You know that NRA slogan – “guns don’t kill people, people do”? Ben Affleck’s film The Town is built on similar logic – guns don’t rob banks, people do. This is a crime drama, all right, but its more about the people than about their crimes. The opening informs us that Charlestown, a “blue collar neighborhood” of Boston, is notorious for producing heist artists and bank robbers. “Blue collar” is exactly right. For the characters in The Town, robbery isn’t a kick; it’s a job. You all but expect them to punch time cards after a heist. And like any other job, robbery can get complicated. There are bad days at the office, times you just want to quit, and even (maybe) an office romance. The Town is a genre piece through and through, but it takes time to create real characters, and that lifts it above the pack.
The Town focuses on a slick team of Charlestown-bred robbers, led by Doug MacRay (Affleck). Also on the team are electronics expert Desmond (Owen Burke), ace driver Gloansy (Slaine), and Doug’s friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) who provides the muscle. In the course of a bank heist, Jem gets nervous and takes a young bank manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage. You know, just in case. It makes Doug uneasy; kidnapping is a whole other thing. They let Claire go unharmed. Yeah, they were masked and she was blindfolded – but how much might she know? Plus, Jem swiped her driver’s license. Turns out she lives in Charlestown. Oops.
Jem offers to tail Claire and see who she talks to, and what they talk about. But Doug knows Jem is too high-strung, so he takes the job himself. Turns out that, when they both aren’t at “work,” Doug and Claire hit it off. She sees him as an ordinary, likable guy. He sees her as a lead on a new, ordinary life. If only there weren’t a few pesky secrets getting in the way. Meanwhile, a team of FBI agents led by the relentless Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) is closing in on the gang. And, wouldn’t you know, a local crime lord, Fergie the Florist (Pete Postlethwaite) picks just this time to offer Doug’s gang that One Big Job. We all know how that one goes.
Indeed we do. What keeps The Town from felling like the same old thing is that Affleck and his team make the film about personalities, not capers. Yes, there’s violence here, the action scenes are well done, and the heists are taut and suspenseful. The real tension here, though, comes from personalities. One of the tensest scenes, in fact, hinges not on who will shoot whom, but where people sit at a café table (I will leave you to discover why). I always appreciate a movie that generates more interest in characters based on what they might do than what we see them doing, and that is the case here. The plot features two wild cards. One is the hotheaded Jem. The other is Doug’s fundamental decency. Both, it turns out, could spell trouble. This movie shares more than its Boston setting with Good Will Hunting, which Affleck co-wrote. Both movies deal with the importance of choices, the costs of lying (to others and to oneself), and relationship to the past. That’s more than you usually get out of a crime picture; parts of your brain can actually get traction on this one.
Affleck, already known as a screenwriter and actor, shows a deft directing touch in The Town. Stylistic flourishes are at a minimum, and the pace never flags (more impressive a feat than it sounds – this is a talky film for an action flick). The action scenes, even if occasionally improbable, are easy to follow. I especially liked the car chase through the narrow alleys of Boston – placement and not number of cars mattered for a change. I’m tired of chases that leave a set looking like Hurricane Katrina just came through. This one - tight, twisty and desperate - feels both more realistic and more entertaining than most. The movie looks good, and is exciting where it should be, without being over the top.
The Town’s biggest asset is characterization, and the ensemble cast deserves a lion’s share of the credit. Doug is not a big stretch for Affleck, but he does what is required. Doug is believably tough when he needs to be, and also believably decent, and smart. Affleck has always excelled at good-hearted fellows with rough edges, and Doug is a credible addition to that list. Jeremy Renner, who is in danger of being typecast as the Guy You Don’t Want to Hang Out With, manages the difficult feat of making Jem both troubling and somehow understandable. Yes, the guy is dangerous, but he has reason to be—and darn it all if he doesn’t make some sense. It’s a worthy follow-up to his lauded turn in The Hurt Locker. As Frawley, Jon Hamm makes use of the same icy charm he displays as Don Draper on “Mad Men,” though the agent gets to show more emotion than the ad man. Claire is probably the character least well served by the screenplay, but Rebecca Hall nonetheless makes her seem real. Doug and Claire have believable chemistry. Able support is provided by Chris Cooper as Doug’s incarcerated father, Blake Lively as Jem’s drug-addled sister (who carries a torch for Doug), and, naturally, Mr. Postlethwaite as a florist whom you don’t want delivering anything to your door.
By the end, things shake out in ways that aren’t that surprising. What is surprising is that the film really takes the time to earn its payoffs. The Town is conventional in many aspects, but it’s not on autopilot. This is a solid second effort behind the camera for Mr. Affleck, and a pleasurable turn by a handful of talented actors. Like one of Doug’s plans, The Town is a well-executed caper.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Social Network (2010)
Yes, David Fincher’s The Social Network is about Facebook. But that’s sort of like saying that Star Wars is about space flight: it’s in there, but it’s not really the meat of the film. The Social Network is a smart, quick-moving look at the creative process and its collateral damage, and the high cost of success and fame. It wouldn’t matter if the bright young men at the film’s center had invented a new light bulb or a coffee maker – how the invention happens and what happens because of it are what matter here.
The film follows Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in his rise from Harvard sophomore to head of the world’s favorite networking site. It begins not just in the middle of things, but in the middle of a conversation. Zuckerberg is having a talk with his girlfriend in a bar, and the talk goes badly in most ways such a talk can go badly. They break up, and Zuckerberg sulks his way back to his dorm. With a stomach full of beer and a mouthful of sour grapes, he goes online. First he turns to his blog, writing angry slurs about the girl’s family and figure. But the judgmental nature of his posts gives him an idea. Zuckerberg hacks the pictures out of the online “facebooks” of Harvard houses, and, using a formula his best friend uses to rank chess opponents, creates Facemash, a site where men can rank the attractiveness of women. It’s like fantasy football for looks, and in a matter of hours has become so popular with undergraduate males that the web traffic crashes Harvard’s network.
The site earns Zuckerberg the hatred of Harvard’s women, and probation from its administrative board, but it also does what he hoped it would – makes him famous as a hacker. He is soon approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), alpha-male twins who are star rowers but also have a great idea for an exclusive Harvard networking site (“The Harvard Connection”). They have clout, but no programming skills—but Zuckerberg does. Their idea gives him his own, and Zuckerberg proceeds to stonewall the Winklevosses while developing his own networking site, “The Facebook.” As the twins stew, Zuckerberg talks his friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) into bankrolling the spread of The Facebook – he’ll even bring Saverin onboard as “Chief Financial Officer.” The site, of course, is off like a rocket--so much so that it lands on the radar or erstwhile Napster inventor and professional schmoozer Sean Parker (a delightfully shallow Justin Timberlake), who promises to take Zuckerberg to the big time. Of course, this may mean an upgrade from that old staff of friends and roomies, but so it goes.
That it doesn’t go smoothly is more or less well known. The film is framed by twin depositions in lawsuits Zuckerberg later faced from the angry Winklevoss twins and the resentful Saverin. How much of this is “true?’ Hard to say. The filmmakers didn’t have much contact with the real players, and that’s ultimately to the film’s benefit. This is a story, not a documentary, and Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin focus less on facts than on the effects of the decisions Zuckerberg, et. al. made. The Social Network feels like a cross between a story of creativity ala Shakespeare in Love and a story where a group of guys dreams up a caper that gets them in over their heads (like the first two Guy Ritchie films). The “social network” at issue here is not so much the website as the people who surround it. Of course, one of those “networks” survives while the other dissolves. That friendships are destroyed over a product whose chief activity is “friending” others only adds a helping of delicious irony.
Of course, a story about guys writing code and having conversations isn’t necessarily riveting stuff. Fincher and Sorkin, however, prove to be exactly the team to pull it off. Sorkin has always written well about writers, and Fincher, in Fight Club, famously brought one man’s imaginings to wonderful life. Together with their actors, the two craft a tale that moves at a breakneck pace, maintains interest, and gives you things to think about long afterward. It helps that both take a more direct approach than in times past. Sorkin’s wordy script has all the music and crackle of a fireworks display (when a partner of the Winklevoss twins wants to “hire the Sopranos to beat the s--- out of” Zuckerberg, one of the twins responds, “We can do that ourselves. I’m six-five, 220, and there’s two of me!”). Fortunately, the writer avoids the bombast that has marred some of his later TV outings. Likewise, Fincher—who can do visual tricks and pyrotechnics with the best—tones it way down. The best compliment I can give him is that I didn’t notice the direction, but every shot felt right. The score, by Trent Reznor (yes, that Trent Reznor) and Atticus Ross, provides energy and drive without grabbing too much attention. This is a very well-made film.
It helps that the performers all create well-rounded (let’s avoid “real,” for the obvious reasons) people. We know Eisenberg can do geeky and chatty, and those skills serve him well as the brilliant and argumentative Zuckerberg. But he also brings a coldness to the part, and its to his credit that we’re never sure how much of that chillness is real hard-heartedness, how much is defense mechanism, and how much is the simple indifference of a man who lives mostly in his head. It’s a performance that’s a little pathetic, a little creepy, a little off-putting, and a lot watchable. Garfield’s Saverin is more conventionally likeable – a well-dressed economics major who makes more in stocks than most students make in their summer jobs. The smart partner everyone ignores has been done before, but Garfield makes it clear that it’s Saverin’s morality that is ultimately violated, not his business sense. He’s cheated, yes—but he’s also heartbroken. Timberlake is one of the film’s small joys – his Parker is all surface glitz and buried insecurity. This, too, could have been a cliché character – the “playboy entrepreneur” – but Timberlake lets us see that Parker, though more gregarious, craves acceptance just as much as Zuckerberg. Parker blows more cash, but neither man is really in this for the money. It’s deeper than that. Hammer, with many an assist from a double and camera tricks, is great fun as the Winklevoss twins, and Rooney Mara is a nice breath of common sense as the girl who first calls Zuckerberg on his flaws and starts the face-ball rolling. One would hope she got a cut of the Facebook profits—that is, if she were real.
Much has been made of whether or not this film, with its Machiavellian plotting, will “tarnish” Zuckerberg’s reputation. I doubt it. For one thing, no one associated with the film ever talked to him, so there’s no way this can be an accurate representation. And for another, the knowledge that the creator of a popular product is a jerk rarely diminishes the public’s enthusiasm for either one – just ask Simon Cowell. The Facebook connection makes The Social Network timely. The film’s deeper themes of inspiration, loyalty, betrayal, and the price of fame make it timeless. You don’t have to know or use Facebook to enjoy this movie. It’s simply well-crafted, from start to finish. I suppose it’s a compliment to the film and its subject matter to sum up in Facebook terms: I liked this. I suggest you do, too.
