45 Years (**3/4)

The famous William Faulker quote goes, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” In Andrew Haigh’s (Weekend) adaptation of a David Constantine short story, which takes place over the course of a week, two events bring the past forward with suddenness. One is the impending anniversary party of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay); the other is news that the body of Geoff’s old girlfriend has been discovered, having been buried under snow for 50 years. This is a movie that starts out quietly (really—I missed some dialogue) and builds slowly, but even then to an understated, or even slight, conclusion.

The pleasures of the movie are in observing the couple, whose everyday dialogue reveals an intimacy that can only grow over a long period. The movie is essentially from her point of view, wondering if, after decades together, she really knows all there is to know about her husband, or whether that’s possible. And Rampling is always a welcome screen presence. But Courtenay is extremely affecting as the husband, just a few years older, but certainly, in multiple ways, more fragile.

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viewed 1/18/16 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 1/18/16

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.

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

Le Week-end (***)

At its best, this drama is a bit like Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” the lovely tune that plays over the closing credits. It’s kind of quiet, but kind of light, buoyant where its simplicity might elsewhere seem somber. Jim Broadbent, star of every third English movie, and Lindsay Duncan, best known for her UK TV roles, play Nick and Meg, teachers celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in Paris. Coming from the director-writer team, Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi, who did Venus, the 2006 Peter O’Toole charmer, it might almost be the next installment in Richard Linklater’s Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) for its emphasis on talk over plot, and for the fact that the couple in question have reached the empty-nester stage of life. But where, at least in Before Midnight, the Julie Delpy-Ethan Hawke couple have loud arguments that can boil over, the characters here simmer. What for another couple might lead to an hour of not speaking, or a ruined evening, these two let roll by, though without forgetting. Only Jeff Goldblum, as Nick’s admiring American friend, supplies a lot of volume. (I actually missed some of Nick and Meg’s dialogue for the lack of same.)

Besides Drake’s contribution, a Jeremy Sams’s piano score supplies a light jazz background that seems appropriate for a film that is too serious to be called fun, but that has enough amusing moments not to be ponderous.

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viewed 4/2/14 at Ritz 5 and posted 4/2/14

Afternoon Delight (***1/4)

If you watch much comedy, there’s a good chance you’ll recognize Kathryn Hahn, but less chance you’ll know her name. She plays a lot of brassy women, like the ruthless campaign manager on Parks and Recreation, and she also has a supporting role in We’re the Millers. But she gets to headline this sometimes serious, sometimes raunchy comedy, playing the sometimes brassy but more frequently closed up Rachel, a Los Angeles housewife (and mother to a little boy) who can barely bring herself to tell her therapist (Jane Lynch) what’s bothering her, such as that she hasn’t had sex with her husband (Josh Radnor) in six months. (A little wine brings out the brassy, even raunchy, side.)

Into this story comes McKenna (Juno Temple), a stripper Rachel encounters on a visit to a local club. Something draws Rachel to her, and so Rachel seeks her out and eventually invites her to stay. I liked the character but she doesn’t fit in with the rescue fantasy Rachel but is also the sleazy gold-digger she might have been written as. Rachel is a tougher character to assess, a woman whose problem seems to be not being in touch with her problems. She might simply strike a lot of people as a spoiled rich woman with too much time on her hands, but the comedy, which is funny, tempers that, and I don’t think she’s meant to be entirely sympathetic. The way the plot resolves is not entirely the cliché it could have been, but the ending may be a little pat. Or maybe it’s subtle. I’m still not entirely clear on what leads Rachel to seek out the stripper; it seems maybe Rachel might have a kinky side, but this theme is explored in only the most tentative way, then tossed aside, despite a few nude scenes. In any case, a very good role for Hahn and a fairly promising feature debut for TV writer/producer Jill Soloway (United States of Tara).

