Big Eyes (***1/2)

Tim Burton is the distinctive director of heavily art-directed films like Edward Scissorhands, Alice in Wonderland, and Sweeney Todd, but sometimes (Mars Attacks!, Corpse Bride) his kinetic/frenetic style can overwhelm substance. However, here he’s collaborated again with the writing team (Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski) responsible for Ed Wood, one of his best films. Both of them are about real people whose careers began in the 1950s, though Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), unlike Wood, is one of Burton’s most conventional lead characters. Only her paintings, and her story, were unconventional.

A divorcée struggling to make a living in beatnik-era San Francisco, Margaret met Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), also an aspiring artist, and within a few years her paintings, most featuring children with oversized eyes, were widely seen and bringing in thousands of dollars. Only everyone thought that Walter painted them. His eventual unmasking is both funny and cathartic, making a satisfying ending that happens to also be a true story.


IMDb link

viewed 1/7/15 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 1/8/15

The Theory of Everything (***1/4)

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This movie is probably slightly better if you don’t know about Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne). For those who do, the story should seem familiar. Covering roughly 25 years, it can only sketch in broad outline Hawking’s major life events — the diagnosis (ALS), the dissertation (on black holes), the debilitation, and the devilishly difficult bestselling book (A Brief History of Time) that made him a household name. Perhaps less familiar will be the love story that director James Marsh focuses on. The movie is in fact based on Jane Hawking’s book.

It’s a story that truly begins after a typical romantic story ends. The scenes in which Stephen, a doctoral student at Cambridge with some unexplained physical lapses, courts Jane (Felicity Jones) are charming — Stephen’s offbeat posture, sly wit, and (later-useful) economy of expression are already apparent — but a prelude. It’s one thing to pledge fidelity to a sick man and another to become the sole caregiver for an invalid who almost literally cannot lift a finger to help around the house.

In all long-term arrangements, the romantic must make room for the domestic. This is that ordinary story, combined with the extraordinary intelligence of Hawking and the fact that time, Hawking’s special area of interest, is not his friend. His speech increasingly slurring, his movements increasingly limited, he yet defies the survival odds. It’s thus an inspirational story that, nonetheless, suggests at once the horror of such a disease and the magnitude of the gift Jane gave him. Marsh, gently eliding over the decades, doesn’t peer deep into the souls of his characters but movingly portrays the way their relationship changes with time, perhaps not as expected. The actors are very good, with Redmayne utterly convincing in evoking the entire range of Hawking’s physical decline, then using his eyebrows to convey emotion and thought. Those interested in more than the barest outline of Hawking’s ideas will want to turn to his books, or Errol Morris’s documentary version of A Brief History of Time, but this is a fine general-interest drama that avoid the clichés of disease movies.

IMDb link

viewed 11/5/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/6/14

Force Majeure (***1/2)

This slow-building Swedish drama (with a number of comedic parts) uniquely and subtly explores modern gender roles.  Tomas and Ebba (Johannes Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli) are a married couple who take their young son and daughter to a ski resort in the French Alps. They seem like, and are, an ordinary family. But a near-disaster the next day has the children frightened and their parents estranged over their divergent reactions in the face of an apparent emergency.

In depicting this estrangement, as well as the reactions of another couple, friends who hear what happened, writer-director Ruben Östlund asks, in the age of egalitarian marriage, whether fundamental differences remain between men and women, what they still expect in a partner, and how trust and respect can be regained when they’ve been lost.


IMDb link

viewed 10/26/14 3:00 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Nebraska (****)

Alexander Payne’s first two films were about young women, but since then he’s become a great chronicler of the difficult man. Probably Will Forte’s character, a mild-mannered stereo saleman, is the lead role here, but Bruce Dern’s grumpy old man dominates the story. And he’s so difficult that it becomes easier for his son to drive him from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, than to convince him that he hasn’t really won a million-dollar prize like the piece of paper says. (Think Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.) He’ll walk to Lincoln to claim his prize if necessary. If this sounds like a road movie, or a comedy, it is both, but it’s a lot more too.

If you are lucky, and paying attention, there will come a point in which you recognize your parents as autonomous individuals who had lives before you came along. This recognition is at the heart of the movie. Your parents may be nothing like the ones in this film, your life nothing like that of the son, and your home far from the Midwest, but there is a kind of universality in this story that is only set in relief by the non-universal, peculiar details.

