We're the Millers (***)

A small-time pot dealer (Jason Sudeikis) hires a broke stripper (Jennifer Aniston) and a couple of teenagers to be his pretend family on a smuggling trip to Mexico. The four of them veer between bickering and fearing for their lives while learning that, if you fake something long enough, it starts to seem a little real.

By no means does it get all sentimental, but the characters are real enough that some of the less-realistic aspects of the plot aren’t bothersome. And the funniest moments come from the characters, not the inevitable sex jokes. (The raunch level is medium, up to and including anal-sex jokes.) I enjoyed, for example, when the “daughter” (Emma Roberts) is completely baffled by a reference to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The screenplay is the combined effort of the writers of Wedding Crashers, who probably handled most of the dialogue, and Hot Tub Time Machine, who probably came up with the idea of having Jennifer Aniston do a (PG-rated) strip for the guys running the marijuana warehouse.

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viewed 6/28/14 on iPad [HBO] and posted 6/29/14

Holy Rollers (***)

Among the Amish there is the tradition of rumspinga, a period during which those on the cusp of adulthood may experience a taste of the greater world, able to return afterward to the community by their own choosing. There is no equivalent among Hasidic Jews, but Brooklynite Sam (Jesse Eisenberg) initiates his own ritual in hopes of gaining a financial independence. Given the chance to make easy money by transporting packages overseas, he comes into contact with people of a different sort. He slowly adapts to the ways of the Gentiles and figures out the nature of his illegal cargo, in turn recruiting other credulous folks who resemble his former self. As he alienates his own family and friends, he discovers concepts like partying, and women who put out.

As a fish-out-of-water story, this fact-based drama is just fine, and I had no cause to believe the portrait of the culture was incorrect. But the appeal is more, hey, isn’t it weird that a Hasidic dude became a big drug dealer, rather than any sort of deeper look at the values espoused by a cloistered culture and the ways such traditions are maintained. (For something like that, see Ushpizin, in which two convicts wander into an Orthodox community in Israel.) Eisenberg may look a bit different with his long curls, but his performance is of a piece with the trying-to-fit-in teens he’s played in The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland.

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viewed 4/10/2010 (Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview) and reviewed 7/6/2010

Frozen River (***1/4)

I love a movie that's about something I've never even thought about, or a completely unfamiliar place. The heroine here (Melissa Leo), if that’s the right word, finds herself with an opportunity to make ends meet by smuggling illegal immigrants. But she lives along the Canadian border, in the northernmost part of New York State. So the customers are not poor Mexicans, but Asians who've paid tens of thousands of dollars to be transported in a car trunk across land and ice claimed not by Canada or the United States, but the Mohawk tribe.

Leo plays a middle-aged mother of two whose husband has taken off to feed his gambling addiction, a woman who carries a pistol, who works in a dollar store, who doesn’t know where Pakistan is, who fears losing the down payment she put on a double-wide modular home. Her partner-in-crime is a Mohawk woman who’s not well-liked, or that likable, and one imagines that their serendipitous joint enterprise is about the only way these women would come into contact.

The cultural aspects are secondary to the plot, but certainly add to it. The setting is at once new and familiar. The location along the St. Lawrence river, in a part of America where the nearest big city is Montréal, is unusual enough, but the nondescript look of the place is what anyone who has driven much in rural America has seen. This is not the idyllic Americana that small-town movies emphasize, but the America built around old state highways and cheap architecture.

Everything about this movie is as believable as the lines on Leo's make-up-free face, the shot that begins the movie. (She’s very good, as is Indian actress Misty Upham.) This is a nicely compact drama about a mother, not illegal immigration or race relations. The ending may work too hard to ingratiate the characters rather than bring these social issues into sharper focus. It remains a small movie. But expect big things from its first-time writer-director, Courtney Hunt.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/17/08

Blood Diamond (***1/2)

 ? A huge stone found in a Sierra Leone diamond mine offers tantalizing possibilities, and danger, for the conscripted laborer (Djimon Hounsou) who found it as well as a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a journalist (Jennifer Connelly) with whom he crosses paths. The African country’s recent civil war forms the backdrop for this thriller that shows how diamonds are used to finance civil wars.

+ This isn’t a sprawling, globe-hopping movie in the manner of Traffic or Syriana. But for a movie that doesn’t try to do too much, it does give a remarkably good primer on the seediest side of the global diamond business while managing, in a subplot, to illustrate how child soldiers are “recruited” and indoctrinated. The corporation that buys the “conflict diamonds” called Van De Kamp, is an obvious stand-in for DeBeers. (It would make a whole other fascinating feature or documentary to look at the history of that company, which virtually created the market for diamond jewels and uses its near-monopoly power to regulate their scarcity.) I should mention that the movie is surprisingly action-oriented. Although Hounsou’s character’s story is the thread that the plot follows, DiCaprio’s character is the pivotal one. With this on top of his recent effort in Departed, the one-time Titanic pretty boy continues to demonstrate his versatility. (It took me a few minutes to get used to DiCaprio’s South African accent, which the South Africans on the IMDB message board seem to approve.) The movie doesn’t work if he’s an unbridled villain, but would also have seemed false if he’d turned into a Peace Corps liberal. Instead, he’s the kind of movie character you can discuss afterward and reasonably come to different conclusions about. Director Ed Zwick (Glory), who shot in Mozambique and South Africa, also captures the natural beauty of the land.

- I’m not sure where it would have fit, but perhaps a minute or so where someone explained the history of the tiny country where the movie is set would have been useful. However, at 143 minutes, the movie feels the tiniest bit bloated.

= ***1/2 This is one of the most powerful movies of the year. It’s a “problem” film that doesn’t come off as preachy. It’s also nice to see this and other recent mainstream films being set in Africa, both for the novelty and because it humanizes a place largely unfamiliar to most Americans.

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