mild-mannered dentist (Don Cheadle) tries to reconnect with his old college roommate (Adam Sandler), who’s become unhinged since the plane-crash death of his wife and children and seems not to remember him. Written and directed by Mike Binder (The Upside of Anger), who also has a supporting role as an accountant.
+ The brilliant thing about Binder’s script is the way it uses the Sandler character as a way into exploring the dentist’s self-image and his marriage. (It’s a bit like the way Upside of Anger used the flamboyant Kevin Costner character as a window into the bitterness felt by Joan Allen, an abandoned wife.) Compare I Think I Love My Wife, which uses reams of narration to explain the feelings that looks and gestures impart here. Moments like the husband’s unspoken distaste at spending an evening doing a jigsaw puzzle let us in on the small accommodations couples make to each other. But you also see that the wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) is self-aware enough to know that he’s doing it for her, and that she somewhat controlling. And finally, you see that although this is an issue, the marriage is still a good one. Cheadle is at his best here, underplaying opposite Sandler’s showier role. This movie would seem to have no point unless his character can "break through" and help his friend start to heal, to use the jargon of psychotherapy. But I thought that Binder frames the story in a way that makes the tearjerker parts seem honest. Both characters move far enough to make the story interesting, but not so much that it seems manipulative or soppy.
- There’s something slightly unreal about Sandler’s character (though I liked Sandler himself), perhaps that he seems to have dropped about 30 IQ points along with his dental practice, perhaps the overt symbolism of his using headphones to literally shut out the world with classic rock, perhaps that latter-day Phil Spector haircut. Another troubled character, played by Saffron Burrows, sticks around too long, until she feels like just a plot device.
= ***1/2 This reminded me of Good Will Hunting, also about an angry character whose anger holds him back from what other people think he ought to be doing. If you liked that, you’ll probably like this.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/29/07

World Trade Center (**3/4)

? Oliver Stone recounts a day, September 11, 2001, in the life of two NYC Port Authority police officers who become trapped underneath the rubble of the fallen Twin Towers. Nicholas Cage and Michael Peña portray John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno. The view shifts between the trapped men and their families, with Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal playing the anxious wives. For Stone, known for controversial works such as JFK, it’s a surprisingly apolitical film. (It’s the first produced feature for screenwriter Andrea Berloff.)

+ Each of the real-life couples participated in making the movie, and it comes off as realistic and non-exploitative. The movie hints at fissures in the marriage of McLoughlin, and implies that his ordeal was a transformative experience for him, but never threatens to become a melodrama. Despite the potential for cheesiness, it rarely comes off that way. (I thought the vision of Jesus was one exception, even if that’s what Jimeno actually saw.) Cage gives a suitably restrained performance.

- The parts with the families at home, including the flashbacks, were less compelling than those with the trapped men. The apolitical tone is a plus and a minus. Although the story being told didn’t particularly lend itself to a political film, the movie could use some kind of edge.

= **3/4 For me, United 93 definitively recalled the feeling I had on 9/11. At the same time, it was a portrait of frenzied activity. This is a different kind of movie, more personalized to its primary characters. For McLoughlin and Jimeno, 9/11 was an hour of confusion, then a slow, literally painful wait. After the first building falls on them, you could forget that this is a 9/11 film.

IMDb link

United 93 (****)

Simulating a real-time documentary, writer-director Paul Greengrass portrays the morning of 9/11. The accumulation of detail and a melodrama-free focus on events, not any one individual, gives the story its power.

I was curious about how I’d react to this movie. Having seen director Paul Greengrass’s earlier docudrama Bloody Sunday, I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t veer into sappiness or cheap jingoism. But seeing the 9/11 events on TV now seems almost like watching atomic bomb footage, and I wondered if seeing this would bring back some of the emotions of when it occurred. The best thing I can say about United 93, which shortly followed a TV movie called Flight 93, is that it did. Greengrass’s approach is simply to show the events in real time. John Powell’s subtle score certainly adds to the mood, but in many ways the movie is something like what a real documentary might have been like, had people been there to film it. There are no stars, either in the sense of well-known actors or in the sense that any particular person’s role was emphasized, although Ben Sliney makes an impression as the FAA national commander who was on duty the morning of 9/11. (Like many of the ground crew, Sliney plays himself.)

Watching Bloody Sunday I thought I’d have liked a stronger character to identify with, but I didn’t miss that here, perhaps because the real-time approach was so powerful, perhaps because the event was more familiar. I’d also wondered if the movie might be dull due to this familiarity, but in fact the dramatization showed the events in a new light, as well as some things I hadn’t known or remembered. For example, a simple flight delay was probably a large reason why 93 didn’t hit the hijackers’ target. As the hijackers headed toward their target, the passengers were aware of the World Trade Center being hit, and so would have realized that, unlike other hijackers, the ones here were not intending to land. For their part, the ground personnel were slow to realize what was happening, both because the event was unique and because the air-traffic control system conveys incomplete information unless the pilots cooperate. At a certain point, the film switches focus from the ground to the air, an implicit acknowledgment that, by then, the people on the ground had become irrelevant. Obviously, the action aboard the plane is a reconstruction based on the black box recording (presumably) and the calls made aboard the flight. There are no flashbacks, so we know little about the passengers, but this is an asset because the range of their actions and reactions seems universal.

I’m sure some people who see this movie will find their political views reinforced, but I don’t think this was intended as a political film. Could the military response been swifter? Could the hijackings have been prevented? These aren’t questions that this film tries to answer. From the standpoint of the people portrayed, 9/11 was an ordinary day that became something else. Depicting this reality through an accumulation of small details is what gives the movie its power.

IMDb link

posted 8/20/13