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viewed 9/11/13 7:30 at Ritz Bourse and posted 9/11/13

Fill the Void (***1/4)

This confusingly titled Israeli drama takes place in an Orthodox Jewish community. Unlike most films about such closed societies, including Ushpizin and Holy Rollers, set among Hasidic enclaves in Jerusalem and New York, respectively, this is not about encounters with outsiders or about those challenging tradition. Instead, it is about the normal challenges of life, but as experienced through a particular cultural dynamic.

Shira (Hadas Yaron), the character at the center of the drama, is an 18-year-old kindergarten teacher hoping to wed a young man she has seen but not yet met. However, upon the death of her sister in childbirth, she feels increasing pressure to instead marry her sister’s widower (Yiftach Klein), now a single father, though he is significantly older than she. Although this is not something that would likely happen in secular Israel, Shira’s internal conflict, between desire for self-determination and duty, is not unfamiliar.

The cultural context is one in which a high emphasis is placed on marriage; another character, an older woman, wears a head scarf to suggest widowhood, though she’s never wed, simply to avoid questions. Additionally, there is great weight placed on the rabbi as the center of the community, dispenser of charity, and giver of advice on everything from spiritual matters to ovens. Still, the long beards on the men aside, these characters seem like ordinary people.

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viewed 6/19/13 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/19/13

Before Midnight (***1/4)

Among 2004’s least likely sequels was Before Sunset, a nine-years-later reuniting of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), the couple who shared one intense night together in Vienna in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. The ending of that movie — spoiler! — left it ambiguous as to whether the couple would stay together. Right on schedule, nine more years having passed, this movie tells us that what we wanted to happen did. (Incidentally, having seen the other two is not a prerequisite to this film, which deftly fills in the relevant details. The screenplay is credited to Linklater as well as the two leads)

There are, more or less, four acts. First is the car ride, after Jesse, a writer, leaves his son at the airport. We quickly learn that that the son lives in Chicago with his mother, that Jesse and his ex have a bad relationship, and that the airport is in Greece, where Jesse and Celine continue vacationing with their twin daughters, who are conveniently sleeping for most of part one, leaving their parents to chat.  Just like the other installments, the movie is all talk, little action, so they chat a lot. They live in Paris, so Jesse laments that he can only see his son in summer. Is he  just feeling guilty, or guilt tripping Celine?

The difference between the first two movies is that, even when Jesse and Celine disagreed, the discussion was hypothetical, philosophical. Act two, in which they discuss love and sex with the literary types they’re staying with, is much in this mode. Act three finds the couple exploring (so, some nice scenery of ancient ruins and architecture), but mostly talking, including the light-yet-heavy subject of whether they would be attracted to each other if they’d just met.

The minor spat of the beginning becomes the seed of the more intense final act, which is most different from anything in the other two movies, just as the idealization of a brief encounter is different from a relationship.  I didn’t mind that, and in fact liked the last part best, having been a little anxious for the discussion to get where it was going before that. However, I did think that I might have preferred that the couple’s disagreement be of the sort that could be blamed equally on either party. In fact, I think most people will think one is more at fault.

In any case. this installment lacks the fairy tale quality of the other films. But it has the same verisimilitude that makes these people seem like a real couple, though Hawke’s edgy vibe is different from Delpy’s cool one. So, I’m marking my calendar for 2022, in case Linklater and his two leads decide that Celine and Jesse aren’t done talking.

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Amour (***1/2)

Woody Allen once made a comedy called Love and Death. Michael Haneke has made a film called Love that is about death, and is superficially a tragedy, but only superficially. Beginning with the end, the body of a woman alone in a luxurious Paris apartment, Haneke then takes us through the stages of her decline following a stroke. The woman is played by Emmanuel Riva, the 85-year-old whose earliest starring role was in the similarly titled Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), her husband by the slightly younger Jean-Louis Trintignant, of ...And God Created Woman, The Conformist, and other European classics. Isabelle Huppert, who plays the couple’s daughter in a few scenes, has starred in two Haneke films, Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher. (Here, Riva’s character was once a piano teacher.) We never see these characters at a younger age, but French viewers may feel that they have known them well via earlier roles.