 

As noted, Dern dominates the film, with the showy role of an ornery, bickery alcoholic, but equally good is June Squibb as his long-suffering wife, though she’s apt to strike most viewers as mean-spirited. Neither of them is especially likeable, but as the film goes on they become understandable, and Payne, collaborating with screenwriter Bob Nelson, elicits a compassion in the viewer. It’s a cliché to say that an old person feels the same inside, but you don’t see it often depicted on screen. For example, so often when you hear an old person talk about sex it’s supposed to be cute, but when Squibb’s character starts talking about the men who once fought over her, it’s not cute — though it’s funny — because you hear the way that experience remains with her.

Another of Payne’s trademarks is to set his films in places usually ignored on screen and to makes those places — the Hawaii of The Descendents, the California wine country of Sideways, key to the story. Nebraska most resembles About Schmidt, which also takes place, in part, in Payne’s native state, though the pace is a notch tighter.  An important part of the story takes place in a small town, and both because of the plot and because this town hasn’t changed much, the movie deeply evokes a forgotten past. It is a reminder that, whether we know about it or not, each of us is influenced by the people and places that have gone before us.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 12/10/13 at 7:00 pm at Ritz 5; posted 1/9/14

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (***)

The Butler is “inspired by” the true story of Gene Allen, whose story was briefly told in a Washington Post article written just after the 2008 election won by Barack Obama. Forest Whitaker plays a character called Cecil Gaines, who, like Allen, labors for decades in the White House, where the serving staff, in contrast to everyone else, have traditionally been black. Rather than chronicling the behind-the-scenes challenges of preparing for state dinners and such, Daniels uses this melodrama as a vehicle for exploring the history of the civil rights movement.

Screenwriter Danny Strong penned the contemporary political dramas Recount and Game Change, which managed to create an air of uncertainty about outcomes that, presumably, were known by the audience. In contrast, this movie has the feel of a “great moments in history” docudrama, something to show young folks who might not know much about the Gandhi-inspired nonviolent protests of the early Civil Rights era, or the formation of the Black Panther Party years later. Starting with President Eisenhower (Robin Williams) and proceeding through the next several administrations, Gaines is shown overhearing one meaningful civil-rights related conversation and having one meaningful interaction with several of the Oval Office occupants, all played by name actors who look more like themselves than the leaders they’re playing, except maybe Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan. It is history as inevitable march of progress, though the re-creation of a Woolworth lunch counter sit-in is powerful and upsetting.

In the movie’s telling, the occupation of the title character is not so much a window into an unseen world as a representation of one side of the black experience. For Gaines, it represents the highest position a black man could reasonably hope to obtain and a source of dignity and unalloyed pride; although he recognizes the injustice of the glass ceiling that holds back men of his color, he sees nothing to be gained by the dangerous tactics employed by the Freedom Riders and other activists. The fictional character of his oldest son (David Oyelowo), who becomes one of those activists, is meant to embody the other side of the coin. For the son, a well-paid butler who talks to presidents is still just a modern version of the house slave. Daniels shows this conflict without imposing a strong viewpoint.

Daniels and Strong mix the history with family drama. Oprah Winfrey, in her first major acting role in 15 years, manages to make you forget she’s Oprah in playing Gaines’s wife. It’s a subplot, but the marital scenes are less programmatic than the historical ones. There’s something sad about a life story, because the subject always winds up dead or very old in the end. But, despite that and the discrimination portrayed, the movie is more uplifting than depressing, and, rather than a instructional video, it comes off like a pretty good yarn.

IMDb link

viewed 10/6/13 1:05 pm at Riverview and posted 10/7/13

Sinister (**1/2)

A decent start to this one from Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). The familiar element: a family moving into an old house, where a writer (Ethan Hawke) hopes to be able to finish his latest true crime novel. His wife (Juliet Rylance) is supportive in one scene and threatens to leave him in the next. But it’s the unfamiliar element, a batch of home movies with murders on them, that makes him a little crazy. (Which sorts of fits the movie into the batch of recent horror films involving found footage, camcorders, and/or otherwise crude-looking visuals.) And the way he keeps hearing noises, noises his wife and young children never seem to hear.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to horror movies. To my mind, if your movie involves the supernatural, keep the supernatural elements to a minimum. So, where I lost interest was where the symbols expert (Vincent D’Onofrio) came on to explain some ancient mythology I never heard of and what it means. To me this is just lazy screenwriting because it lets you explain anything. (I think one reason people like vampire and zombie films is because there are known rules for these beings.) I won’t give away the twist, but the explanation for it pretty much amounts to, well, because it’s pretty creepy.