The film follows Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in his rise from Harvard sophomore to head of the world’s favorite networking site. It begins not just in the middle of things, but in the middle of a conversation. Zuckerberg is having a talk with his girlfriend in a bar, and the talk goes badly in most ways such a talk can go badly. They break up, and Zuckerberg sulks his way back to his dorm. With a stomach full of beer and a mouthful of sour grapes, he goes online. First he turns to his blog, writing angry slurs about the girl’s family and figure. But the judgmental nature of his posts gives him an idea. Zuckerberg hacks the pictures out of the online “facebooks” of Harvard houses, and, using a formula his best friend uses to rank chess opponents, creates Facemash, a site where men can rank the attractiveness of women. It’s like fantasy football for looks, and in a matter of hours has become so popular with undergraduate males that the web traffic crashes Harvard’s network.
The site earns Zuckerberg the hatred of Harvard’s women, and probation from its administrative board, but it also does what he hoped it would – makes him famous as a hacker. He is soon approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), alpha-male twins who are star rowers but also have a great idea for an exclusive Harvard networking site (“The Harvard Connection”). They have clout, but no programming skills—but Zuckerberg does. Their idea gives him his own, and Zuckerberg proceeds to stonewall the Winklevosses while developing his own networking site, “The Facebook.” As the twins stew, Zuckerberg talks his friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) into bankrolling the spread of The Facebook – he’ll even bring Saverin onboard as “Chief Financial Officer.” The site, of course, is off like a rocket--so much so that it lands on the radar or erstwhile Napster inventor and professional schmoozer Sean Parker (a delightfully shallow Justin Timberlake), who promises to take Zuckerberg to the big time. Of course, this may mean an upgrade from that old staff of friends and roomies, but so it goes.
That it doesn’t go smoothly is more or less well known. The film is framed by twin depositions in lawsuits Zuckerberg later faced from the angry Winklevoss twins and the resentful Saverin. How much of this is “true?’ Hard to say. The filmmakers didn’t have much contact with the real players, and that’s ultimately to the film’s benefit. This is a story, not a documentary, and Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin focus less on facts than on the effects of the decisions Zuckerberg, et. al. made. The Social Network feels like a cross between a story of creativity ala Shakespeare in Love and a story where a group of guys dreams up a caper that gets them in over their heads (like the first two Guy Ritchie films). The “social network” at issue here is not so much the website as the people who surround it. Of course, one of those “networks” survives while the other dissolves. That friendships are destroyed over a product whose chief activity is “friending” others only adds a helping of delicious irony.
Of course, a story about guys writing code and having conversations isn’t necessarily riveting stuff. Fincher and Sorkin, however, prove to be exactly the team to pull it off. Sorkin has always written well about writers, and Fincher, in Fight Club, famously brought one man’s imaginings to wonderful life. Together with their actors, the two craft a tale that moves at a breakneck pace, maintains interest, and gives you things to think about long afterward. It helps that both take a more direct approach than in times past. Sorkin’s wordy script has all the music and crackle of a fireworks display (when a partner of the Winklevoss twins wants to “hire the Sopranos to beat the s--- out of” Zuckerberg, one of the twins responds, “We can do that ourselves. I’m six-five, 220, and there’s two of me!”). Fortunately, the writer avoids the bombast that has marred some of his later TV outings. Likewise, Fincher—who can do visual tricks and pyrotechnics with the best—tones it way down. The best compliment I can give him is that I didn’t notice the direction, but every shot felt right. The score, by Trent Reznor (yes, that Trent Reznor) and Atticus Ross, provides energy and drive without grabbing too much attention. This is a very well-made film.
It helps that the performers all create well-rounded (let’s avoid “real,” for the obvious reasons) people. We know Eisenberg can do geeky and chatty, and those skills serve him well as the brilliant and argumentative Zuckerberg. But he also brings a coldness to the part, and its to his credit that we’re never sure how much of that chillness is real hard-heartedness, how much is defense mechanism, and how much is the simple indifference of a man who lives mostly in his head. It’s a performance that’s a little pathetic, a little creepy, a little off-putting, and a lot watchable. Garfield’s Saverin is more conventionally likeable – a well-dressed economics major who makes more in stocks than most students make in their summer jobs. The smart partner everyone ignores has been done before, but Garfield makes it clear that it’s Saverin’s morality that is ultimately violated, not his business sense. He’s cheated, yes—but he’s also heartbroken. Timberlake is one of the film’s small joys – his Parker is all surface glitz and buried insecurity. This, too, could have been a cliché character – the “playboy entrepreneur” – but Timberlake lets us see that Parker, though more gregarious, craves acceptance just as much as Zuckerberg. Parker blows more cash, but neither man is really in this for the money. It’s deeper than that. Hammer, with many an assist from a double and camera tricks, is great fun as the Winklevoss twins, and Rooney Mara is a nice breath of common sense as the girl who first calls Zuckerberg on his flaws and starts the face-ball rolling. One would hope she got a cut of the Facebook profits—that is, if she were real.
Much has been made of whether or not this film, with its Machiavellian plotting, will “tarnish” Zuckerberg’s reputation. I doubt it. For one thing, no one associated with the film ever talked to him, so there’s no way this can be an accurate representation. And for another, the knowledge that the creator of a popular product is a jerk rarely diminishes the public’s enthusiasm for either one – just ask Simon Cowell. The Facebook connection makes The Social Network timely. The film’s deeper themes of inspiration, loyalty, betrayal, and the price of fame make it timeless. You don’t have to know or use Facebook to enjoy this movie. It’s simply well-crafted, from start to finish. I suppose it’s a compliment to the film and its subject matter to sum up in Facebook terms: I liked this. I suggest you do, too.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Get Low (2010)
The old hermit rides his mule cart into town. He says he’s looking to arrange a funeral. His own. The kicker? He wants it now, while he’s still alive to appreciate it. The local priest is a little uneasy about this. Not the town undertaker, though. It’s bad when a funeral home is hurting for business. So he’ll take the request. But how do you plan a “funeral party” for a live man who hasn’t spoken to anyone in 40 years? Who can possibly deliver a eulogy? Is it still a eulogy, if the guy is standing right there?
This odd circumstance (based, I learn, on a somewhat true tall tale of a Tennessee man who attended his own massive funeral) is the basis for Aaron Schneider’s film Get Low. The movie, set in 1930s Tennessee, does in fact unfold like something Mark Twain might have told, with a little bit of rough humor, a little bit of mystery, and a whole lot of comment on what makes people tick. The old hermit is Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), who sports a beard like an Old Testament prophet and shoots trespassers like a nervous moonshiner. The undertaker is Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), a slick transplant from Chicago, who knows very well that bodies ride lighter in the hearse when relieved of heavy burdens of cash. Frank’s assistant is Buddy (Lucas Black), a good-hearted new father who spends a lot of time trying to work out what these two shifty older fellows are on about. Also in the mix are Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), a friend of Frank’s and one-time girlfriend of Felix (back before the beard), and a pair of pastors: town priest Gus Horton (Gerald McRaney), who doesn’t quite know what to make of Felix, and Illinois preacher Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs), who knows exactly what to make of Felix, but doesn’t want to say. There’s also the matter of the woman who appears in a faded photo on Felix’s wall, and a story about a man falling out of a house on fire.
There’s really very little plot. Felix’s odd request, his odder manner, and his odder-still history serve as excuses for the characters to bounce off each other and, in the process, explore themes of life, death, forgiveness, and redemption. There are mystery elements (the identity of the woman in the photo, for instance), but the answers are seldom surprising. The fact of knowledge matters less to this film than what people do with knowledge. For example, at first Felix wants anyone who knows a story about him to come to his funeral and tell it. It turns out, though, that some stories are more interesting to Felix himself than others. There’s something he needs to hear. What it is matters less than why he needs to hear it, and who he needs to hear it from. Get Low evokes thought, not surprise, and is better for that fact.
Really, though, the film is about the acting. Duvall, Murray, and Spacek could read recipe cards for an hour and a half and still be entertaining. None of the three breaks new ground here. Duvall’s done the complex loner before, Spacek’s done the sweet-but-tough belle before, and Murray’s done the world-weary quipster before. But watching these three together is like watching three star athletes run time-tested plays: the joy is in the execution. Duvall and Murray in particular are experts at wringing meaning out of a single grunt or half-smile. In lesser hands, Felix Bush would be ridiculous—but with Duvall in the role, he’s real. Cobbs brings a nice authority to Rev. Jackson. Black is adequate as Buddy (often saddled with needless reaction shots). The part mostly calls for him to be the optimistic foil to the two grumpy old men, but, exactly because those two old men are played by Duvall and Murray, Black’s performance often seems to lack depth. The film wants us to think the character has learned something by the end, but the performance doesn’t show it. McRaney, himself an actor of some physical presence, is criminally underused here. I wonder if some of his part ended up on the cutting room floor.
The rest of the film isn’t as solid as the acting. There are some strange shifts in tone, and certain plot strands that seem dropped for no good reason. The two opening sequences – a flashback to the burning house, and a nearly wordless bit where some kids who sneak onto Felix’s land learn the error of their ways—show a creative spark that soon fades into more pedestrian modes of storytelling. Nothing is wrong with the look of the film – the costumes and setting are right on target. It’s just that the film overall lacks a certain unity. This is one of those movies that seems not to trust itself, and that’s a shame given the quality of the talent involved. The style of the piece just isn’t up to the level of the acting it contains.
Still, there’s a lot to like here. There’s nothing wrong with watching an expert cast go through the paces, and it’s nice to see a film that remembers that the most special of effects are those created by human voices and faces. Get Low is also remarkable for two other reasons: in a culture increasingly obsessed with shallow youth, here’s a film about complex older characters; and the movie is actually about serious things – about faith, about grief, about dealing with the past, about how if it takes a village to raise a kid, it may also take one to understand a grown man.
I find that I like the film the more I think about it after the fact, which is both a compliment and a criticism – a compliment to the content, a criticism of the experience itself. This is a film that makes you think, and for that, and for the performances, I can recommend it. It’s a good film, but not a great one—a wry, soulful look at some of the dustier corners of the human psyche. I’m serious about the Twain comparison. Many books get turned into movies these days. Get Low is that rare movie that might actually work just as well as a book. Especially if you could get Duvall, Murray, and Spacek to read the CD version. Or those recipe cards. I’m in either way.
This odd circumstance (based, I learn, on a somewhat true tall tale of a Tennessee man who attended his own massive funeral) is the basis for Aaron Schneider’s film Get Low. The movie, set in 1930s Tennessee, does in fact unfold like something Mark Twain might have told, with a little bit of rough humor, a little bit of mystery, and a whole lot of comment on what makes people tick. The old hermit is Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), who sports a beard like an Old Testament prophet and shoots trespassers like a nervous moonshiner. The undertaker is Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), a slick transplant from Chicago, who knows very well that bodies ride lighter in the hearse when relieved of heavy burdens of cash. Frank’s assistant is Buddy (Lucas Black), a good-hearted new father who spends a lot of time trying to work out what these two shifty older fellows are on about. Also in the mix are Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), a friend of Frank’s and one-time girlfriend of Felix (back before the beard), and a pair of pastors: town priest Gus Horton (Gerald McRaney), who doesn’t quite know what to make of Felix, and Illinois preacher Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs), who knows exactly what to make of Felix, but doesn’t want to say. There’s also the matter of the woman who appears in a faded photo on Felix’s wall, and a story about a man falling out of a house on fire.
