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

-->

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

Life of Pi (***1/2)

Like Cast Away, much of this story is about a man stranded and alone, but instead of being American he is Indian, instead of an island he is on a small boat, and instead of a volleyball his only companion is a non-human predator called Richard Parker. Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee’s (Finding Neverland) adaptation of the Yann Martel bestseller is faithful to the novel’s spirit, though it omits many details about how to survive alone on a lifeboat.

Perhaps unnecessarily, Lee preserves the novel’s structure — a grown man, in Canada, telling the story of his distant childhood in India, and then his perilous voyage, to a curious stranger — and adds frequently gorgeous visuals: shimmering skies, glowing seas, and pastel cityscapes suggestive of a fable. Pi’s is a story  “to make you believe in God,” the stranger has been told. Pi (played winsomely by newcomer Suraj Shjarma), the son of an atheist, himself subscribes to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, and an element of spirituality runs through the movie, which can alternately be seen as a kind of magical realism. In some sense, both book and film draw a parallel between religious faith and storytelling, suggesting that the power of a good story is more important than certainty or literal truth. One need not agree to enjoy this existential story of adventure.

IMDb link

viewed 2/11/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East

The Way (***1/4)

The title refers, literally, to El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, a Christian pilgrimage route through Spain for the last dozen centuries. But Tom (Martin Sheen) is a widowed California ophthalmologist, not a seeker of spiritual truths. When his priest, offering comfort upon the unexpected death of his son, asks him if he’d like to pray, Tom answers simply “What for?” But he says it in the voice of one who has become embittered, rather than a skeptic.

 

Tom is not an expressive man, and he had a complicated relationship with the son. Perhaps it’s in a quest to understand his son’s refusal to settle down that Tom decides to complete the journey his son had begun before falling victim to a sudden storm. Or perhaps it’s simply to honor the dead. The son is played, in brief flashbacks that aren’t overdone, by Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed.

 

The lightly plotted drama strikes the familiar notes you expect it to—the journey being more important than destination, the importance of human connection, the meaning of loss—but it does so subtly. Instead of epiphanies, the movie lets its characters, especially Tom, emerge along the way. I appreciated that Tom remain ornery through much of the movie and quite the opposite of the silver-tongued president he played in The West Wing. As the title suggests, religion and spirituality obviously play a role in the plot, but there is no obvious message. In one scene, Tom and his traveling companions witness a centuries-old ceremony in a famous church. Only the faces of the four—Tom, a burly Dutchman, a bitter Canadian divorcée, and a prolix Irish writer— betray what they might have made of the whole thing. They don't say anything afterward. Estevez does not, in other words, force a particular meaning on the scene. In the end, we don't know how the journey will change the characters; it is enough that they will always remember it.

 

IMDB link

viewed 10/3/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/09/11

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

Of Time and the City (*1/2)

Outside of England, the only thing people probably know about the city of Liverpool is that it was the hometown of the Beatles. After seeing this film, you will know two things, the other being that it was also the hometown of writer-director Terence Davies, best known for his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. Not so much a history of the city as Davies’s nostalgic audiovisual memoir, mostly of the late 1940s through about the mid-1960s, it is clearly a deeply personal, carefully crafted film. Nonetheless, this doesn’t prevent it from being a dreadful bore.

The Beatles do show up, but for less time than a 1970 song (“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”) by Manchester’s Hollies is used, oddly, to illustrate footage of returning Korean War veterans. According to the narration Davies pompously provides, he had by 1970 lost interest in popular music, as well as his faith in God and queen. Religion and monarchy bring out snide sarcasm (the queen and her husband are “Betty and Phil”), but that’s at least a relief from the poetic pretention that Davies otherwise employs, e.g., blankets that “warm but give no comfort”—why’s that?

Primarily, the visuals are street scenes of ordinary citizens, quaintly dressed, that do convey the sense of long ago, longer even than the 50 or 60 years ago from which they actually date. In a few cases, important persons or events or prominent buildings are seen, but little information is imparted. Apparently it is enough for us to know that these are the scenes Davies recalls, bittersweetly but mostly fondly, in his mind. I longed at least for some on-screen descriptions. Although the footage skips about in time, the newest—dreary public housing in the 1960s and 1970s, casually dressed diners and shiny buildings in newly filmed scenes—is shown, by way of contrast, toward the end. The newer the footage, the more likely it is to be in color and of greater technical quality; this has the unintended effect of suggesting steady improvement, though if anything Davies intends the opposite.

It seems wrong to slam a work that was obviously a labor of love, and made with obvious attention. But there are ways to make a work personal while engaging the audience. For most viewers, watching this may be a chore.

IMDB link

viewed 4/5/09 at Bridge (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/6/09

Religulous (***)

Religion is “detrimental to the progress of humanity,” says comedian Bill Maher at the outset of this comic documentary. After a short look at his own religious history, including an interview with Mom and early standup clips, he spends about 90 minutes ridiculing its defenders. The movie is directed by Larry Charles, whose experience directing Borat must have come in handy. (In each case, Charles arranged interviews without explaining the viewpoint, or in this case identity, of the person doing the interview.)