 

Haneke has strongly resisted the conventions of Hollywood (though he remade his own film Funny Games in English) and mainstream cinema, such as tidy endings. In doing so he has made movies that can seem chilly and detached. Films like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and The White Ribbon take a nearly clinical look into dark aspects of human behavior. I’m not sure whether he’s doing anything different here. It may be that simply placing his camera in front of these two characters, one witnessing her own decline, the other transitioning from husband to caretaker, is responsible for the deep empathy we feel for both. His approach is at once minimalist and rich in detail. The camera lingers, sometimes to the point where the viewer may become impatient, but allows us to see the evidence of this couple’s life together, including their well-appointed residence, full of books, art, and old furniture.

 

The tragedy embodied in the movie is that with all the ways modernity has made life easier, it has done little to improve the experiences of death and loss. The way in which it is not a tragedy, is hopeful even, is in its depiction of the tenderness shown by the husband. He does not speak the film’s title. No protestations of ardor, no dramatic medical interventions, no grand gestures (well, not more than one), as in a Nicholas Sparks novel, no mad dashes to the airport attest to his feelings. All that does is his willingness to do for his wife, day after day, what she cannot do and would want done. (In contrast is his daughter, who cannot see the situation through the eyes of her parents.) You don’t expect to see that in one of Haneke’s movies, and that makes it all the more moving.

 

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viewed 1/27/13 4:00 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 1/18/13 

This Is 40 (***1/4)

Judd Apatow revisits the supporting couple Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), from his movie Knocked Up. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen that movie—none of the other major characters makes an appearance here—but if you did and liked the alternately argumentative and simpatico duo this is more of the same. If you liked the mix of crude humor and emotion, there’s still a little bit of raunch, occasionally seeming forced. I guess in Los Angeles women confide sexual intimacies to their trainer, like that their husband took Viagra. (Pete didn’t need to, but  it was Debbie’s birthday and “I thought you’d think it was fun for me to supersize it for once,” he says.) But they have bigger problems, mostly money problems. Pete’s independent record label is foundering, thanks in part to its inability to get fans to buy the latest album from 1970s/’80s semi-star Graham Parker. (Parker plays himself.) Debbie thinks someone’s stealing from her clothes store. They communicate poorly, except when they don’t.

I’ve liked all of Apatow’s work and liked this. Apatow’s ability to craft natural-sounding dialogue, along with some that’s improvised, is the movie’s forte, which is good in a talky movie. His characters, including the minor ones (like John Lithgow and Albert Brooks as the difficult fathers of Pete and Debbie) are consistently engaging, so long as one does not conflate that with being admirable. I appreciate that Apatow resists the impulse to make his characters always likable (or perfect parents). Whether Mann and Apatow’s daughters Iris and Maud, who play Pete and Debbie’s bickering kids, are the best child actors is open to debate, but they seem more like real kids than many seen on screen. The early scenes may seem somewhat disjointed, and lighter in tone, not fully setting up the more confrontational second part.

I normally wouldn’t recommend the outtakes that sometimes play over the closing credits; usually they’re just the actors laughing, but in this case it’s an amazing thing to watch Melissa McCarthy continuing a lengthy, probably improvised rant without breaking character as her costars giggle and obviously render the scene unusable.

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viewed 6/29/13 on iPad (from Netflix DVD) and reviewed 6/29–7/6/13

Take This Waltz (**1/4)

This is the second feature from actress/writer/director Sarah Polley, whose Away from Her was an affecting of a man watching his wife’s memory drift away due to Alzheimer’s. Polley brings an equal degree of emotional authenticity to this, the story of a much younger wife (Michelle Williams) and her romantic friendship with another man (Luke Kirby). In fact, I sort of felt embarrassed watching the in which Williams and Seth Rogen, as the unwitting husband, engage in a game in which each describes elaborate ways of killing the other. It was like overhearing a couple using pet names and baby talk to each other, though weirder. So, the marriage is not a bad one, but the other man beckons as a diversion.