IMDb link

viewed 10/9/12 7:30 [PFS screening] at Ritz East and reviewed 10/10–12/12

 

The Queen of Versailles (***1/4)

Twenty-six thousand square feet. Enough room for a couple, eight kids, a nanny, and assorted staff. Enough room to host a reception for all 50 Miss America contestants. Could anyone want more? Apparently, David and Jackie Siegel could. When Lauren Greenfield began her documentary, David was the “time share” king who had recently opened his greatest project, a skyscraper in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. He boasted of having personally gotten George W. Bush elected president. Jackie, his third wife, was an ex-beauty queen who had borne him a new family of seven young children, though a Filipino nanny did a lot of the less-fun stuff. (They had taken in another girl, Jackie’s niece.) And 26,000 feet was just not big enough.

The Seigels’ new place, nicknamed after the French palace, would become a boondoggle symbolic of the Great Recession, and David’s attempts to maintain his empire, and Jackie’s to reform lifestyle, would give Greenfield’s film an unexpected story arc. David Siegel has meanwhile sued Greenfield over her editing choices, which he argues exaggerate the financial troubles, but all things considered, they don’t come off too badly. At least, they seem more relatable, less hateable, than you would think if all you knew was the bare facts above. Jackie, who is the main character, may not be the world’s best mother—she freely confesses she wouldn’t have had so many kids if she needed to actually raise them herself—and she may be a bit childlike herself, but she’s no Leona Helmsley figure. That is, she’s pleasant to spend time with.

In the end, money, especially money one comes into suddenly, as by lottery or marriage, may not change a person so much as allow a person to indulge the personality one already had. That’s the sense I get here. It’s probably just as true of reality-show contestants, and that’s the vibe of this documentary.

IMDb link

viewed 8/22/12 7:20 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/13–9/15/12

Meeting Evil (**1/4)

If you heard someone beating on your door several times within 30 seconds and weren’t expecting company, would you maybe look through the peephole before opening up? Would you head off without taking your cell phone or wallet? And would you agree to go anywhere in the car with a stranger in a fedora (Samuel L Jackson) who’s clearly a little off, if not crazy? Regular guy John (Luke Wilson) does all of these things. There you have, or maybe you don’t have, the problem I had with this movie, which is quite suspensefully directed by TV veteran Chris Fisher, who adapted a novel by Thomas Berger. Jackson has played crazy before, but this is a new kind of crazy, and we’re not sure what sort this is. In any case, he leads John, just fired from his job but hiding it from his wife, on a one-day odyssey through some his very recent, mistake-filled past.

The setup suggests that the passive John will be pushed too far and get all badass, but the tone is of some sort of philosophical movie, like Fight Club, maybe. Berger also wrote the novels on which the (very different) films Little Big Man and Neighbors were based is another clue that this isn’t supposed to be just an exploitation movie. Fisher conveys existential themes, no doubt more easily explored in a novel, partly by using location, both bland suburban ones and rural, desolate ones. Yet, although the worst violence is off-screen, one reason this is a suspense drama instead of a horror film, the sheer level of that violence makes the plot ridiculous. Has the killer, whom we learn about later, really done this before and not been caught? If not, why now?

Incidentally, Berger’s novel was published in 1992, before cell phones were common. Why didn’t Fisher just set the movie then instead of creating a series of awkward machinations (not just leaving the cell phone home) just so John won’t have a phone to use? This also would make it more plausible that a convenience store wouldn’t have security camera footage available. And, if a black man was going to play the second lead, perhaps it would have made sense to make the setting somewhere with a few more black people. That way, it won’t seem entirely too coincidental when, later, the only other black character in the film happens to be in a place where he can be mistaken for Jackson’s.