There’s really very little plot. Felix’s odd request, his odder manner, and his odder-still history serve as excuses for the characters to bounce off each other and, in the process, explore themes of life, death, forgiveness, and redemption. There are mystery elements (the identity of the woman in the photo, for instance), but the answers are seldom surprising. The fact of knowledge matters less to this film than what people do with knowledge. For example, at first Felix wants anyone who knows a story about him to come to his funeral and tell it. It turns out, though, that some stories are more interesting to Felix himself than others. There’s something he needs to hear. What it is matters less than why he needs to hear it, and who he needs to hear it from. Get Low evokes thought, not surprise, and is better for that fact.
Really, though, the film is about the acting. Duvall, Murray, and Spacek could read recipe cards for an hour and a half and still be entertaining. None of the three breaks new ground here. Duvall’s done the complex loner before, Spacek’s done the sweet-but-tough belle before, and Murray’s done the world-weary quipster before. But watching these three together is like watching three star athletes run time-tested plays: the joy is in the execution. Duvall and Murray in particular are experts at wringing meaning out of a single grunt or half-smile. In lesser hands, Felix Bush would be ridiculous—but with Duvall in the role, he’s real. Cobbs brings a nice authority to Rev. Jackson. Black is adequate as Buddy (often saddled with needless reaction shots). The part mostly calls for him to be the optimistic foil to the two grumpy old men, but, exactly because those two old men are played by Duvall and Murray, Black’s performance often seems to lack depth. The film wants us to think the character has learned something by the end, but the performance doesn’t show it. McRaney, himself an actor of some physical presence, is criminally underused here. I wonder if some of his part ended up on the cutting room floor.
The rest of the film isn’t as solid as the acting. There are some strange shifts in tone, and certain plot strands that seem dropped for no good reason. The two opening sequences – a flashback to the burning house, and a nearly wordless bit where some kids who sneak onto Felix’s land learn the error of their ways—show a creative spark that soon fades into more pedestrian modes of storytelling. Nothing is wrong with the look of the film – the costumes and setting are right on target. It’s just that the film overall lacks a certain unity. This is one of those movies that seems not to trust itself, and that’s a shame given the quality of the talent involved. The style of the piece just isn’t up to the level of the acting it contains.
Still, there’s a lot to like here. There’s nothing wrong with watching an expert cast go through the paces, and it’s nice to see a film that remembers that the most special of effects are those created by human voices and faces. Get Low is also remarkable for two other reasons: in a culture increasingly obsessed with shallow youth, here’s a film about complex older characters; and the movie is actually about serious things – about faith, about grief, about dealing with the past, about how if it takes a village to raise a kid, it may also take one to understand a grown man.
I find that I like the film the more I think about it after the fact, which is both a compliment and a criticism – a compliment to the content, a criticism of the experience itself. This is a film that makes you think, and for that, and for the performances, I can recommend it. It’s a good film, but not a great one—a wry, soulful look at some of the dustier corners of the human psyche. I’m serious about the Twain comparison. Many books get turned into movies these days. Get Low is that rare movie that might actually work just as well as a book. Especially if you could get Duvall, Murray, and Spacek to read the CD version. Or those recipe cards. I’m in either way.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Inception (2010)
In graduate school, I read a book called The Craft of Thought by Mary Carruthers, which explained the way in which medieval monks were able to memorize enormous quantities of Biblical text. The monks constructed vast spaces in their minds—“rooms” in which they could store verses. To remember, they mentally walked through the structures they’d made: one room held, say, the Psalms. Another held the Gospel of Luke. And so on. Christopher Nolan’s Inception takes that idea of mental structures and uses it as the basis of a heist movie. What if a person’s mental “rooms” could be invaded by outsiders, and looted for their contents? And what if someone started messing with the architecture? Could you alter a person’s mind not with external suggestion, but from inside? What would be the consequences for them? For you?
The world of Inception accepts that these things are possible. The “extraction” of ideas from a person’s head, by sneaking into the virtual reality of their subconscious while they dream (minds are more vulnerable then), is available as form of corporate espionage—the ultimate in intellectual property theft. One of the best in the business is a man named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose services have been retained by wealthy energy company owner Saito (Ken Watanabe) in order to mentally thieve some secrets. That job doesn’t go quite as planned, but Saito likes what he sees and offers Cobb a different job: not extraction (the theft of an idea) but inception (the planting of an idea). Saito wants to convince the heir to a powerful rival corporation (Cillian Murphy) to break up the empire he is set to inherit from his dying father. Inception is complicated (the film explains) because the mind, like the body, resists foreign entities. The mind will attack invading thoughts the way antibodies attack viruses. Most in the extraction business think inception is essentially impossible, but Cobb has reason to believe otherwise. Plus, Saito offers a juicy reward: he has the money and pull to clear up some nasty lingering legal business involving Cobb’s wife (Marion Cotillard) and children. Cobb takes the assignment.
What follows is essentially a caper picture, though the exact details are best left for you to discover, as Inception is at least as much about procedures as results. As usual, the mastermind—Cobb—assembles a crack team. Cobb’s team includes his resourceful right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); a “forger” named Eames (Tom Hardy) whose specialty is faking personalities rather than documents; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), an expert in brain chemistry; and Ariadne (Ellen Page) a brilliant young architecture student who will design the mental space in which to trap the mark. As usual, the basic plan for the heist is explained beforehand, setting up the rules of the game, as it were. And then the careful plan goes into action. But you know what they say about best-laid plans…
What elevates Inception above most action-heist pictures is its focus on the mind, and I mean that in two senses. First, of course, is that minds are the arenas of adventure here, as characters jump between levels—and owners—of consciousness much the way James Bond jumps between exotic locales. But the movie also aims (a rarity these days) at the audience’s minds. This is an action film, yes, but it requires real attention. It may not be quite the mind game that the trailers (or a few stylistic winks by director Nolan) try to make it, but you sit through this on autopilot at your peril. And like Nolan’s immensely popular The Dark Knight, Inception manages to hint at—if not adequately address—some bigger themes amidst all the robbery, gunplay, and special effects.
And the effects are impressive. The “mental spaces” can be engineered in ways that real-life physics would make impossible: cities fold up on themselves, cliffs and buildings melt and rotate, and passageways shift and emerge in ways that would make Hogwarts jealous. Nolan makes excellent use of the visual medium here to represent subjective consciousness. I can’t imagine this story being told in another format, and that’s a compliment. Inception is the second movie I’ve recently seen that really showed me a different world onscreen—the other was Avatar—and its also the first movie to take the groundbreaking effects in films like Dark City and The Matrix as foundations to build upon rather than templates to copy. The filmmakers also deserve credit for putting the thing together. At one point, the characters are immersed in at least three levels of mental world, but we never lose track of what is happening in which level.
With a cast that features the names already mentioned, along with supporting ringers Pete Postlethwaite, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine, it’s hard to go astray. The acting is competent across the board. Gordon-Levitt continues to nudge the boundaries of his range, and is good here as Cobb’s more practical foil. Murphy, who knows his way around unsettling situations, plays it straighter than usual this time. Hardy and Rao get to produce some of the better-deserved of the film’s snickers. Page’s role is in some ways the most obvious, as the neophyte who gets trained in mental espionage, and Cotillard’s role is in many ways the most complex, for reasons best left unexplained here. The heaviest acting burden, however, falls on DiCaprio. Cobb has the most to do both in terms of plot and character development, and must seem, at different times, both trustworthy and untrustworthy as a barometer of what is going on. Yes, he’s an expert in the mind—but as in most fields, even experts have difficulty applying their insights to themselves. This plays to DiCaprio’s strengths: I find the actor is always best when he can play his tendency toward bravado off some nagging uncertainties, letting his narrow features suggest equal parts slyness and confusion. That’s the case here. DiCaprio sometimes brings depth to parts that don’t require it, creating muddled characters—but a little depth and muddle is just right for Cobb. I believe him when he says he’s improvising—up to the point where I don’t. And that’s as it should be.
Some grumbling is already beginning about the nature of the “dreams” represented in Inception—that they’re too stable and logical to be true “dreams.” Of course they are. As author Neil Gaiman notes, “dream logic is not story logic,” and Nolan has a story to tell. A literal visual transcription of a dream would be a chaotic mess. But it’s worth remembering two things here. First, the mental worlds in Inception are not true “dreams” at all, but artificial mazes created by Cobb’s team. Dreaming is only the issue because that’s when the mind lets its defenses down. Second, and more important, dreams do seem logical when we’re in them (as the movie points out), and that logic is highly subjective to the person dreaming. What Inception is really after is how we create reality—how ideas take root and what effects they have in both the long and short term. Every one of us, like Cobb and his team, try to create worlds our minds can navigate while protecting our deeper secrets. That my world and your world might conflict is, in some sense, the dynamic that powers this movie. As is the idea that my world might conflict with itself. Do we plan it that way? No. But you know what they say about best-laid plans.
Inception itself may not represent a perfect plan. It tries a little too hard to surprise us, and the fact that a few elements drop out along the way is either a flaw or an illustration of dream logic (I’m not sure which). The movie itself is like an intriguing dream: interestingly made, enjoyable to the senses, and equal parts tense and simply entertaining. And if you aren’t sure what it all adds up to when it’s over, at least it was fun to go through. There’s craft and thought here, and I much prefer an action film that plays with my mind to one that forces me to turn it off. Is Inception the stuff dreams are made of? No. The stuff box-office hits are made of? That’s more likely.
The world of Inception accepts that these things are possible. The “extraction” of ideas from a person’s head, by sneaking into the virtual reality of their subconscious while they dream (minds are more vulnerable then), is available as form of corporate espionage—the ultimate in intellectual property theft. One of the best in the business is a man named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose services have been retained by wealthy energy company owner Saito (Ken Watanabe) in order to mentally thieve some secrets. That job doesn’t go quite as planned, but Saito likes what he sees and offers Cobb a different job: not extraction (the theft of an idea) but inception (the planting of an idea). Saito wants to convince the heir to a powerful rival corporation (Cillian Murphy) to break up the empire he is set to inherit from his dying father. Inception is complicated (the film explains) because the mind, like the body, resists foreign entities. The mind will attack invading thoughts the way antibodies attack viruses. Most in the extraction business think inception is essentially impossible, but Cobb has reason to believe otherwise. Plus, Saito offers a juicy reward: he has the money and pull to clear up some nasty lingering legal business involving Cobb’s wife (Marion Cotillard) and children. Cobb takes the assignment.