Though we wonder whether this new relationship will be consummated (other than through a very erotic, talk-only seduction), the subject is not infidelity as such. It’s more like, is happiness a matter of perception or reality? Do we make ourselves unhappy by imagining the unattainable? It’s a different take on the subject than, say, Unfaithful. However, it’s also painfully stagnant and sometimes redundant. (The imaginary-killing game described above recurs in several scenes.) Sarah Silverman’s perhaps surprising appearance as an alcoholic relative brings, at first, welcome comic relief. Later, she’s featured in a cut-through-the-bullshit scene that quickly sums up what’s played out, very slowly, over the previous 90 minutes. Michelle Williams’s very fine performance is also to be recommended. Nonetheless, as someone who usually has patience for stories that are slow to develop, I found this honest, but honestly dull.

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viewed 6/26/12 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 7/30/12

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (***)

“For the elderly and beautiful” reads the legend on the sign of the namesake hotel in this comedy-drama, whose cast amounts to an employment program for some British actors of a certain age. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are the married couple. Judi Dench is the recent widow. Celia Imrie is the man hunter, and the aptly named Ronald Pickup her male counterpart. Maggie Smith…is the bigot. Tom Wilkinson is the just-retired businessman returning to his long-ago home, which is Jaipur, India. Which is the home of the once-majestic, still exotic Marigold. And which is where all of these characters have come, even the bigot, because the living (and the medical care) is cheaper in England.

In hardly ten minutes of screen time — I didn’t quite get how it was arranged — they all manage to arrive into the same previously unoccupied hotel at the very same time. Whereupon the young proprietor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel, playing a similarly optimistic character) adds “Now with guests!” to the hotel’s sign sign. A bunch of English folk learning life lessons in a poor country is a plot ripe for cliché. These are not completely avoided—most obviously simplistic is the story of the proprietor, whose mother disapproves of his girlfriend, scoffs at his plans to revive the hotel, would prefer an arranged marriage to a Delhi girl, etc. However, the key to this kind of film is to be able to establish the several characters efficiently without making them into clichés, and this is done. Even Wilton’s character, the least likeable and most resistant to India’s charms, is sympathetic, at times, in her despair.

The script (from Deborah Maggoch’s novel) by Ol Parker (Imagine Me & You) is sometimes witty. The direction by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) highlights the colors of the Pink City and avoids making the old folks “cute.” (In this respect, I would contrast it with some of Richard Curtis’s work, like Love, Actually, which I found to be faux “adorable.”) The English seem to specialize in ensemble-cast dramedies, and this one is fairly good, if occasionally meandering.

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viewed 5/2/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/3/12

Carnage (***1/2)

There will be those who describe this as stripping away the veneer of civility that hides our contempt for others. Some may see it as skewering a certain kind of liberal hypocrisy. Undoubtedly, some will think it’s just two unpleasant couples bickering for 80 minutes. I thought Roman Polanski’s adaptation of  Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage was all of those things, but mostly just funny.

Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz play one couple; they’ve arrived at the home of the other, played by Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, to deal with an altercation between their eleven-year-old sons, who are not present. Actually, they’re about to leave as the story begins, the four of them having hashed out a description of the incident and committed it to print, all legal style. (Waltz’s character is, in fact, a lawyer.) The only thing that struck me as unrealistic, if clever, is how Reza/Polanski get them all to stay together the whole time. (Polanski does nothing to “open up” the story, which nearly all takes place in one fashionable Brooklyn apartment, though it didn’t bother me.)

Quickly enough, talk about the incident becomes talk about parenting, talk about marriage, and talk about whether the cobbler being served is a cake or a pie. The couples ally against the other; the men ally against the women; the wives argue with their husbands. The lawyer’s repeatedly ringing, familiarly annoying cell phone becomes an ongoing punch line. And though I tend to dislike body-function humor, this movie shows that even a gross-out scene can be funny if done right.