 

If you interpret the fedora-clad man as a symbolic character meant only to test John, perhaps such implausibilities will bother you less than they did me. Maybe he is another version of the killer in the Saw movies, who weaves morality plays into his torture games. With, say, Bruce Willis as the lead instead of the everyman-type Wilson, one can imagine the film building to a conclusion in which nebbish becomes superhero and the villain dies by having a construction crane land on top of him. The climax is a close-enough approach to satisfy conventional expectations, but the actual ending is about a husband, a wife, and an uncertain future. It’s the the best part, actually, but the titter of laughter I heard from the screening audience suggests that such subtlety was incongruous in a movie with so many bullet and plot holes.

IMDb link

viewed 4/20/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/1/12 and 5/13/12

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (***1/4)

Jeff (Jason Segel) is, in conventional terms, a loser. When we meet him, he’s half watching an infomercial in the basement, where he sleeps. An odd phone call turns out to be a wrong number, but Jeff's the kind of person who thinks there are no coincidences. He thinks, instead, that the call might be a clue of some kind, a path to destiny. Pat (Ed Helms), who lives in a modest apartment, is, in conventional terms, an ass. When we meet him, he's just blown a bundle on a Porsche without telling his wife (Judy Greer).

Jeff and Pat are brothers. So are writer-director team Mark and Jay Duplasse, whose last film, Cyrus, was also about a man living with his mother. This movie is in a similar style, taking a fairly realistic approach to a fairly odd character and focusing also on the mother, who here is played by Susan Sarandon. Her storyline is about trying to deal with a son who she can barely motivate to do a simple home repair before she gets home from work, where she has surprisingly acquired a secret admirer. Meanwhile, her sons wind up tailing Pat’s wife, whom he suspects may be having an affair. These scenes are quite funny and play the brothers’ opposite personalities against each other.

Naturally—that is, both inevitably and seamlessly— things turn serious. The brothers Duplasse seem to agree with their main character than everyone has a destiny, and their effort to have all three family members experience a kind of redemption all in one day may seem strained to those who, like me, believe otherwise. Nonetheless, this is funny when it means to be, quirky yet approachable, and sharp in its depictions of the characters, including Rae Dawn Chong as the mother’s coworker.

IMDb link

viewed 3/13/12 7:30 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/16/12

Declaration of War (**3/4)

Misleading titled, this French import nearly begins misleadingly too, with a montage scene straight from a romantic comedy. Actually, though, we first see a boy of five or so in a MRI machine. And then we see his parents, who are named Roméo and Juliette, meet. They have a boy, Adam. Not yet two, Adam gets sick. (Rarely does a toddler get so much screen time.) Relatives are informed. There are tears, but this is less of a tearjerker, all things considered, that one might have expected. The most notable segments are not the obvious ones—the diagnosis, the treatment decisions, and so on—but the ones in between, where the couple must go on living their lives.

The drama, cowritten by the two leads, Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm, and directed by Donzelli, is at its best in these small moments. (Donzelli and Elkaïm have played romantic partners in other films and have some chemistry.) Roméo and Juliette try to make each other laugh about their worrying too much. They try to understand each other’s different reactions to their situation. They smoke a lot. (It was the degree of smoking that made me suspect, correctly, that the movie was based on a true story.) Except for the smoking, I’d have liked the movie to be even more about these small moments. I don’t really trust those montage scenes in romantic comedies because they seem to be a substitute for actually showing why a couple are together, and I felt like that was true here. Without giving away what happens to either Adam or his parents, it also seemed odd that the story simply skips ahead and dispenses with both questions in a quick epilogue that is not necessarily implied by what has happened before. Additionally, the soundtrack music, which ranges from Vivaldi to Laurie Anderson, is jarring when it should have been intimate.

IMDb link

viewed 2/5/12 3:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/5/12  

A Separation (****)

Iran boasts a fairly robust film industry, but its only filmmakers whose movies have been widely seen outside the country are Jafar Panahi, whose politically laced work led to his arrest and a ban on further filmmaking, and Abbas Kiarostami, who makes minimalist, arty films like A Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. This drama by Asghar Farhadi (whose previous work has been shown at US film festivals) is neither political or arty in an obvious way. It is both accessible enough to have been a hit in its native country and complex enough to garner a passel of awards.