What follows is essentially a caper picture, though the exact details are best left for you to discover, as Inception is at least as much about procedures as results. As usual, the mastermind—Cobb—assembles a crack team. Cobb’s team includes his resourceful right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); a “forger” named Eames (Tom Hardy) whose specialty is faking personalities rather than documents; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), an expert in brain chemistry; and Ariadne (Ellen Page) a brilliant young architecture student who will design the mental space in which to trap the mark. As usual, the basic plan for the heist is explained beforehand, setting up the rules of the game, as it were. And then the careful plan goes into action. But you know what they say about best-laid plans…
What elevates Inception above most action-heist pictures is its focus on the mind, and I mean that in two senses. First, of course, is that minds are the arenas of adventure here, as characters jump between levels—and owners—of consciousness much the way James Bond jumps between exotic locales. But the movie also aims (a rarity these days) at the audience’s minds. This is an action film, yes, but it requires real attention. It may not be quite the mind game that the trailers (or a few stylistic winks by director Nolan) try to make it, but you sit through this on autopilot at your peril. And like Nolan’s immensely popular The Dark Knight, Inception manages to hint at—if not adequately address—some bigger themes amidst all the robbery, gunplay, and special effects.
And the effects are impressive. The “mental spaces” can be engineered in ways that real-life physics would make impossible: cities fold up on themselves, cliffs and buildings melt and rotate, and passageways shift and emerge in ways that would make Hogwarts jealous. Nolan makes excellent use of the visual medium here to represent subjective consciousness. I can’t imagine this story being told in another format, and that’s a compliment. Inception is the second movie I’ve recently seen that really showed me a different world onscreen—the other was Avatar—and its also the first movie to take the groundbreaking effects in films like Dark City and The Matrix as foundations to build upon rather than templates to copy. The filmmakers also deserve credit for putting the thing together. At one point, the characters are immersed in at least three levels of mental world, but we never lose track of what is happening in which level.
With a cast that features the names already mentioned, along with supporting ringers Pete Postlethwaite, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine, it’s hard to go astray. The acting is competent across the board. Gordon-Levitt continues to nudge the boundaries of his range, and is good here as Cobb’s more practical foil. Murphy, who knows his way around unsettling situations, plays it straighter than usual this time. Hardy and Rao get to produce some of the better-deserved of the film’s snickers. Page’s role is in some ways the most obvious, as the neophyte who gets trained in mental espionage, and Cotillard’s role is in many ways the most complex, for reasons best left unexplained here. The heaviest acting burden, however, falls on DiCaprio. Cobb has the most to do both in terms of plot and character development, and must seem, at different times, both trustworthy and untrustworthy as a barometer of what is going on. Yes, he’s an expert in the mind—but as in most fields, even experts have difficulty applying their insights to themselves. This plays to DiCaprio’s strengths: I find the actor is always best when he can play his tendency toward bravado off some nagging uncertainties, letting his narrow features suggest equal parts slyness and confusion. That’s the case here. DiCaprio sometimes brings depth to parts that don’t require it, creating muddled characters—but a little depth and muddle is just right for Cobb. I believe him when he says he’s improvising—up to the point where I don’t. And that’s as it should be.
Some grumbling is already beginning about the nature of the “dreams” represented in Inception—that they’re too stable and logical to be true “dreams.” Of course they are. As author Neil Gaiman notes, “dream logic is not story logic,” and Nolan has a story to tell. A literal visual transcription of a dream would be a chaotic mess. But it’s worth remembering two things here. First, the mental worlds in Inception are not true “dreams” at all, but artificial mazes created by Cobb’s team. Dreaming is only the issue because that’s when the mind lets its defenses down. Second, and more important, dreams do seem logical when we’re in them (as the movie points out), and that logic is highly subjective to the person dreaming. What Inception is really after is how we create reality—how ideas take root and what effects they have in both the long and short term. Every one of us, like Cobb and his team, try to create worlds our minds can navigate while protecting our deeper secrets. That my world and your world might conflict is, in some sense, the dynamic that powers this movie. As is the idea that my world might conflict with itself. Do we plan it that way? No. But you know what they say about best-laid plans.
Inception itself may not represent a perfect plan. It tries a little too hard to surprise us, and the fact that a few elements drop out along the way is either a flaw or an illustration of dream logic (I’m not sure which). The movie itself is like an intriguing dream: interestingly made, enjoyable to the senses, and equal parts tense and simply entertaining. And if you aren’t sure what it all adds up to when it’s over, at least it was fun to go through. There’s craft and thought here, and I much prefer an action film that plays with my mind to one that forces me to turn it off. Is Inception the stuff dreams are made of? No. The stuff box-office hits are made of? That’s more likely.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Robin Hood (2010)
Seems like any hero worth his salt these days is getting a ‘reboot’ or an ‘origin story,’ a begin-from-before-the-beginning tale that tells us how they came to be who and what they are. We’ve seen it for comic-book heroes (Batman), secret agents (James Bond), and even sci-fi starship crews (namely that of the Enterprise). Now here’s Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, which offers up an ‘origin story’ for British history’s most famous arrow-slinging bandit. And, indeed, what we have here is closer in tone to Batman Begins or Casino Royale than any given Errol Flynn offering. There’s not much merry about Robin Longstride and his men this go-‘round—this is Robin Hood by way of Braveheart or Scott’s own Gladiator—but there is plenty of epic action, decent acting, and sumptuous design to behold.
Robin Hood wants to tell us the story ‘before Sherwood Forest.’ And before he was a forest-dwelling highwayman, it seems that Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) was a crack archer among the Crusaders of King Richard III (Danny Huston). Richard’s forays into the Holy Land have left him weary, cynical, and broke. He and his army are on the march home, but decide to take a swipe at perennial enemies the French along the way. Bad idea. Richard ends up on the wrong end of a French arrow. This puts his right-hand knight Sir Robert Loxley in the unpleasant situation of having to deliver bad news back to England along with Richard’s crown, and it puts Robin and his fellow soldiers out of a job. Meanwhile, back in England, Richard’s younger brother John (Oscar Isaac) has been ruling somewhat haphazardly, trying to recoup his elder brother’s defense-budget debts between sexual romps with French princesses. But John is not the only one in bed with the French (so to speak). His childhood friend Godfrey (Mark Strong) is a double agent, doing his best to foment unrest in England so that Philip II of France can invade the fractious country with ease. Godfrey and his thugs intercept Loxley on his return trip, but Robin and his friends (also returning) run off the assassins before they get the crown—but not before Sir Robert is mortally wounded. Recognizing Robin as a fellow Crusader, he asks him to deliver his sword back to his estranged father Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham. And so Robin, assuming Loxley’s upper-class identity to ensure safe passage, returns to England with a dead king’s crown and a dead man’s sword. But will crowning the inexperienced John king be enough to stop the French? And how, exactly, will the Loxleys—Sir Walter and Sir Robert’s widow Marion (Cate Blanchett)—feel about this archer claiming to be a part of the family?
There are many narrative strands to weave together here (did I mention there are questions about Robin’s past?) along with many, many characters. In addition to those already named, there are the usual ‘merry men’: excitable Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), lute-strumming Alan A’Dayle (Alan Doyle) and towering brawler Little John (Kevin Durand); there’s the mead-distilling Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and a sleazy Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen); and, back at court, Richard and John’s formidable mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eileen Atkins) and her loyal friend Chancellor William Marshall (William Hurt). It’s to the credit of Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland that we largely know what is what and who is who most of the time. The plots and people are juggled effectively if not always thoroughly. I suspect some of Hurt’s part, as well as some of the John-Eleanor stuff, ended up on the cutting-room floor. And it also sometimes feels as if characters like Tuck and the Sheriff are there more because we expect them to be than because the story requires them. Still, a certain amount of complexity is true to the course of British history, if not to our usual summer movie narrative experience, and the actions and motivations of the principal characters remains clear. Scott tends to favor big over small in his productions, and, in a movie of about 2 ½ hours length, it’s probably better to have too many rich supporting characters around the edges than too few.
There’s little to complain about in the acting. Crowe (who is to Ridley Scott what Johnny Depp is to Tim Burton) gives a more layered performance than the movie probably deserves. One of Crowe’s trademarks as an actor is to always hint that there is more to a character than we see, and that serves him well here as a man who is in fact other than he pretends to be (or remembers). This role isn’t new ground for Crowe by any means, but his comfort in it is an asset. Blanchett is likewise on familiar footing as dignified/spunky/coy Marion Loxley, who is neither maid nor shrinking violet in this version (she even dons a suit of armor). There’s less romance between these two than some Robins and Marions, but how quickly do we really want Marion to kiss the man who brought news of her husband’s death? Danny Huston (whose agent has clearly been pulling some overtime lately) is a nice surprise as a burned-out but still somehow regal Richard the Lionheart, and Oscar Isaac, who seems to come from the Jonathan Rhys Myers school of petulant kingship, is equal parts naïve and Machiavellian as slippery King John. As Godfrey, Mark Strong (whose business cards surely have black hats emblazoned on them) adds yet another in his recent long line of arch and gleeful villains. It’s nice to have von Sydow, Atkins, and Hurt along to add some gravitas, even if two of the three feel vastly underused.
Robin Hood is meant to be an epic—Scott’s apparent genre of choice—and, like the same director’s Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, looks every inch of it. There’s much of the current revisionist-accurate gray-stone-and-mud look, but there are also warm firelit rooms, lush forests, green rolling hills, and cliff-ringed beach landings. The landscape is dotted here and there with ruined towers and slowly eroding Roman and Celtic monuments, a nice depth-adding touch that is mercifully exploited less than it could be. The costumes are probably a bit more modern Renaissance Faire than true 12th Century, but everyone looks good enough in them that I didn’t really care. Scott has the chops and the resources to pull of a film of this scale. He especially seems to relish mass battle sequences, and the ones in Robin Hood don’t overstay their welcome. The same can not be said for his now-trademark stop-and-start approach to editing one-on-one combat. It was new and fresh in Gladiator; it’s now starting to feel like its own knock-off.
Much of the unfavorable reaction to this film stems, I’m willing to bet, from the fact that it is not what we think of as the Robin Hood story: jolly lads in a forest making fools of the authorities for a good cause. That’s where this ends, leaving ample room for more adventures of Longstride (as well as Scott, Crowe, Blanchett, et. al.) in the future. I have no problem with the movie wanting to show me new aspects of the Robin Hood character. I have more problems with the movie not really showing me new aspects of filmmaking. This feels like a comfortable outing by a director who knows a genre and actors playing the sorts of roles they know they can play well. Films don’t always have to innovate to succeed, of course, but Scott, Crowe, Blanchett, and Helgeland have all been groundbreakers in various ways in various other projects, and the juicy tale of Robin Hood would seem to be a great opportunity to really go somewhere. I’ll admit, however, that ‘origin’ movies are often a bit unsatisfying, and set up better sequels (X2, The Dark Knight). That may be the case here, as this world and these people are certainly rich enough to revisit. The legend itself teaches us that, in their time in Sherwood Forest, Robin and his men learn a number of new tricks. I hope that if this crowd elects to journey to Sherwood as well, that they learn a few, too.