Foster’s sanctimonious writer character is simultaneously the least likeable character and the one I felt sorriest for, since she seems most unhappy. Actually, hers was only the one of the four I really felt much toward, other than amusement. I can still see the bulging veins in Foster’s neck when her character gets extremely angry. I suppose it would have been even more impressive watching these actors delivering the torrent of dialogue on the fly, live, but even on film it’s a showcase for all four. The nasty edge to all of these characters might put off some people, but it’s impressive that in the short space they are all well-defined, and they have such delicious dialogue.


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viewed at Ritz Bourse 1/18/12 and reviewed 1/18/12

Happy, Happy (***1/4)

Couples living next door face the hard truths of their relationships in rural Norway. One pair, the more sophisticated of the two, have just relocated, but it’s Kaya (Agnes Kittelsen), the wife in the other couple, who unwittingly instigates things with a social invitation. Isn’t she gorgeous, Kaya says to her husband. But does this reflect security or merely doubt about her own sexual attractiveness? Slightly quirky (a men’s vocal quartet introduces each segment of the story), slightly comedic, and slightly unsettling (Kaya’s young son plays master and slave with the other couple’s boy, who was adopted from Africa), the drama never gets too heavy, but satisfyingly shuffles the deck on its characters’ lives.

Beautiful Boy (**3/4)

This is a heartfelt drama about parents grieving for a child, with one difference: their son had, previous to killing himself, shot several classmates at college. The parents (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello), already having marital difficulties, go through the expected steps of sorrow, shock (second, because they don’t immediately learn that he was the shooter), self-blame, and blaming each other. Despite the added dimension of learning their son is a killer, the drama plays a lot like the better Rabbit Hole. Even though the couple there are merely dealing with an accidental death, there is similarity in the focus on each partner’s different grieving style, and how it affects the couple’s relationship.

There is nothing inauthentic about this movie, and it’s a nice actors’ showcase for Bello and Sheen, who uses an American accent. However, everything was pretty much what I expected to be. Tears, pity, confrontation. True, it didn’t occur to me, as it does the husband here, that there would be a need to craft a media statement to assure the public and the families of the other students of their sorrow for what their son had done. But I did anticipate that they would wonder about why he did it, a question the film raises but doesn’t try to answer. And that really is the question you want answered in a film like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a film to supply an explanation for such a rare event. But it would have been more compelling to have explored the parent-child relationship as it was rather than only seeing a husband and wife wondering, as I was, later.

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viewed 5/25/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/9/11

Lapland Odyssey (***1/4)

If you see only one Finnish comedy this year, make it this genial comedy about one slacker’s overnight quest to finally get the “digibox”— digital TV converter—his wife has been asking for. Besides fitting into the slacker-comedy subgenre, it’s also a road movie. The humor is not especially culturally specific, but there does seem to be just a bit of the melancholy that hangs over a lot of Scandanavian films I’ve seen, like 101 Reykjavík, which paints winter in Iceland as a similarly dark force that dampens the soul of men, though not so much women. Beginning with the tale of a tree where five generations of men have hanged themselves is a bit bleak for a comedy, even if it happens to be told with gorgeous photography. But the hapless hero (Jussi Vatanen), traveling with his two pals and trying not to (again) disappoint his wife, brings the story to light and rather funny ending. I would have barely recommended the film but for the delightful…Finnish.

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viewed 4/11/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011] and reviewed 4/11/11

Blue Valentine (***)

Commenting on contemporary fiction in The Atlantic, literary conservative B. R. Myers laments that “[c]haracters are now conceived as if the whole point of literature were to create plausible likenesses of the folks next door.” Mainstream cinema veers between fantasy characters and ordinary characters in fantastic situations, but only independent usually looks at regular people in regular situations. Here, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play Dean and Cindy, a couple living in northern Pennsylvania with a preschool-age daughter whose relationship may be starting to deteriorate.