The main characters in this story (Leila Hatami, Peyman Maadi) are a married, middle-class couple, but the wife is seeking a divorce. On what grounds an unseen clerk asks. Does he mistreat you? No, he is a good man, she explains, but will not emigrate with her. He does not wish to leave his elderly father, who has dementia. Neither party will budge. And so, instead of divorce, the couple separate, necessitating hiring a housekeeper who can also look after the old man. There is also a choice for the couple’s eleven-year-old, who elects, for now, to stay with her father.

The rest of the story is all complications that lead to an unfortunate incident and an accusation against the husband. What’s brilliant about the movie is the way it brings several elements together in a completely natural way. It has much to say about the push-pull of relationships, but it’s not a self-consciously psychological film. It depicts an unfamiliar (to Americans) legal system, but is not a legal thriller. It has certain cultural particulars—humorously, the housekeeper consults a sort of dial-a-cleric to see whether it’s okay for her to help undress the old man—but its broad themes are universal.


IMDb link

viewed 2/11/12 12:45 pm at Ritz 5

The Iron Lady (***)

This is perhaps two thirds of a very good biopic about the life of Margaret Thatcher, British counterpart to Ronald Reagan, yet his temperamental opposite. Unfortunately, the employment of a mostly useless framing device — Thatcher (Meryl Streep) spends half a dozen segments in the near-present day as she struggles with dementia and has conversations with her late husband (Jim Broadbent)—mars it. Not only does it rob the narrative of some momentum with a storyline that emphasizes the artificial nature of the medium—how could screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame), or anyone, know that Ms. Thatcher is turning on her radio and other noisy appliances to drown out the sound of the imagined husband she’s bickering with?—but it also uses up time that would have better spent, say, showing us how a grocer’s daughter came to such firm conservative beliefs that, even today, she is a controversial figure in her hometown in the English Midlands. Or how young Margaret Roberts became so determined to break into the nearly uniformly male field of electoral politics in the 1950s. (Director Phyllida Lloyd depicts some of the sexism that greeted her efforts, but wisely doesn’t make it the main focus; the visual statement of the pearl-necklace-wearing Thatcher among a sea of grey suits makes its own statement.)

Other than Thatcher’s landmark achievements as 1980s prime minister—the taming of the trade unions and the victory in the Falklands War—the film elides over her specific political policies, not to mention her four years as opposition leader, in favor of emphasizing her forcefulness and disinclination to yield. (The vehement opposition to her is also depicted without the film seeming to take any position on whether it was justified.) Indeed, American Tea Party sympathizers will find her an appealing heroine, and even firm liberals may fantasize about a President Obama who’s as unwilling to compromise.

Streep, of course, is entirely convincing; another actress, Alexandra Roach, plays Roberts/Thatcher as a college student, newlywed, and 1950s candidate for a seat in parliament. At least the makeup artistry that makes Streep look 80 can be admired. Broadbent is a fine actor, but not one who can be made to look young. So we see Denis Thatcher in the earliest scenes played by another actor; then he seems to age about 40 years to Thatcher’s 20. Oddly, Broadbent appears more as a ghost than in the scenes when Denis is alive. Although Denis was ten years the senior of Margaret and an archconservative, his possible role in shaping her political views is not explored.

For some reason, too many biographies of current or recent figures (e.g., J. Edgar) seem to insist on some sort of flashback structure so that the story is told from a present-day perspective. Yet less frequently is this done for those who died long ago. A Dangerous Method, for example, is perfectly content to dispense with the last 40 years of Carl Jung’s life in a brief epilogue. This would have done just fine to sum up the post-office life of Lady Thatcher. As it is, depicting the Iron Lady in her doddering dotage, possibly lamenting neglecting her husband and children, and the grandchildren off in South Africa, would seem to sentimentalize a woman for whom sentimentality would seem wholly inappropriate.

IMDb link

viewed 1/26/12 7:35 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 1/30/12

Le Havre (**3/4)

I’d guess half of the French movies I’ve seen take place in Paris, and none in the port city whose very name means port. Technically, it may not be French, as its producer, director, and writer is the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past). The less-familiar setting would seem to suit Kaurismäki’s seemingly stylizing rendering of the place. Although the film provides just enough hints to give the setting away as present day, or close to it, everything about it seems designed to make the place seem frozen in some time where people still use rotary phones (or have none, in the case of the main character), smoke in hospital rooms, and have never heard of a chain restaurant, or any sort of chain. Here a man can still make a modest living shining shoes, then toddle off to the pub while his wife contentedly cooks dinner for him.