Robin Hood wants to tell us the story ‘before Sherwood Forest.’ And before he was a forest-dwelling highwayman, it seems that Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) was a crack archer among the Crusaders of King Richard III (Danny Huston). Richard’s forays into the Holy Land have left him weary, cynical, and broke. He and his army are on the march home, but decide to take a swipe at perennial enemies the French along the way. Bad idea. Richard ends up on the wrong end of a French arrow. This puts his right-hand knight Sir Robert Loxley in the unpleasant situation of having to deliver bad news back to England along with Richard’s crown, and it puts Robin and his fellow soldiers out of a job. Meanwhile, back in England, Richard’s younger brother John (Oscar Isaac) has been ruling somewhat haphazardly, trying to recoup his elder brother’s defense-budget debts between sexual romps with French princesses. But John is not the only one in bed with the French (so to speak). His childhood friend Godfrey (Mark Strong) is a double agent, doing his best to foment unrest in England so that Philip II of France can invade the fractious country with ease. Godfrey and his thugs intercept Loxley on his return trip, but Robin and his friends (also returning) run off the assassins before they get the crown—but not before Sir Robert is mortally wounded. Recognizing Robin as a fellow Crusader, he asks him to deliver his sword back to his estranged father Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham. And so Robin, assuming Loxley’s upper-class identity to ensure safe passage, returns to England with a dead king’s crown and a dead man’s sword. But will crowning the inexperienced John king be enough to stop the French? And how, exactly, will the Loxleys—Sir Walter and Sir Robert’s widow Marion (Cate Blanchett)—feel about this archer claiming to be a part of the family?
There are many narrative strands to weave together here (did I mention there are questions about Robin’s past?) along with many, many characters. In addition to those already named, there are the usual ‘merry men’: excitable Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), lute-strumming Alan A’Dayle (Alan Doyle) and towering brawler Little John (Kevin Durand); there’s the mead-distilling Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and a sleazy Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen); and, back at court, Richard and John’s formidable mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eileen Atkins) and her loyal friend Chancellor William Marshall (William Hurt). It’s to the credit of Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland that we largely know what is what and who is who most of the time. The plots and people are juggled effectively if not always thoroughly. I suspect some of Hurt’s part, as well as some of the John-Eleanor stuff, ended up on the cutting-room floor. And it also sometimes feels as if characters like Tuck and the Sheriff are there more because we expect them to be than because the story requires them. Still, a certain amount of complexity is true to the course of British history, if not to our usual summer movie narrative experience, and the actions and motivations of the principal characters remains clear. Scott tends to favor big over small in his productions, and, in a movie of about 2 ½ hours length, it’s probably better to have too many rich supporting characters around the edges than too few.
There’s little to complain about in the acting. Crowe (who is to Ridley Scott what Johnny Depp is to Tim Burton) gives a more layered performance than the movie probably deserves. One of Crowe’s trademarks as an actor is to always hint that there is more to a character than we see, and that serves him well here as a man who is in fact other than he pretends to be (or remembers). This role isn’t new ground for Crowe by any means, but his comfort in it is an asset. Blanchett is likewise on familiar footing as dignified/spunky/coy Marion Loxley, who is neither maid nor shrinking violet in this version (she even dons a suit of armor). There’s less romance between these two than some Robins and Marions, but how quickly do we really want Marion to kiss the man who brought news of her husband’s death? Danny Huston (whose agent has clearly been pulling some overtime lately) is a nice surprise as a burned-out but still somehow regal Richard the Lionheart, and Oscar Isaac, who seems to come from the Jonathan Rhys Myers school of petulant kingship, is equal parts naïve and Machiavellian as slippery King John. As Godfrey, Mark Strong (whose business cards surely have black hats emblazoned on them) adds yet another in his recent long line of arch and gleeful villains. It’s nice to have von Sydow, Atkins, and Hurt along to add some gravitas, even if two of the three feel vastly underused.
Robin Hood is meant to be an epic—Scott’s apparent genre of choice—and, like the same director’s Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, looks every inch of it. There’s much of the current revisionist-accurate gray-stone-and-mud look, but there are also warm firelit rooms, lush forests, green rolling hills, and cliff-ringed beach landings. The landscape is dotted here and there with ruined towers and slowly eroding Roman and Celtic monuments, a nice depth-adding touch that is mercifully exploited less than it could be. The costumes are probably a bit more modern Renaissance Faire than true 12th Century, but everyone looks good enough in them that I didn’t really care. Scott has the chops and the resources to pull of a film of this scale. He especially seems to relish mass battle sequences, and the ones in Robin Hood don’t overstay their welcome. The same can not be said for his now-trademark stop-and-start approach to editing one-on-one combat. It was new and fresh in Gladiator; it’s now starting to feel like its own knock-off.
Much of the unfavorable reaction to this film stems, I’m willing to bet, from the fact that it is not what we think of as the Robin Hood story: jolly lads in a forest making fools of the authorities for a good cause. That’s where this ends, leaving ample room for more adventures of Longstride (as well as Scott, Crowe, Blanchett, et. al.) in the future. I have no problem with the movie wanting to show me new aspects of the Robin Hood character. I have more problems with the movie not really showing me new aspects of filmmaking. This feels like a comfortable outing by a director who knows a genre and actors playing the sorts of roles they know they can play well. Films don’t always have to innovate to succeed, of course, but Scott, Crowe, Blanchett, and Helgeland have all been groundbreakers in various ways in various other projects, and the juicy tale of Robin Hood would seem to be a great opportunity to really go somewhere. I’ll admit, however, that ‘origin’ movies are often a bit unsatisfying, and set up better sequels (X2, The Dark Knight). That may be the case here, as this world and these people are certainly rich enough to revisit. The legend itself teaches us that, in their time in Sherwood Forest, Robin and his men learn a number of new tricks. I hope that if this crowd elects to journey to Sherwood as well, that they learn a few, too.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Crazy Heart (2009)
Many a movie about musicians starts to feel like one of those old “Behind the Music” shows, a heavily-edited, moralized version of someone’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-and-maybe-back-again life. Crazy Heart has that narrative arc, but it doesn’t feel like a show. It doesn’t even feel like a documentary. It feels like one of those musicians’ home movies. Oh, it’s all fiction. There is no real country singer named Bad Blake. I know that. You know that. The movie doesn’t know that, and that—along with a deep performance by Jeff Bridges—is Crazy Heart’s strength.
Crazy Heart is one of those films that relies less on plot than on character, and the main character here is the aforementioned Bad Blake (Bridges). Bad (“My real name will be on my tombstone,” he says. “Until then, I’m Bad Blake.”) is an old school country singer. He had some big hits, once, years ago (he’s still regarded as a home-run songwriter, when he can be bothered to write), but lately he’s fallen on hard times. Bad tours the West, playing dive bars and bowling alleys, without even a permanent backup band. On gig nights, he hands kids he’s never met CDs and sheet music from the back of his truck: “Listen real good to this. I’ll show up in an hour.” Meanwhile, his own protégée, young Tommy Sweet (an understated Colin Farrell), packs arenas playing slick Nashville-produced covers of Blake’s songs. Bad Blake is on autopilot, and it’s not pretty. He drinks too much. He doesn’t care.
Turns out, though, one guy in one of his ‘pick-up bands’ isn’t a kid, but a seasoned, talented pianist. Blake likes him for that. Turns out the guy has a niece who’s a small-time music journalist. Turns out she wants to interview Bad Blake. Blake has nothing to lose, and time to kill. What the hell—he’ll meet the niece. And so into Bad’s motel room and into his life walks Jane Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal, effortlessly appealing). At first, Blake tries to put her off. But she knows more about country music—and him—than he suspected. She’s younger than him, by a lot, but they’ve both made mistakes and they’ve both lost. And so they connect on some level, the level on which many a classic country song operates. This could be the start, as the saying goes, of a beautiful…well, a beautiful something.
What that something is I will leave you, if you are so inclined, to discover. The movie plays itself out in ways that are sometimes expected and sometimes not, but which are always genuine. Crazy Heart takes Bad and Jane seriously, and neither romanticizes nor cheats them. We’ve seen this sort of hard luck, hard-drinking, love-of-a-good-woman story before, but rarely this richly presented. The movie has time for details. Bad is, well, bad. Not mean, but adrift. Alcoholic. Selfish. Cynical. But notice how, even drunk, he remembers the song he’d promised a fan. And notice how, when he calls Jane long distance, and her four-year-old son answers the phone, he has time for the kid, too. And notice how, to interview Bad after a show, Jane has to find a babysitter. And how the only rule she lays down about Bad’s drinking is “not in front of my son.” Too many movies are just about characters. This one feels like it’s actually about people.
It helps that the number of people the film focuses on is rather small. First, of course, is Bad Blake, and Bridges, with greasy hair and sunglasses from the Hank Williams Jr. collection, owns this role. Some performances jump out at you. Bridges’s turn here sneaks up on you. He is Bad Blake. Jeff Bridges is a busy guy. His is a familiar face. I forgot I was watching him. The role won Bridges a Best Actor Oscar, and justly so. He builds Bad Blake from the inside out, and wisely lets it show that the character, too, is an actor. The flashier turn as a guy named ‘Bad’ is by Blake himself, not Bridges. There are layers to this performance, all of them well-executed. Bridges also does his own singing, which adds authenticity. It’s often said that an actor “inhabits” a role; Jeff Bridges seems to have been living in Bad Blake for years. It pays off. Without a ringer in the Blake role, the film would fall apart. It doesn’t. Guess why not.
The other key player is Jane. Maggie Gyllenhaal does “likable” about as well as any actress working, but it’s to her and the script’s credit that Jane is more than a long-suffering pretty face. She is not a groupie, nor is she naive. Jane is interested in the guy, not the persona. Pay attention to the scene where she cries as Bad plays a new song, and why she cries when she does. Also notice how she reacts when Bad finally goes too far. There is no big shouting scene. After all, that only happens in the movies.
Filling in the edges are solid turns by Colin Farrell (also singing his own stuff) as the younger star who knows how lucky he has been in his timing—and his friends, and Robert Duvall as Blake’s old pal Wayne, the kind of guy who knows when not to serve Bad whiskey, and also when to take him fishing. Duvall himself gave an Oscar-winning performance as a hard-living country singer in Tender Mercies, and his presence here has a similar “seal of approval” feeling to Leonard Nimoy’s appearance in the Star Trek reboot.