There’s Protestants, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims, who get the roughest treatment. No Hindus or Quakers. There’s the actor playing Jesus at Orlando theme park, and creationist Arkansas senator Mark Pryor. There’s a rabbi displaying inventions that essentially employ technicalities to get around rules relating to Sabbath prohibitions. What can it mean that all of these people are so certain about beliefs that contradict each other? (Unfortunately, Maher doesn’t make this point.) Catholicism, perhaps, comes off best, thanks to Maher’s interview with a hilariously skeptical Vatican historian who dismisses many aspects of the faith as, essentially, opiates for the masses. But the movie doesn’t really engage with the ideas of those who are able to reconcile religion with the modern world, and science. The closest it comes is an interview with scientist Frances Collins of the Human Genome Project, who admittedly seems a little fuzzy explaining his beliefs.

Maher ranges from skeptical to disrespectful to smug, not unlike on his HBO show. Typical of the smug Maher is his explanation that he disbelieves the story of Jonah and the Whale because “I’m not ten.” His shorthand for a literal interpretation of Genesis is “a talking snake.” Humorously inserted among the interviews are on screen subtitles that contradict what the interviewees are saying, and cheesy film clips on which the producers obviously spent a bundle. (Apparently nothing was left to edit out all the visible boom microphones.) A Flintstones clip, for example, illustrates the idea that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

Those looking for an amusing look at some of the unusual ways people express their spirituality and aren’t offended by Maher’s derisive views toward religion will find the movie funny. But if we take his argument seriously, as he means us to, there are flaws. For one thing, he spends way too much time with fundamentalists and biblical literalists. It’s overstating it to call this a straw-man argument, because such people are a significant part of the American religious scene. And from a humor standpoint, a dinosaur with a saddle, found in Kentucky’s Creation Museum, is more amusing than an anecdote about Gandhi. But if you’re making an argument that religion generally is a force for bad, and Maher does, then you need to come to grips those who take more nuanced views. If you show religious fanatics, like the Muslim rapper in this movie who seems to defend violence, then you need to argue their actions outweigh those of people who have been inspired to good by religion.

It’s an issue I’ve wrestled with myself; I have the same view as Maher, that it makes no sense to believe something on faith alone, but I can’t say for certain that the world would be a better place if everyone agreed. To use the obvious religious metaphor, Maher is preaching to the converted, who will have lots of fun. The movie’s too scattershot, and too disrespectful, to be seen as a serious attempt to convince believers that they’re wrong, but they won’t be watching anyway. What he does want is for the faithless to go public. Given polls showing that fewer Americans would vote for an atheist for president than even a Muslim, this makes sense and justifies the movie’s existence on some other ground besides comedy.

IMDB link

viewed 9/25/08 at Ritz Bourse (screening)

The Simpsons Movie (***1/4)

Which is more likely, that it would take 20 years for The Simpsons to make it to the movieplexes, or that, with 400-plus half-hour episodes in the can, it would still be on the air as USA’s longest-running comedy series? But whether on small screen or large, the animated family is always pretty much the same.

Whereas the South Park movie was, unlike its TV progenitor, an animated musical, The Simpsons Movie wouldn’t have seemed out of place as a three-part episode on Fox. To be sure, the animation is a notch better, and they’d be three, or at least two, of the funnier episodes, but it doesn’t feel very new. And that’s okay.

As has been true of most episodes in recent years, the main plot’s driven by hapless household head Homer, while wife Marge’s choice winds up, as many times before, being deciding how much she can put up with. This time, Homer provokes a crisis so great that the whole town of Springfield’s angry at him, not just his family. Meanwhile, bratty son Bart finds a soft spot for goody-two-shoes neighbor Ned Flanders, while ordinarily mopey Lisa meets a boy. But these are minor subplots on the road to Alaska, of all places. If there is anything surprising about the movie, it’s the relatively straightforward storyline. There’s an environmental theme, and even a religious one, which doesn’t stop the movie from making fun of environmentalism, religion, and anything else that came into the screenwriters’—15 are credited—heads. (A certain environmental documentary is spoofed as An Irritating Truth.) At the end, Homer learns the same sort of lesson about selfishness that he learns and forgets with regularity on the series.

As a movie, this pretty much met my expectations. Despite being a work-in-progress for four years, it doesn’t feel worked over and processed. There’s only one celebrity voice cameo, excepting the band Green Day’s appearance in a pretty funny opening sequence. The mildly ballyhooed shot of young Bart’s private part turns out to be brief fodder for a clever sight gag. But we get to see Mr. Burns, Krusty the Clown, Moe, Lenny and Carl, and most of the other endearingly foolish residents of Springfield. (Sorry, Sideshow Bob fans.) So, after 20 years, Matt Groening, Jim Brooks, et al haven’t broken new ground, but have made a movie to please people who’ve seen the series and liked it. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a good starting point.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/2/07