It’s all very quaint, and so it would be more accurate to call Kaurismäki’s style of storytelling simple rather than minimalist. Although the story has the aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) shelter a Gabonese boy trying to evade the authorities, this is no more a film about illegal immigration than, say, Taxi Driver, is about teen prostitution. It’s a decent story about decent people being decent. I would like it to have been a little more than that, but the film is never more, though never less, than pleasant. Perhaps the closest it comes is when the shoe shiner, short on cash to help the young man, enlists the aid of a local rocker called Little Bob, who plays himself. True to form, his music sounds up to the minute, if the minute is in 1977.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 12/8/11 and reviewed 12/8/11

Take Shelter (***)

I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to the supernatural, but I went to see this because I’d read good things about the film and Michael Shannon’s performance. From the plot summaries, I couldn’t get a handle on whether the film is really about the supernatural, which is because the film keeps it ambiguous for a long time. Construction worker Curtis, Shannon’s character, is definitely having some unusual experiences, mostly in his dreams, but some, like the brown rain in the opening scene, apparently in real life.

The other thing that makes me nervous about a film like this, where one odd thing happens after another, is that nearly the whole film winds up being a big question to which the answer has the potential to really lower my evaluation of the movie as a whole. Other movies like this are Close Encounters of the Third Kind—Curtis seems crazy the way Richard Dreyfuss’s character there does—or Frailty, which involved a character who was either a religious nut or a prophet. This is like that a little too, but without the religious angle. Also, Curtis isn’t such a hardass, so his wife (Jessica Chastain) notices quickly when he begins behaving strangely. He himself is caught between wondering if he’s crazy (it runs in the family) or prescient, or both. They have a deaf little girl; her silence in situations where another child would cry out help create tension.

Ultimately, although writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) throws an interesting false ending in, I did feel like the answer to the the movie’s question—is he just nuts?—was a letdown. Another answer might have been also. But there’s enough tension built up, and enough just plain drama, to make the success not completely dependent on the ending. Shannon has the showier role, but Chastain (whose breakthrough roles in The Help and The Tree of Life form the other two thirds of a sort of housewife trilogy for her) has the unappreciated role of reacting to a husband coming apart at the seams. This has only a few special effects, but if you do like a supernatural story, and like it told subtly, you’ll probably like this more than I did.

IMDB link

viewed 11/9/11 7:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/9/11

The Company Men (***)

Wearing its earnestness on its sleeve, John Wells’s downsizing drama stars Ben Affleck as Bob, a suddenly laid-off sales manager for a large corporation based in Boston. Wells, a veteran TV writer/director (ER) splits his film between Bob and his former colleagues. These guys—and one can’t help but notice the dearth of women (or non-whites)—may have had more than most of the people who lost their jobs in the recent recession, but then, as research shows, losing what you have feels worse than not having had it in the first place. And so, cocky Bob, with a nice house, nice car, and a golf-club membership, has a lot to lose if the severance pay runs out. His nice wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) urges him to cut the expenses, but he doesn’t want to admit defeat.

Back at his old corporation, his older colleague (Chris Cooper) tries to hang on. His old boss (Tommy Lee Jones), head of the shipbuilding division, tries to convince the CEO (Craig T. Nelson) not to lay off even more workers, but is told, “We work for the shareholders now.” Later, Wells plunks Affleck and Jones down in an abandoned shipyard so Jones can trot out a hoary we-don’t-make-stuff-here-anymore speech. Wells has a habit of hammering home his anti-corporate message this way, including my point above about losing stuff. In the same shipyard scene, the older man laments that, having acquired so many things, men like him are “terrified of losing them.”

A documentary like Inside Job does a better job of critiquing recent corporate greed. The story of Bob and his family is the richer one here, including a subplot about the evolving relationship between Bob and his blue-collar brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), which might be a metaphor for Affleck’s career. The brother-in-law doesn’t much like Bob at first, but eventually Bob wins his respect. Similarly, with his directorial efforts (Gone Baby Gone and The Town) and roles like this, Affleck seems determined to win some respect of his own, as well as turn Boston into a film-making town.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/17/11

Stone (***)

Crime has paid for Edward Norton. His breakout role (and first Oscar nomination) came in 1996’s Primal Fear, in which he played an altar boy accused of murder. His second Oscar nomination came two years later, when he played a white supremacist who finds redemption in prison. He is once again imprisoned as the title character in this psychological drama, an arsonist hoping to be paroled after serving nearly a decade.