This is a movie about music, among other things, and the music it features—written or chosen by T-Bone Burnett—is just right. The music attracted an Oscar as well, for “The Weary Kind,” the song that makes Jane cry. Blake’s material feels like it’s been around for a while, and sounds just as good played on one acoustic guitar as it does with Tommy’s full-strength band behind it. At some point in the film, I realized that, if Bad Blake was playing a bar near me, I’d probably go hear him. He’s not going to do that, of course, but it’s to the movie’s credit that I sort of hope he does.
“Character pieces” like this are not for everyone, but, then, neither is country music. For those interested, however, Crazy Heart offers both those things, both well-performed.
Crazy Heart is one of those films that relies less on plot than on character, and the main character here is the aforementioned Bad Blake (Bridges). Bad (“My real name will be on my tombstone,” he says. “Until then, I’m Bad Blake.”) is an old school country singer. He had some big hits, once, years ago (he’s still regarded as a home-run songwriter, when he can be bothered to write), but lately he’s fallen on hard times. Bad tours the West, playing dive bars and bowling alleys, without even a permanent backup band. On gig nights, he hands kids he’s never met CDs and sheet music from the back of his truck: “Listen real good to this. I’ll show up in an hour.” Meanwhile, his own protégée, young Tommy Sweet (an understated Colin Farrell), packs arenas playing slick Nashville-produced covers of Blake’s songs. Bad Blake is on autopilot, and it’s not pretty. He drinks too much. He doesn’t care.
Turns out, though, one guy in one of his ‘pick-up bands’ isn’t a kid, but a seasoned, talented pianist. Blake likes him for that. Turns out the guy has a niece who’s a small-time music journalist. Turns out she wants to interview Bad Blake. Blake has nothing to lose, and time to kill. What the hell—he’ll meet the niece. And so into Bad’s motel room and into his life walks Jane Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal, effortlessly appealing). At first, Blake tries to put her off. But she knows more about country music—and him—than he suspected. She’s younger than him, by a lot, but they’ve both made mistakes and they’ve both lost. And so they connect on some level, the level on which many a classic country song operates. This could be the start, as the saying goes, of a beautiful…well, a beautiful something.
What that something is I will leave you, if you are so inclined, to discover. The movie plays itself out in ways that are sometimes expected and sometimes not, but which are always genuine. Crazy Heart takes Bad and Jane seriously, and neither romanticizes nor cheats them. We’ve seen this sort of hard luck, hard-drinking, love-of-a-good-woman story before, but rarely this richly presented. The movie has time for details. Bad is, well, bad. Not mean, but adrift. Alcoholic. Selfish. Cynical. But notice how, even drunk, he remembers the song he’d promised a fan. And notice how, when he calls Jane long distance, and her four-year-old son answers the phone, he has time for the kid, too. And notice how, to interview Bad after a show, Jane has to find a babysitter. And how the only rule she lays down about Bad’s drinking is “not in front of my son.” Too many movies are just about characters. This one feels like it’s actually about people.
It helps that the number of people the film focuses on is rather small. First, of course, is Bad Blake, and Bridges, with greasy hair and sunglasses from the Hank Williams Jr. collection, owns this role. Some performances jump out at you. Bridges’s turn here sneaks up on you. He is Bad Blake. Jeff Bridges is a busy guy. His is a familiar face. I forgot I was watching him. The role won Bridges a Best Actor Oscar, and justly so. He builds Bad Blake from the inside out, and wisely lets it show that the character, too, is an actor. The flashier turn as a guy named ‘Bad’ is by Blake himself, not Bridges. There are layers to this performance, all of them well-executed. Bridges also does his own singing, which adds authenticity. It’s often said that an actor “inhabits” a role; Jeff Bridges seems to have been living in Bad Blake for years. It pays off. Without a ringer in the Blake role, the film would fall apart. It doesn’t. Guess why not.
The other key player is Jane. Maggie Gyllenhaal does “likable” about as well as any actress working, but it’s to her and the script’s credit that Jane is more than a long-suffering pretty face. She is not a groupie, nor is she naive. Jane is interested in the guy, not the persona. Pay attention to the scene where she cries as Bad plays a new song, and why she cries when she does. Also notice how she reacts when Bad finally goes too far. There is no big shouting scene. After all, that only happens in the movies.
Filling in the edges are solid turns by Colin Farrell (also singing his own stuff) as the younger star who knows how lucky he has been in his timing—and his friends, and Robert Duvall as Blake’s old pal Wayne, the kind of guy who knows when not to serve Bad whiskey, and also when to take him fishing. Duvall himself gave an Oscar-winning performance as a hard-living country singer in Tender Mercies, and his presence here has a similar “seal of approval” feeling to Leonard Nimoy’s appearance in the Star Trek reboot.
This is a movie about music, among other things, and the music it features—written or chosen by T-Bone Burnett—is just right. The music attracted an Oscar as well, for “The Weary Kind,” the song that makes Jane cry. Blake’s material feels like it’s been around for a while, and sounds just as good played on one acoustic guitar as it does with Tommy’s full-strength band behind it. At some point in the film, I realized that, if Bad Blake was playing a bar near me, I’d probably go hear him. He’s not going to do that, of course, but it’s to the movie’s credit that I sort of hope he does.
“Character pieces” like this are not for everyone, but, then, neither is country music. For those interested, however, Crazy Heart offers both those things, both well-performed.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Blind Side (2009)
The Blind Side is a pleasantly charming movie that’s a little about football, a little about race and class dynamics, a little about family, but really a lot about decent people trying to do the right thing. Given that it takes its title from a football term, I’ll use some here: this film is no Hail Mary Pass—it’s a solid, slow march down the field. No flash, no heroics, but good enough to score.
The Blind Side is based on the true story of Michael Oher. The outlines of his story are familiar: an African-American kid from the inner-city projects rises, through hard work and a talent for athletics to success in college and professional sports. Oher (Quinton Aaron) has many of the sadly usual problems against him: a disinterested, drug-addicted mother; lackluster support from foster homes; economic hardship (we meet Michael living on an uncle’s couch and owning just as many clothes as fit in a plastic shopping bag). In his favor, Michael is gifted with unusual size, an aptitude for auditory learning, and a strong tendency to display ‘protective instincts.’ The size gets him noticed. When his uncle (a mechanic who’s been saving) angles to get his own son, a basketball whiz, into a ritzy Christian school, the football coach notes the hulking nephew and starts salivating. ‘Big Mike’ is in. He’s now a private school kid.
And it’s here that Oher’s story takes an interesting turn. One cold night, Michael attracts the attention of well-to-do Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) not for his size, but because he’s wandering around in the cold in only a polo shirt and shorts. He’s on his way to try to sleep in the school gym. Leigh Anne is having none of it, and invites Oher to spend the night at the house she shares with her entrepreneur husband Sean (Tim McGraw) and kids. Slowly, the Tuohys take Oher under their wing, giving him shelter, support, and something the young man has never had before: a loving family.
Yeah, there’s football involved. Turns out that Oher is just perfect to be a prize left tackle, guarding the all-important ‘blind side’ of the quarterback, and the Tuohys (a clan of sports fans) encourage Michael on and off the field to pursue sports as a vocation. This leads to some entertaining ‘training montages’ and gridiron exploits. This is not, however, a ‘football movie.’ The resolution does not depend on someone winning a big game, or on a small team defeating a scary cross-state rival, but instead depends on the decisions people make—on who Michael Oher decides to be, and why. This is a character piece, and wisely uses sports and people’s reactions to them as means to illustrate character. Consider the high-school football coach (Ray McKinnon): he’s neither a tyrant nor a dunce nor a manipulator—just a man who knows a good thing when he sees it, and who likes to win. There’s also a great scene where Sean Tuohy—himself a former basketball star—explains Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to Michael in sporting terms, and the young man completely gets it. Sure, lots of films make the connection between the athletic life and manhood and courage—but how many do it with poetry?
The film is helped along by winning performances—literally, in Bullock’s case: she won an Oscar. Her take on Leigh Anne is certainly memorable, even if she feels a little underserved by the screenplay. There are plenty of ways to go wrong with this sort of brassy Southern Belle, and Bullock manages to avoid most of them. Oscar-worthy is always a matter of opinion, but at least Bullock keeps Leigh Anne from sliding into caricature, and makes a woman who’s honestly quite pushy also honestly likable. Tim McGraw brings a delightful laid-back twinkle to Sean Tuohy, the husband who is, refreshingly for a movie spouse, allowed to be at least as decent as his wife. McGraw, a country music star, did a very different parental turn in the film version of Friday Night Lights. The guy has some range, and he doesn’t pale here next to Bullock. As the Tuohy kids, Lily Collins smiles sweetly as cheerleader daughter Collins (how’s that for name coincidence?) and as motormouth younger brother S. J., Jae Head gets to spout the usual slicker-than-his-years one-liners. Quinton Aaron, as Oher, has the hardest job, given that he has to play straight man to the Tuohy clan, suggest the inner depths of the quiet, troubled Michael, and play believable football. He acquits himself admirably in all three cases. It’s not a standout performance, but soul, not virtuosity, is required here, and Aaron has that. As for the real-life college coaches (including Nick Saban and Lou Holtz) who show up as their past selves on recruiting missions, they’re at least no more wooden than in post-game interviews. One imagines giving recruiting pitches is a sort of acting coaches are used to. Providing a spunkier sort of authority figure is the always-dependable Kathy Bates in a small role as Michael’s personal tutor.
What The Blind Side lacks is what many a pro bench also lacks: depth. In some cases, this is not a detraction. The movie hints at a number of complex issues—racial inequality, the exploitation of African-American young men by athletic programs, banal bigotry, the temptation of easy, drug-fueled living in the projects—but it mostly keeps these below the surface. Discretion is probably the better part of filmmaking here, as too much of this would lead to a darker tone. The movie is smart enough to acknowledge these things, but also smart enough to move on. The Blind Side wants to be about the bright side, not the dark side, and it wisely stays there (for those who want grit in this type of story, there’s Precious). Less wise, however, is the tendency to also keep the characters’ deeper emotions below the surface. At one point, when Leigh Anne’s country club friends patronizingly tell her how great it is that she’s changing Michael’s life, she responds, “No. He’s changing mine.” It’s the right sentiment, of course, and it’s the line convention trains us to expect. But she shouldn’t have to say it. The movie should show us Leigh Anne’s life changing, and it doesn’t. Bullock gamely closes her eyes from time to time and Considers Things Deeply, but that’s not enough. I liked these characters too much to believe they had such static inner lives.
As a whole, though, The Blind Side tells a charming story in a largely charming way. I appreciated that it didn’t make Michael’s struggle about conquering plain ignorance or bad attitude but rather about learning to trust others and himself. And I appreciated that the movie recognizes that the hardest hits often come off the football field, not on it. Most of all, I appreciated that the movie didn’t have much ambition beyond competently telling a story of plain old human kindness. These days, that’s a subject that often ends up (if you’ll excuse me) on Hollywood’s blind side. Michael Oher eventually went to the Baltimore Ravens, number 23 in the first round of the 2009 NFL draft. A respectable place for Oher: not top ten, but still first round. That’s about where this film belongs, too.