The movie is not as depressing as it might be because about half of it is flashbacks relating the tender courtship—the charming high school dropout wooing the young medical student. Gosling reminded me of his breakthrough role in The Notebook in a scene in which Dean threatens to jump off a bridge if Cindy won’t tell him what’s on her mind. (In The Notebook, Gosling’s character vows to jump off a Ferris wheel if Rachel McAdams’s character won’t agree to a date.) The Notebook is the fantasy version of a romance, and it’s notable in skipping from marriage right to death. I wonder what either of its character would have said if a granddaughter had asked, as Cindy asks her grandmother, “How do you trust your feelings when it can just disappear like that?” Of course, charming courtship scenes look at little different when that thought hangs over the drama.

In flitting back and forth a few years, I’m not sure director Derek Cianfrance really shows the path from blind love to malaise, but he excels at evoking it. In an early scene, Dean lightly scolds Cindy for giving tasteless oatmeal to their daughter, and she gets upset at his encouraging her to eat off the table. Dean’s attempt at arranging a romantic weekend getaway constitutes much of the drama, and eventually brings things to a head, but the ending is typically low-key. Cianfrance doesn’t use handheld cameras, but the music is minimal and the voices are often miked far away, so the movie comes off a little lo-fi. It’s film of small details, like another Michelle Williams film, Wendy and Lucy. I’m not sure Myers would approve of this kind of film, but even he allows that “a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody.”

There was some controversy about this movie because the producers successfully challenged the initial NC-17 rating. There are a few intimate scenes; Williams is shown topless, and Dean is shown orally pleasuring her, but you can’t directly see that. All in all, the notion that such a film would be considered for the harshest rating and mainstream films with torture scenes would not is, to my mind, an indictment of the ratings system and/or American values.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/10/11

All Good Things (***1/4)

Some are ruined by being born into the wrong family. And some by marrying the wrong person. It’s not obvious, except in the fact that the story flashes back from a courtroom scene, that things will go wrong for David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the personable young son of a wealthy New York real estate speculator (Frank Langella). Nor for his future wife Katie (Kirsten Dunst), a sweet girl he meets in 1971. With her, he moves to Vermont, where they run a health-food store called All Good Things. Seemingly metaphorical, this was in fact the real name of the store operated by the husband and wife who inspired this movie, directed by Andrew Jarecki from a script by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling.

Jarecki is best known for another family saga, the Capturing the Friedmans. That was a documentary whose intrigue came in part because the truth about this strange family was somewhat elusive. The reason this heavily researched drama is not a documentary becomes clear eventually; although Jarecki is subtle about depicting some of the darker elements of the story, he obviously has assumed (or very strongly implied) facts that in real life must have been uncertain. Where the film remains ambiguous is in why David’s life goes sour, or at least why it happens when it does. Jarecki succeeds in depicting the progress of his disintegration, and Katie’s different sort of decline. Gosling is typically fine, Dunst heart-rending in her later scenes, and Langella suitably imposing. And obviously, that David witnesses his mother’s death as a child, that he is emotionally repressed, and that his father was an overbearing presence are part of what leads him astray. Yet what is apparent, especially the hold the family real estate business has on him, is not always palpable. In the end, this is a character who remains as elusive as he must have seemed to the Texas jury he testified before in 2003.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/13/11

The Next Three Days (***1/2)

You expect from the high-concept plot that this will be a cheesy thriller. Professor (Russell Crowe) seeking justice for wife (Elizabeth Banks) he believes was falsely imprisoned for murder. With no legal options, and her life draining away behind bars, he vows to get her out any way he can. If this were the Russell Crowe from Gladiator or American Gangster you would have one kind of film, an action-packed one in which Crowe muscled his way into the prison and killed off a dozen guards without breaking a sweat. But imagine the concept with the Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, maybe a little less brilliant, and a little less crazy, but pretty smart and every bit as obsessed. In other words, what would it take for a very driven regular guy to pull off a prison break?