Reunited with his Painted Veil director John Curran, Norton gets to try out another accent of some sort that I found irritating. But then, this is not a movie for those who crave likable characters. Stone says things like “I don’t want no beef with you. I just want to be a vegetarian.” Norton/Stone mutters this under his breath, so it doesn’t sound as silly as it reads. He’s talking to Jack (Robert De Niro), the man who will decide whether to make Stone a free man. De Niro isn’t likable either, as our view of him is colored by the first scene in the movie, a flashback in which Jack makes a violent threat to prevent his wife (played by Frances Conroy in the later scenes) from leaving. Also not likable is Stone’s wife (Milla Jovovich), a teacher who sets out to “talk” with Jack on behalf of her husband. Her transparently fakery made me also irritated by her, or more so by Jack’s apparent blindness to her attempts to manipulate him.

What might be a setup for an intense thriller is instead a morality drama. The script by Angus MacLachlan, who wrote the delightful Junebug, paints Stone as a kind of mirror for Jack, whose job is to determine whether others are good, who admires goodness but doesn’t understand it. Religion is a theme in the movie. Jack and his wife listen faithfully to a radio preacher, but he has doubts that seem to stem as much from his own failings as those he sees in others. Both male characters are intended to be ambiguous. Stone seems simultaneously coy and honest, and a little crazy; we have no idea whether he will re-offend if released. What seems ambiguous to some may seem underwritten to others. The relationships between the two men and their wives remain mysterious, and Conroy is a good actress (and the most sympathetic character) whose role—the long-suffering spouse—could have been profitably expanded.

IMDB link

viewed 11/11/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/11 and 11/15/10

Secretariat (***)

Even with a great pedigree, no one can predict with certainly that a horse will be great, and so Secretariat’s owner got him after losing a coin toss. (The winner took another horse that seemed more promising.) Still, he was not a true underdog, like Seabiscuit. He did not meet a mysterious and tragic end, like the title character in Phar Lap, another great drama about a racehorse. So some obvious dramatic angles are missing here. Instead, this is is a straight inspirational drama with a mild but definite feminist angle. The horse’s owner, Penny Tweedy (née Chenery) (Diane Lane), was a housewife and mother of four who learned the business in her 40s, made some smart decisions, and got a bit lucky. Taking over her father’s Virginia horse farm in the late 1960s, she defied her husband’s preference that she stop spending so much time away from their home in Denver. Pointedly, the film does not apologize for her having done so.

The screenplay is by Mike Rich, who has penned other inspirational sports films, notably The Rookie. Rich plays up Chenery’s feistiness and simplifies or sentimentalizes some events, but sticks to the facts when it comes to the horse racing. (The corniest moment is probably when her father’s assistant brings Penny coffee. Asked how she knew Penny wanted two sugars and cream, she replies, “That’s how your Daddy liked it.”) Director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) does a fine job filming the races. Seen close up, with dust kicking in the air, it seems almost a violent sport, in contrast to how elegant it looks from afar. And even if you know the outcome, Secretariat’s performance in the 1973 Belmont Stakes is still pretty astonishing. A nice one to watch with the kids.

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viewed 9/2/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/2–10/7/10

Farewell (***)

The dissolution of the Soviet Union is one of those things that happened fairly recently yet seems like ancient history. The dynamic of the Cold War disappeared in a very short time; nor is anything similar likely to happen soon. And this film implies that it will tell us how it all unraveled. It all started in 1981, with a Soviet colonel (Emir Kusturica) who decided to spill some secrets. That it was a French engineer (Guillaime Canet) working in Moscow who became his contact is one of the more peculiar aspects of the story, and why the director is not an American, but Christian Carion, who made Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noël), another tale of a rapprochement among enemies.