The Blind Side is based on the true story of Michael Oher. The outlines of his story are familiar: an African-American kid from the inner-city projects rises, through hard work and a talent for athletics to success in college and professional sports. Oher (Quinton Aaron) has many of the sadly usual problems against him: a disinterested, drug-addicted mother; lackluster support from foster homes; economic hardship (we meet Michael living on an uncle’s couch and owning just as many clothes as fit in a plastic shopping bag). In his favor, Michael is gifted with unusual size, an aptitude for auditory learning, and a strong tendency to display ‘protective instincts.’ The size gets him noticed. When his uncle (a mechanic who’s been saving) angles to get his own son, a basketball whiz, into a ritzy Christian school, the football coach notes the hulking nephew and starts salivating. ‘Big Mike’ is in. He’s now a private school kid.
And it’s here that Oher’s story takes an interesting turn. One cold night, Michael attracts the attention of well-to-do Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) not for his size, but because he’s wandering around in the cold in only a polo shirt and shorts. He’s on his way to try to sleep in the school gym. Leigh Anne is having none of it, and invites Oher to spend the night at the house she shares with her entrepreneur husband Sean (Tim McGraw) and kids. Slowly, the Tuohys take Oher under their wing, giving him shelter, support, and something the young man has never had before: a loving family.
Yeah, there’s football involved. Turns out that Oher is just perfect to be a prize left tackle, guarding the all-important ‘blind side’ of the quarterback, and the Tuohys (a clan of sports fans) encourage Michael on and off the field to pursue sports as a vocation. This leads to some entertaining ‘training montages’ and gridiron exploits. This is not, however, a ‘football movie.’ The resolution does not depend on someone winning a big game, or on a small team defeating a scary cross-state rival, but instead depends on the decisions people make—on who Michael Oher decides to be, and why. This is a character piece, and wisely uses sports and people’s reactions to them as means to illustrate character. Consider the high-school football coach (Ray McKinnon): he’s neither a tyrant nor a dunce nor a manipulator—just a man who knows a good thing when he sees it, and who likes to win. There’s also a great scene where Sean Tuohy—himself a former basketball star—explains Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to Michael in sporting terms, and the young man completely gets it. Sure, lots of films make the connection between the athletic life and manhood and courage—but how many do it with poetry?
The film is helped along by winning performances—literally, in Bullock’s case: she won an Oscar. Her take on Leigh Anne is certainly memorable, even if she feels a little underserved by the screenplay. There are plenty of ways to go wrong with this sort of brassy Southern Belle, and Bullock manages to avoid most of them. Oscar-worthy is always a matter of opinion, but at least Bullock keeps Leigh Anne from sliding into caricature, and makes a woman who’s honestly quite pushy also honestly likable. Tim McGraw brings a delightful laid-back twinkle to Sean Tuohy, the husband who is, refreshingly for a movie spouse, allowed to be at least as decent as his wife. McGraw, a country music star, did a very different parental turn in the film version of Friday Night Lights. The guy has some range, and he doesn’t pale here next to Bullock. As the Tuohy kids, Lily Collins smiles sweetly as cheerleader daughter Collins (how’s that for name coincidence?) and as motormouth younger brother S. J., Jae Head gets to spout the usual slicker-than-his-years one-liners. Quinton Aaron, as Oher, has the hardest job, given that he has to play straight man to the Tuohy clan, suggest the inner depths of the quiet, troubled Michael, and play believable football. He acquits himself admirably in all three cases. It’s not a standout performance, but soul, not virtuosity, is required here, and Aaron has that. As for the real-life college coaches (including Nick Saban and Lou Holtz) who show up as their past selves on recruiting missions, they’re at least no more wooden than in post-game interviews. One imagines giving recruiting pitches is a sort of acting coaches are used to. Providing a spunkier sort of authority figure is the always-dependable Kathy Bates in a small role as Michael’s personal tutor.
What The Blind Side lacks is what many a pro bench also lacks: depth. In some cases, this is not a detraction. The movie hints at a number of complex issues—racial inequality, the exploitation of African-American young men by athletic programs, banal bigotry, the temptation of easy, drug-fueled living in the projects—but it mostly keeps these below the surface. Discretion is probably the better part of filmmaking here, as too much of this would lead to a darker tone. The movie is smart enough to acknowledge these things, but also smart enough to move on. The Blind Side wants to be about the bright side, not the dark side, and it wisely stays there (for those who want grit in this type of story, there’s Precious). Less wise, however, is the tendency to also keep the characters’ deeper emotions below the surface. At one point, when Leigh Anne’s country club friends patronizingly tell her how great it is that she’s changing Michael’s life, she responds, “No. He’s changing mine.” It’s the right sentiment, of course, and it’s the line convention trains us to expect. But she shouldn’t have to say it. The movie should show us Leigh Anne’s life changing, and it doesn’t. Bullock gamely closes her eyes from time to time and Considers Things Deeply, but that’s not enough. I liked these characters too much to believe they had such static inner lives.
As a whole, though, The Blind Side tells a charming story in a largely charming way. I appreciated that it didn’t make Michael’s struggle about conquering plain ignorance or bad attitude but rather about learning to trust others and himself. And I appreciated that the movie recognizes that the hardest hits often come off the football field, not on it. Most of all, I appreciated that the movie didn’t have much ambition beyond competently telling a story of plain old human kindness. These days, that’s a subject that often ends up (if you’ll excuse me) on Hollywood’s blind side. Michael Oher eventually went to the Baltimore Ravens, number 23 in the first round of the 2009 NFL draft. A respectable place for Oher: not top ten, but still first round. That’s about where this film belongs, too.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Let’s get this over with right away: it’s not as cool as the first one. The first Iron Man movie came out of nowhere, harnessed a beloved but minor comic franchise to a loosey-goosey script, some nifty CGI, and a knockout performance from Robert Downey, Jr., and was good beyond all reason. That’s hard to sustain. The movies provide their own analogy, though: people are always trying to knock off Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit and its ‘arc-reactor’ power source but never quite get there. Iron Man 2 is the same way: it lacks the genius of the original, but it’s certainly powerful enough to do some (box-office) damage.
Iron Man 2 finds inventor-turned-superhero Tony Stark (Downey) facing troubling times. Yes, his high-powered robosuit is a smashing success, and, yes, he’s ditched that usual hero standby, the secret identity—so he gets, as it were, the power and the glory. But pressures are mounting. His company is floundering while Tony flies off to fight evil. A government panel led by Senator Stern (a pompous Garry Shandling) wants Stark to bring Iron Man under government control. Rival weapons-maker Justin Hammer (the always-welcome Sam Rockwell) is sniffing around for a piece of the Iron Pie. And those are just the obvious menaces: lurking in Russia is the embittered Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), the son of a former colleague of Tony’s father, whose knack for physics is matched only by his drive for revenge. And lurking in Tony’s own blood are toxins leaking in from the nuclear element that powers his suit—being Iron Man is literally killing Mr. Stark.
He has a solution for the company problem: promoting his ever-practical assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) to CEO of Stark Industries. And Stern and Hammer can be put off with some deft word-and-tech work. That only goes so far, though—and the hidden menaces are harder to manage. Fortunately, Tony has some help: there’s his good friend Lt. Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) to back him up in the firepower department, and his own government friends at the secret ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’ agency—headed by no-nonsense Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)—to help Stark find his place in the world order. Also in Stark’s corner are faithful valet-cum-boxer Happy Hogan (director Jon Favreau, donning his actor hat) and new assistant Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson), who seems to have a few more skills than are listed on her resume.
There’s a lot going on here, and perhaps because of that this movie takes itself a bit more seriously than its predecessor. Iron Man felt slightly subversive, but this sequel pretty firmly plants itself in conventional superhero movie territory. Events seem to matter more this time around, and the emotions are pitched a little higher. Director Favreau manages a deft enough touch to keep things from becoming too heavy, though (let’s not forget he helmed Swingers and Elf). And while I’m growing a bit weary of CGI-metal bodies clanking against each other, there are some real rushes to be had from some of the obligatory action sequences. The one in which Vanko, sporting arc-reactor-powered laser whips, ambushes Stark at a Monaco racetrack and a later sequence where Stark and Rhodes have a party quarrel while wearing robosuits each provide a different kind of genuine pleasure.
The strength of this movie, like its predecessor, is in the acting. Favreau and screenwriter Justin Theroux are themselves both actors, and so it’s no surprise that this is a superhero franchise that gives us real characters to get to know and not just weird names in suits. Downey is the human arc-reactor that powers the film, slipping easily back into the role of Tony Stark as if he never left it (to, for example, play Sherlock Holmes). Downey’s whipcrack verbal timing conveys Stark’s arrogance while the look in his big dark eyes suggests some of the inner demons at work in Tony’s psyche. Favreau apparently likes to let his actors improvise, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that more of Stark onscreen comes from Downey himself than from the script. The actor gets this guy, through and through, and that alone goes a long way toward selling the movie. It doesn’t hurt a bit that Downey is abetted by such an able supporting cast. Paltrow once again makes Pepper the sweet superego to Stark’s id, and, making the most of the rather thankless part of Stark’s other conscience, Don Cheadle ably replaces an equally underused Terrence Howard from the first film as ‘Rhodey.’ Jackson gets to try yet another version of his familiar bad-mutha-shut-yo-mouth persona as growly Nick Fury, though, honestly, he’s probably one of the few actors who can utter a phrase like “you can solve the riddle of your heart” onscreen without it turning to utter sap. John Slattery, of “Mad Men” fame, turns up as Tony’s father in flashbacks which establish Stark Industries as not far removed from Sterling Cooper. And if Johansson’s femme fatale is a little underwritten, hey—she at least looks good in those tight dresses and black bodysuits.
In true comic book movie tradition, though, the best additions are the villains. Never mind that Mickey Rourke is actually about as Russian as a fifth of Jameson’s; sporting enough metal teeth and tattoos to supply the next three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, his Ivan Vanko is a masterpiece of sly menace. This is a man who laughs off being hit head-on (repeatedly) by a car, and is equally capable of hacking Hammer’s company’s mainframe and lovingly feeding his pet cockatoo vodka. It’s a performance that succeeds on mere presence as much as anything (no mean feat in this ensemble), and seems to prove that the ‘comeback’ talk around Rourke is no fluke. A better verbal match for Downey is provided by Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, a silver-spoon motormouth who has vapid business-speak, money, and spray-on tanner all in seemingly endless supply. Slickness (think Matchstick Men), threat (think The Green Mile), and silliness (think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) are all veins Rockwell has richly tapped in the past, and this role allows him to combine all three. The script leaves space for Hammer to return, and I at least hope he will, if only so I can continue to see two veteran hams square off as the rival businessmen. Downey and Rockwell’s scenes together are a smarmy delight.
