What Maisie Knew (***1/2)

Maisie is a six-year-old girl played by six-year-old Onata Aprile, and she’s in every scene. I have no idea what the real Onata is like, but as Maisie she’s so appealing it’s a wonder her parents, who are divorcing as the movie begins, can’t get it together enough not to argue in front of her. Exactly what drove them apart is not well explained — the movie is entirely from Maisie’s point of view, and the squabbles of adults are literally above her head. A caretaker, Margo, seems much more level-headed than Maisie’s mother (Julianne Moore), a New York City-based rock singer who, while loving, uses her daughter to vent her own frustrations.

And so the father (Steve Coogan) gets custody. We don’t know his job—probably Maisie doesn’t either—but it involves traveling to Europe sometimes. Most of the plot (updated from a Henry James novel) consists of young Maisie being shuttled back and forth between parents who are alternately possessive and neglectful. Throughout, she remains open-hearted and calm, a counterbalance to the primary adults in her life. This is all established pretty early, and where the story, and Maisie, will wind up will be obvious by about the middle point, but the film still captivated me. There are a few other films meant for adult audiences but told from a young child’s view — Beasts of the Southern Wild and a French film, Ponette, come to mind — but not many.  Aprile’s performance carries the movie like that of Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts. Aprile doesn’t have to recite long voiceovers like Wallis, but her lack of affect is very like a typical child of that age, yet captivating. And that is enough.

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viewed 6/7/13 7:10 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/7/13

Hugo (***1/2)

Though best known for violent tales such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Martin Scorsese has made several movies in other genres, but this is the first one you can take the kids to, and should.

With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.

The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.

If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.

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viewed 11/22/11 at Franklin Institute [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/28/11

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viewed 7/8/09 at Moorestown

The Chaser (***3/4)

Watching this Korean action-thriller makes you realize how many ways there are to do this kind of film other than the ways Hollywood has gotten people used to. The sort-of hero is a surly pimp who does most of the chasing on foot. The killer is an ordinary-looking guy with no special powers or elaborate apparatuses. His victim is a demure-looking prostitute with a young daughter. And the police range from competent to crooked to inept, but most often the last.

There is infrequent but realistic brutality, yet also some humor that does nothing to diminish the parts that are serious and even tender. (A very good music score sets a melancholy mood at times.) I kept waiting for the predictable tropes of the genre to show up, but they don’t. Even though the whodunit is established in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, there’s more real suspense than in half a dozen typical thrillers. The sure-to-be-inferior American remake awaits.

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viewed at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/30/09

Phoebe in Wonderland (***1/4)

The trick of making a movie about a troubled little girl is not coming off like a sappy TV movie. Phoebe, a bright ten-year-old, is troubled by the rituals that take up so much of her time, the persistent thoughts and imagined conversations that take up so much of her mind, and the classmates’ torments that take away her confidence. Her parents (Felicity Huffman and Bill Pullman), academic types with their own issues, fail to help.

Elle Fanning is captivating as Phoebe, and Patricia Clarkson is reliably sympathetic as an eccentric drama teacher whose staging of Alice in Wonderland provides a refuge for Phoebe and a motif for the film. (Phoebe fantasizes the adults in her life as figures from the Lewis Carroll classic, a slightly precious conceit.) But the reason the feature debut of writer-director Daniel Barnz compels is because it works her obsessions into a broader story. That is, Phoebe’s condition blends into her personality, and her specific family, including a younger sister who resents the attention she gets. True, Mom’s state of denial is tedious. Phoebe’s troubles are so obvious that I wanted to slap her parents upside the head and tell them to get Phoebe on some meds. But on the whole, Barnz has a made a touching movie that avoids disease-of-the-week clichés.

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viewed 3/11/09 at Ritz Five and reviewed 3/16/09

Toyland (**3/4) [2009 Oscar-nominated shorts program]

A mother’s protective lie to explain the neighbors’ disappearance has the boy dreaming of running away to “Toyland.” It’s Nazi Germany, and the neighbors are Jewish. The poignant twist ending (a kind of variation on The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) would have more impact if it didn’t depend on a mass of improbabilities, beginning with the idea that a couple getting taken away to a concentration camp might let the neighbor kid come with, or that he might get on the crammed train.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/11/09

Jellyfish (***)

This is one of those films with several storylines that intersect in small ways, united in this case by a wedding in Tel Aviv. Despite the Israeli setting, the movie is neither political nor, for the most part, particular to its setting. One character is a struggling waitress working for a caterer and living in an apartment with a leaking roof. Having lost a boyfriend, she finds a lost child by the sea. Another story concerns newlyweds who seem to be on different wavelengths, which could be the theme of all the stories. The third plotline is about a Philippine home health aide whose communication problems are quite literal. (She speaks English, but very little Hebrew.)