Carion bookends the movie with the most suspenseful parts, but the midsection is practically a buddy film. The colonel, having an affair, talks to the engineer about marital issues. At one point he warns his new partner that the KGB bugs the bedrooms of foreigners and sends women to seduce men who seem not to be getting any at home. “If you want peace, screw your wife,” he says. In return for such advice, he receives French champagne and cassettes of Queen (for his teenage son) and Leo Ferré (for himself). Occasionally there are meetings involving the French premier, François Mitterand, and his American counterpart. It may be for the best that there’s only a few of these scenes, as Fred Ward’s Ronald Reagan impersonation is pretty weak. (Willem Defoe, the best known American in the cast, plays a fictionalized CIA director.)

Probably the story could have been made to seem more suspenseful. Even though the Frenchman’s wife tells him she’s frightened for their kids, and the Russian allows his son to hate him for being a Soviet stooge rather than tell him what he’s really doing, I rarely had a sense of danger during their meetings. As for ending the Cold War, maybe the dots need to be connected more. Clearly the information provided was a coup for the French and the Americans, who learned the identities of spies working for the USSR as well as the extent of the KGB’s intelligence operation. But it’s not that clear from the film that the events portrayed helped precipitate perestroika or assisted its architect, Mikhail Gorbachev, in consolidating power.

The movie is worth watching as a portrait of an communist-era Moscow and as a character drama, but lacks the power of great spy thrillers.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/26/10

The Father of My Children (***1/2)

One thing I like about certain (usually) foreign films is the way you don’t immediately know what they’re going to be about. For a would-be blockbuster, this is no good because that doesn’t lend itself to a very exciting description. For example, this can be described as the story of a French film producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), his money troubles, and his family. (There are a lot of films about actors, a fair number about writers and directors, but not too many about producers; The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biography, would be one.) What’s pleasing about it is all in the characters and their relationships. That’s not to say nothing happens—plenty does—but that the story isn’t entirely driven by what happens in the first ten minutes, which is the usual case.

After ten minutes, I assumed the movie was going to be about a workaholic who can’t stay off his cell phone as he tries to placate a free-spending Swedish auteur, a group of Koreans coming to shoot in Paris, and his impatient creditors. He is a workaholic—“human spam” to one of his daughters—but also an adored father and husband, and the proud creator of dozens of non-blockbuster films. He cherishes the freedom of being his own boss, but the freedom is threatened by the bank’s threat to pull the plug on his credit. The most significant plot point happens past the halfway point. The emphasis also surprisingly shifts from the filmmaker to his Italian-born wife (hinted at by the title) and his three daughters, the eldest of which is played by de Lencquesaing’s real-life daughter, Alice. A young adult, she has the most complicated relationship with her father.

The second film of the still-under-30 Mia Hansen-Love is a film that is sometimes sad, but isn’t sappy. The lack of melodrama is one reason why such a film doesn’t feel heavy or depressing. The other is that the characters are enjoyable to be around; after 110 minutes, I wasn’t ready for the movie to end.

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viewed 8/5/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/6/10

The Greatest (***)

“Happy families are all alike” wrote Tolstoy; “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it’s also true that each member of an unhappy household is unhappy in his own way. For one woman, it may be obsessing over the details of the auto accident that killed the older of her two sons. For her husband, it may manifest itself in sleepless nights and feigned stoicism. And for the girlfriend of the deceased, it may mean simply focusing on fond memories and deciding to raise the child of his that she will bear.

Not a remake of the Muhammad Ali biopic, this oddly titled tearjerker stars Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan as the parents and an American-accented Carey Mulligan as the pregnant Rose. (Brosnan sticks with his mother tongue.) Rose, whose own sorrow seems too mild, becomes the lens through which the parents, and to a lesser extent the teenage brother, focus their grief. One finds her a comforting presence, the other a reminder of loss. As for the deceased, we see him in flashbacks, but only through Rose-colored glasses. There are no scenes in which he interacts with his family. And as for his flaws, the worst we learn is that he was “a bit OCD” because he liked to separate his foods. The family may be ambivalent about how to express their loss, but not about the young man himself, which might have given the story another dimension.

Still, even with the inevitable group catharsis that the story builds toward, first-time writer-director Shana Feste keeps it from becoming a sap-fest. (Well, except for the mawkish scene in which Brosnan breaks down.) Her screenplay is perhaps too polished, but not manipulative. And Carey Mulligan, who’s like a British Michelle Williams, shows every sign of enjoying a long, successful career.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/5/10