While this remake of a French film (reset in Pittsburgh) is essentially a thriller, the suspense is of the sort that keeps you on edge rather than “thrilling” you. (The violence is realistic, but sporadic.) It’s a deeply unsettling film adapted by Paul Haggis. Haggis’s work can seem pretentious when applied to grand themes, as in the racism drama Crash. Here his approach that’s methodical and relentless (and nearly humorless), but never grandiose. Crowe is the picture of the man who is transformed by having the life he knew stripped away, yet does not suddenly become a superhero. In one scene, he’s nearly caught in his preparations. The moment having passed, he vomits. Banks, though her role is brief, does well to suggest the dispiriting experience of prison. (She reminded me of Sam Rockwell in Conviction.)

From Die Hard to Prince of Persia, there are zillions of suspense and action movies about men (or, less frequently, women) facing all sorts of peril to save someone. But unlike almost all of them, this movie really gives you the feeling of what it would be like if you actually tried to do such a thing.

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viewed 11/3/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/3–11/19/10

Fair Game (***1/4)

The story of Valerie Plame, or Valerie Plame Wilson, is pretty well known to those who follow American politics, especially in the spring of 2003. Plame’s (Naomi Watts) husband had been sent to Niger to see whether Iraq had attempted to buy “yellow cake” uranium there. If so, this would tend to corroborate the views of those in the Bush administration who believed that Iraq was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, and that war was justified to prevent this. But Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) found no evidence in Niger, and said so in a New York Times editorial. Soon after, a column by Robert Novak mentioned that Wilson’s wife was a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction.” And then she wasn’t.

Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, Mr. & Mrs. Smith), Fair Game was adapted by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth from books by Plame and Wilson, and sticks to their point of view. Therefore, it is not primarily a political movie. Factually speaking, you are left essentially none the wiser (at least, if you read the news) about the process by which Plame’s name was leaked to Robert Novak. Most of the key plot points are revealed in scenes where one or the other of the Wilsons is shown watching a news report, or reading a newspaper story.

The story Liman and the Butterworths tell is the story of a married couple whose lives are upended with no warning. The early scenes show Plame as a cool-headed operator (and operative) who merely listens as her dinner-table companions express opinions on the possibility of war. (Her husband, a former ambassador and a foreign-policy expert, is less restrained.) At work, Plame calmly persuades. When a colleague loudly insists, over objections from others, that the Iraqis have centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons, Plame defuses the situation. “We’re not saying you’re wrong,” she says, “but if you’re right, it’s huge, and we want to be sure.” Later, it is this hawkish colleague who has the ear of the White House.

This pre-leak part of the movie is less exciting, but there is a key moment when Plame explains that to lie convincingly, you need to know why you’re lying, and never forget the truth. She’s talking to a source she plans to send to Iraq to gather information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons program, and her lies are necessary for her job. In any event, the latter half of the movie has obvious dramatic appeal even for the non-political junkie. Although Plame had not been a political actor, she and Wilson were subjected to threats, intrusions by the press, and false information.

The media, some of whom couldn’t even get straight whether Plame was a field agent or merely an office worker, come off looking at least as bad as the Bush administration. Were they lying? It’s not clear, because for something to be a lie you need to actually know the truth.

IMDB link

viewed 11/2/2010 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/2/2010

The Kids Are All Right (***1/2)

This is my idea of a family comedy, even though I wouldn’t take the kids to see it. Even if the heads of the household are a female couple (Julianne Moore, Annette Bening), and even if the plot is driven by their two teens deciding to look up their sperm-donor dad (Mark Ruffalo), family is the subject. And even though director Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) has taken advantage of the obvious comic potential of the story, the serious scenes work too. (Her cowriter, Stuart Blumberg, managed a similar balance in scripting the underrated Keeping the Faith.)

