Labor Day (**3/4)

Some movies stand out for their plots, and some for their characters. This drama has a plot —a mother and son taken hostage by an escaped convict — that would tend to stand out, but what in fact makes the strongest impression is the character of Adele, played by Kate Winslet. Winslet has rarely played this kind of character. Adele is a fragile woman, certainly not the kind of woman who would cry out when a quietly insistent man (Josh Brolin) with a wound in his side coerces her into giving him a lift in a department store. This occurs in a small New England town in the year 1987, but a 1987 that seems very long ago, at least the way that director Jason Reitman has filmed it.

The story is not told from Adele’s viewpoint, though. Rather, adopting the approach of the Joyce Maynard novel, it is told as a coming-of-age story for her 13-year-old son Henry. Henry (Gattlin Griffith) is the sensitive, but mostly average, child, of a mother who, according to the narration of the adult Henry (Tobey McGuire), is not so much devastated by the absence of a husband as by the absence of love. Her ex-husband, not a man who knows how to deal with a fragile woman, or a sensitive son, lives nearby with his new wife. And so, as if ordered up for the purpose, the convict shows up to provide a life lesson for the boy and inspiration for the mother. Yes, the man ties them up, but then he cooks for them and cleans up. Of his incarceration, he says, there is more to the story. We learn the truth in a clever way, but if Adele ever asks, we do not see it. The story is told like poetry, prettily, but my non-poetic self asks, Why does she not ask? Why does a man who’s served most of his sentence break out of jail?

I’m of two minds about the use of the present-day narrator. On the one hand, the device provides adult perspective to the confusion of childhood and a voice to an inarticulate character. On the other, as a literary, rather than a cinematic, device, the interruption of the disembodied voice can rob a story of a certain immediacy, and allow us to forget that the present we experience was conditional, not pre-ordained. And it’s a slight-of-hand, placing events decades apart together, pushing the past and present together when in real life memories fade and people continue to chance. The poetic ending of this movie, along with the tough-to-believe plot, pushes it slightly too far into Nicholas Sparks territory. Of course, many people like Nicholas Sparks, the author of Dear John, The Notebook, etc., and if you’re one of them, you’ll probably like this movie also.

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viewed 10/25/13 8:00 pm at Prince Music Theater; scheduled to post 11/8/13; posted 1/31/14

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

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (***1/4)

Picking up about where Mesrine: Killer Instinct left off, this is nonetheless a different film than its predecessor. You don’t particularly need to have seen part one to make sense of part two, and in fact there is hardly any character overlap, save Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) himself. Here Mesrine is no longer the angry young man. He is older and has settled into a career, albeit as a bank robber only dabbling in other crimes. He is still capable of violence but it seems more measured. He reserves most of his hatred for the police and those running France’s maximum-security prisons. He believes himself to have a credo, to be a man of his word even as he publishes an exaggerated memoir aimed at increasing his fame and notoriety.

Lacking some of the vitality of Killer Instinct, this installment is nearly a character study, though its prison-escape sequence bests the one in the first film, and there are multiple shootouts. Here his penchant for disguises is more prominent. Like the first film, this one starts off with his death in 1979. Since it begins in 1973, it doesn’t skip ahead in time as much. It’s still episodic, but less so. Unlike the first film, this ends where it begins, with the police killing Mesrine. We now see this, for the first time, from the viewpoint of the police, a clever reminder that, to them, this was no master criminal, no gentleman bandit, but a thug they were determined to take down.

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viewed 9/8/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8–9/10

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (***1/4)

The gangster film had already been around awhile when the early classics The Public Enemy and Little Caesar were released in 1931. These formed the template for countless films that followed the rise and, usually, fall of a would-be mob boss. Arguably, this formula reached its zenith with the Godfather saga, which also incorporated the trope of family conflict that is nearly as frequent an ingredient in these stories. But filmmakers still try their hand at making something original of the genre. Just a few months ago there was A Prophet, another French film that is superior to this, probably, though this does have a certain visceral energy to it.

These films vary in location, time period, criminal proclivities of the antihero, and so on, but the primary characters generally fall into two types. One is the type who under other circumstances might have done something else with his life, but learn the ruthlessness that underlies criminality. Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Henry Hill in Goodfellas are such characters. So is the hero of The Prophet, who starts off as a scared prisoner. This suspense drama, a true story, is of the other type. If Jacques Mesrine ( Vincent Cassel) was once an ordinary young man, it was at a young age. In an early scene the young Jacques, just back from fighting in Algeria, berates his father for cooperating with the Germans during World War II. "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" he asks. And that's about as much of an explanation as we get for the remarkable criminal résumé that Mesrine would amass, on two continents, in the 1960s and ’70s. It's a record so extensive as to have been compiled in two parts, of which this is the first. (Even with that, the film skips ahead and omits several of Mesrine's documented adventures.)

What most gangster films have in common is the man who disregards all rules, and our fascination with that is why they keep making them. Attracting comely women and escaping from prison were among Mesrine’s talents, but it is sheer cockiness that propels him. Cassel is quite charismatic in the leading role. In terms of story, there is not much order to all that happens. Mesrine seems to have been an improviser, which is perhaps why he got caught and ultimately killed. No spoiler this, since it’s shown at the start of the film. The movie never returns to it, though. Instead, it stops in the middle, the story to be picked up in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, whose title is an homage to one of its classic forebears.

IMDB link

viewed 8/29/10 at Ritz 5

Nothing to Lose (***1/2)

As in The Fugitive, a convicted killer (Theo Maassen) escapes and sets out to prove his innocence, yet this story, based on an actual case, is far removed from that. That it’s the work of a Belgian, Pieter Kuijpers, who made another good crime drama, Godforsaken, is one reason. Another is that, for much of the film, the escapee is in the company of a thirteen-year-old girl (Lisa Smit) he’s taken as a hostage. Most significantly, the characters make the film unique. For one thing, it’s clear that, innocent or not, the convict is no Richard Kimble. His escape is from a facility for the criminally insane. At times the film operates like a thriller, as when he tries to flee the country. At others, it is more of a drama, but with the tension of wondering whether the girl is right as she begins to trust him, and without undue sentimentality.

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viewed 4/13/08 (Philadelphia Film Festival); reviewed 8/8/2010