I enjoyed this while I was watching it, but it seemed wispy and insubstantial, kind of an indie version of a feel-good movie, with a sort of poetic ending.

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viewed 6/19/08 (Ritz Bourse); reviewed 6/23/08

Martian Child (**3/4)

Calculatedly heartwarming, or “heartwarming” at any rate, this drama finds widower John Cusack adopting a bright but troubled six-year-old who claims to be from the Red Planet. He’s got other issues too, like an aversion to sunlight, a whisper for a voice, and an insistence on eating a certain breakfast cereal. Bobby Coleman plays the boy well enough to keep him from seeming him like a collection of mannerisms, though to be honest I didn’t warm to him as a character. The whispering, you know. Cusack’s character, a fantasy writer, likes him, though; fortunately, he’s an actor who seems incapable of overemoting. He never seems to be speaking down to the boy, or to us. There’s some minor conflict about whether the state will take the boy, as if a parade of superior adoptive families are lining up to adopt a messed-up six-year-old. And there’s the whole thing about being from Mars. But pretty much, the movie is everything I expected to be. If all you’re expecting is a nice story about a guy and a kid helping each other feel less alone, this is it. Not too sappy (but a little), not too surprising.

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Gone Baby Gone (***1/2)

A lot of movies about children in peril start out with what I call the “good mother” scene. That’s the one where we see the mom (occasionally dad) see the kid off to school or some such and is there mostly to show what a great parent the main character is, and likely to justify mayhem later visited upon the villain. The kid will usually give the parent a deep hug or say “I love you.” But the mother in this story is not a great one, or even a good one, and the first thing we see is the little girl already gone, her aunt and uncle pleading with the TV cameras of Greater Boston for her return.

If the Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) pedigree didn’t already suggest it, you’ll have already figured out that this will be darker and less sensationalistic than a typical crime thriller. Casey Affleck, who is younger brother to the first-time director Ben, plays a private detective who teams with his girlfriend (Michell Monaghan) on small-time missing-persons cases. There’s something appealing about these two, who seem more like college kids than real detectives, but more like real detectives than TV ones. They are neighborhood folks, hired by the aunt and uncle to augment the police efforts. A gray-bearded Ed Harris plays the diffidently cooperative police detective on the case, while Morgan Freeman has a small but key role as his boss.

Ben Affleck,who co-adapted Lehane’s novel, was once a neighborhood guy too, and he has a real eye for the sort of seedy bars and nondescript eateries that make up working-class Boston, although a climactic scene takes place atop a tor outside of town. (The accents are authentic, too, and I missed a bit of the dialogue.) That’s not what makes the movie great, though, nor is it the machinations of the investigations, the quick pacing, the nuanced portrayal of the junkie mother, or the surprising turns of the plot. (If I was going to criticize anything here, it’d be that the kidnapper does not seem to have thought about the practicalities of his plan as much as I’d have thought.) It’s the ethical dilemma that anyone who sees the movie will be talking about.
For all the people who cast Ben Affleck as an acting lightweight, unfairly I think, it’ll be hard to pin that label on him as a director.

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reviewed 10/18/07 and 10/19/07

The Game Plan (***)

A narcissistic football star learns to love someone else when a bright-eyed eight-year-old shows up at his door and says she’s his daughter. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson follows the path of other action heroes by trying to broaden his audience with a family comedy. He’s Joe “The King” Kingman, who fancies himself the Elvis of football and keeps a self-portrait on the wall. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, or Vin Deisel in (ugh) The Pacifier, the King is a reluctant caretaker. Obviously, that will change, but meanwhile, at least, the fart jokes are kept to a minimum and the characters are recognizably human. Joe actually knows hows how to cook and appears to have seen children before, although he’d just as soon not. Meanwhile, the daughter (Disney Channel star Madison Pettis) is as precocious as every other movie child, but quite often seems like a real one. (Johnson is also a better actor than his mesomorphic brethren.)

The ending gets treacly, for sure, but the kids won’t mind. This may not be a movie adults will seek out on their own, but it’s at least one they can take the kids to without feeling embarrassed, bored, or ripped off.

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reviewed 9/30/07