Cholodenko has dealt with issues of sexuality in her previous movies, and that (and fairly explicity displays of such) is definitely in the mix. The fondness of some lesbians for gay male porn is dealt with as a humorous curiosity, for example. But always the lens is the family dynamic. Bening, whose character in Mother and Child misses the child she gave up for adoption, plays one wearing the shoe on the other foot. She resents her turf being infringed on by a biological parent who hasn’t been around for 18 years. Her partner, Jules, has an entirely different reaction.

There are probably very few hetero couples who can empathize over feminine hygiene products, but most of the other issues that come up here are ones that can come to define any long-term relationship. The issues with the kids—the fifteen-year-old has a best friend who his moms think the wrong sort; his sister is about to leave for college—are familiar too. (The brother-sister relationship isn’t a big part of the movie, but it’s there, which is nice to see.) In other words, it’s kind of a post-gay rights film.

Ruffalo was a good choice for Paul, the male lead. His characteristic expression is a laid-back head bob that seems to add a silent “yeah, man” to everything, and he sounds that way too. Paul runs a locavore-oriented restaurant in sunny southern California, and his easygoing nature is another reason he bonds with Jules. By the end of the film, he becomes a fuller character who both pulls apart and brings together the family. Cholodenko does a nice transition from the early scenes, which are all about the awkwardness of meeting new people and of forced relationships. Things get a little heavier in the second half, but, as with the best comedy-dramas, the funniest scenes are also, frequently, the ones with the greatest emotional impact.

IMDB link

viewed 7/24/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 7/25–31/10

Sex and the City 2 (***)

“It’s like 1998 all over again,” says Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) at one point in this sequel, naming the year Sex and the City premiered on HBO. In this case, that’s a good thing. The title may not show much originality, but the story returns to the strengths of the series—female bonding, glamorous settings, strange fashion choices, and tasteful double entendres—while updating us on the lives of the four gal pals.

A fabulous gay wedding kicks off the film, complete with Liza Minelli officiating. Marriage is, in fact, the theme, although the sexually rapacious Samantha (Kim Catrell) is still blessedly single. She’s now combating menopause with an array of pills and hormones. Lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and housemom Charlotte (Kristin Davis) are navigating the effects of career, children, and having a sexy nanny on their marriages. As for Carrie, she and Big (Chris Noth) are still working on theirs after two years, but thankfully that doesn’t take up half the film like in the first movie. It’s a much more episodic film, though like the first one it’s written and directed by Michael Patrick King.

The most unusual thing about the story is not the sex, but the city, which for about half of the runtime is not Manhattan, but Abu Dhabi. The reason the ladies wind up there is unimportant and barely plausible, but provides plenty of opportunities to show off luxury as well as outfits that, much of the time, might best be called get-ups. Placing the women in even this most modern part of the Middle East provides some amusing culture clash moments. As with the earlier film, the setting puts Samantha in a sexual straightjacket, as she can barely abide even the more relaxed standards afforded to foreigners. The difference is that here her inclination is to rebel—humorously—against them, whereas her attempts at monogamy in the first movie robbed her of her one salient personality feature. It also had her stuck in Los Angeles, away from the other women, and that separation is another mistake that doesn’t get repeated here. The strength of the Sex and the City franchise is not in the characters as individuals, but in the way that they play off of one another. Excepting some of the early scenes with Carrie and Big, most of the time the women are all together.

Sex and the City 2, while updating some storylines, doesn’t take the series in any bold new directions. Those who find the series to be a celebration of self-absorption and materialism will continue to find it so. (Carrie does, however, refer to something as a “waste of money,” which surely must be a rare phrase in her vocabulary.) If the last movie erred on the side of seriousness, the second movie does the opposite, while still seeming a bit bloated. But, despite some forced moments, it does a better job than the first of encompassing adult themes while keeping the light, witty tone of the television series.

IMDB link

viewed at Moorestown and reviewed 5/30/10