There’s been grumbling in some quarters that this movie, like the first, basically ends with versions of the Iron Man suit fighting each other. Comic books, however, trade on this type of mirroring (the colorful, brash Joker is dour, dark Batman flipped, etc.), and for now the metaphor of Stark fighting versions of himself works. Vanko personifies the drive to settle scores just as Obadiah Stane in the first film personified corporate greed. These are both men Stark might have been, and what keeps this franchise’s head above water, in terms of narrative, is that everything is basically a variation on Stark trying to save his own heart: literally from shrapnel or poison, but also figuratively from greed, dishonor, wrath, and a host of other sins. After all, you don’t hire a guy like Downey just to spout one-liners; he gives Tony Stark depth and real personality. But I think the movies can learn from their own metaphor: overusing the whiz-bang tech stuff will slowly kill you. Right now, like Stark himself, the Iron Man series looks to come out more or less alive. This sequel is fine summer fun, and a worthy follow-up to the original. But it’s the people, not the technological bells and whistles, that make it so. Without a human being inside, Iron Man is just a bunch of colorful metal. Let’s keep a real guy in there, OK?
Iron Man 2 finds inventor-turned-superhero Tony Stark (Downey) facing troubling times. Yes, his high-powered robosuit is a smashing success, and, yes, he’s ditched that usual hero standby, the secret identity—so he gets, as it were, the power and the glory. But pressures are mounting. His company is floundering while Tony flies off to fight evil. A government panel led by Senator Stern (a pompous Garry Shandling) wants Stark to bring Iron Man under government control. Rival weapons-maker Justin Hammer (the always-welcome Sam Rockwell) is sniffing around for a piece of the Iron Pie. And those are just the obvious menaces: lurking in Russia is the embittered Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), the son of a former colleague of Tony’s father, whose knack for physics is matched only by his drive for revenge. And lurking in Tony’s own blood are toxins leaking in from the nuclear element that powers his suit—being Iron Man is literally killing Mr. Stark.
He has a solution for the company problem: promoting his ever-practical assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) to CEO of Stark Industries. And Stern and Hammer can be put off with some deft word-and-tech work. That only goes so far, though—and the hidden menaces are harder to manage. Fortunately, Tony has some help: there’s his good friend Lt. Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) to back him up in the firepower department, and his own government friends at the secret ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’ agency—headed by no-nonsense Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)—to help Stark find his place in the world order. Also in Stark’s corner are faithful valet-cum-boxer Happy Hogan (director Jon Favreau, donning his actor hat) and new assistant Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson), who seems to have a few more skills than are listed on her resume.
There’s a lot going on here, and perhaps because of that this movie takes itself a bit more seriously than its predecessor. Iron Man felt slightly subversive, but this sequel pretty firmly plants itself in conventional superhero movie territory. Events seem to matter more this time around, and the emotions are pitched a little higher. Director Favreau manages a deft enough touch to keep things from becoming too heavy, though (let’s not forget he helmed Swingers and Elf). And while I’m growing a bit weary of CGI-metal bodies clanking against each other, there are some real rushes to be had from some of the obligatory action sequences. The one in which Vanko, sporting arc-reactor-powered laser whips, ambushes Stark at a Monaco racetrack and a later sequence where Stark and Rhodes have a party quarrel while wearing robosuits each provide a different kind of genuine pleasure.
The strength of this movie, like its predecessor, is in the acting. Favreau and screenwriter Justin Theroux are themselves both actors, and so it’s no surprise that this is a superhero franchise that gives us real characters to get to know and not just weird names in suits. Downey is the human arc-reactor that powers the film, slipping easily back into the role of Tony Stark as if he never left it (to, for example, play Sherlock Holmes). Downey’s whipcrack verbal timing conveys Stark’s arrogance while the look in his big dark eyes suggests some of the inner demons at work in Tony’s psyche. Favreau apparently likes to let his actors improvise, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that more of Stark onscreen comes from Downey himself than from the script. The actor gets this guy, through and through, and that alone goes a long way toward selling the movie. It doesn’t hurt a bit that Downey is abetted by such an able supporting cast. Paltrow once again makes Pepper the sweet superego to Stark’s id, and, making the most of the rather thankless part of Stark’s other conscience, Don Cheadle ably replaces an equally underused Terrence Howard from the first film as ‘Rhodey.’ Jackson gets to try yet another version of his familiar bad-mutha-shut-yo-mouth persona as growly Nick Fury, though, honestly, he’s probably one of the few actors who can utter a phrase like “you can solve the riddle of your heart” onscreen without it turning to utter sap. John Slattery, of “Mad Men” fame, turns up as Tony’s father in flashbacks which establish Stark Industries as not far removed from Sterling Cooper. And if Johansson’s femme fatale is a little underwritten, hey—she at least looks good in those tight dresses and black bodysuits.
In true comic book movie tradition, though, the best additions are the villains. Never mind that Mickey Rourke is actually about as Russian as a fifth of Jameson’s; sporting enough metal teeth and tattoos to supply the next three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, his Ivan Vanko is a masterpiece of sly menace. This is a man who laughs off being hit head-on (repeatedly) by a car, and is equally capable of hacking Hammer’s company’s mainframe and lovingly feeding his pet cockatoo vodka. It’s a performance that succeeds on mere presence as much as anything (no mean feat in this ensemble), and seems to prove that the ‘comeback’ talk around Rourke is no fluke. A better verbal match for Downey is provided by Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, a silver-spoon motormouth who has vapid business-speak, money, and spray-on tanner all in seemingly endless supply. Slickness (think Matchstick Men), threat (think The Green Mile), and silliness (think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) are all veins Rockwell has richly tapped in the past, and this role allows him to combine all three. The script leaves space for Hammer to return, and I at least hope he will, if only so I can continue to see two veteran hams square off as the rival businessmen. Downey and Rockwell’s scenes together are a smarmy delight.
There’s been grumbling in some quarters that this movie, like the first, basically ends with versions of the Iron Man suit fighting each other. Comic books, however, trade on this type of mirroring (the colorful, brash Joker is dour, dark Batman flipped, etc.), and for now the metaphor of Stark fighting versions of himself works. Vanko personifies the drive to settle scores just as Obadiah Stane in the first film personified corporate greed. These are both men Stark might have been, and what keeps this franchise’s head above water, in terms of narrative, is that everything is basically a variation on Stark trying to save his own heart: literally from shrapnel or poison, but also figuratively from greed, dishonor, wrath, and a host of other sins. After all, you don’t hire a guy like Downey just to spout one-liners; he gives Tony Stark depth and real personality. But I think the movies can learn from their own metaphor: overusing the whiz-bang tech stuff will slowly kill you. Right now, like Stark himself, the Iron Man series looks to come out more or less alive. This sequel is fine summer fun, and a worthy follow-up to the original. But it’s the people, not the technological bells and whistles, that make it so. Without a human being inside, Iron Man is just a bunch of colorful metal. Let’s keep a real guy in there, OK?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
“Curiouser and curiouser,” says Alice of her trip to Wonderland, and the same could be said about a trip to see Tim Burton’s visually arresting but strangely unaffecting take on Alice’s story. On paper, it’s a slam-dunk: a master of charming-creepy movies taking on the archetypal charming-creepy kids’ story—even featuring cinema’s reigning king of quirk, Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter. On celluloid, however, it proves trickier than that. There’s a lot to look at here, but, in the end, Alice in Wonderland can’t quite generate enough curiousness to really capture the curiosity…or perhaps the curiouserosity…
Alice’s famous literary encounter with Wonderland (as many of us remember) takes place when she is a young girl. For this movie, that’s background. The story here (screenwritten by Linda Woolverton, previously of The Lion King and other Disney projects) borrows from both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in parts to create a story featuring a 19-year-old version of Alice. Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is the free-thinking daughter of the late Charles Kingsleigh (Marton Csokas), a visionary businessman who bequeathed his child his imagination and a hint of madness…but not his trading company. Instead, Alice is to be married to the boorish Hamish Ascot, the son of Charles’s lordly business partner. This is not exactly Alice’s idea of a good time, and so, when the watch-holding rabbit she recalls from a childhood dream shows up in the Ascots’ garden, Alice is quick to run after him to escape a fate worse than boredom. After she takes a fateful tumble down the rabbit’s hole, Alice finds herself in Wonderland (or Underland, as its inhabitants insist on calling it) and in the company of the usual gallery of odd folk: the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen); an unerringly precise, hookah-smoking caterpillar (Alan Rickman); the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), whose vapory body seems to pivot in all directions around his unmoving head; pudgy, indecisive, and argumentative twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both Matt Lucas); a feisty pin-wielding Dormouse (Barbara Windsor); a gibbering March Hare (Paul Whitehouse); and, of course, Mr. Depp’s wild-eyed Mad Hatter. All these live in fear of Wonderland’s reigning despot, the vain, petulant Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter). The Queen rules through fear: she commands an army of seemingly robotic playing-card-men led by the tall, one-eyed Knave, Stayne (Crispin Glover)—as well as two fearsome Wonderland beasties: the Frumious Bandersnatch (a sort of bulldog-leopard-shark hybrid…I know…don’t worry about it…) and the great dragonlike Jabberwocky. The citizens of Wonderland would much prefer to live under the Red Queen’s gentler sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway)—but she is out of power, and requires a champion to fight her Red sister’s evil creatures. Of course everyone is looking at Alice…
This is all an attempt to create some sort of forward-pushing narrative out of books that mostly consisted of Alice wandering about and running into eccentric-scary persons and animals. This turns out to not necessarily be a good idea. Alice in Wonderland has been taken to task for resorting to the now-usual battle climax, but the script actually earns this by letting the battle stand for a conflict taking place within Alice herself. It’s not the end that’s the problem, but the middle of the movie. Alice has a history in Wonderland; we don’t, and so are suddenly immersed in the politics of a world we don’t know. Sometimes it can be fun to get to know a world on the fly—but here it’s frustrating. The movie throws odd details our way—many of the animals’ proper names, for instance—but not much in the way of motivation. Details are not in themselves explanations, nor does the fact that a character (say, the Hatter) has a backstory mean that we the viewers will comprehend that backstory. This is an odd movie that all feels like a third act. It’s a sort of imprecision that, ironically, most of Lewis Carroll’s original characters would not have stood for. I would gladly have exchanged some of the intrigue here for a leisurely nitpicky talk over tea.
But if its inhabitants are a bit lackluster, Wonderland itself is surely not. As always, Burton’s artistic background comes through, ahem, wonderfully. Wonderland is a splendid mix of wild color in some spots and a dreary wasteland in others. The Red Queen’s palace looks like a playing card designed by M. C. Escher, while the White Queen’s castle more resembles Rivendell painted by Maxfield Parrish. Like James Cameron’s Pandora, Wonderland is almost entirely computer generated, as are most of its inhabitants. Also like Pandora, Wonderland is crammed to the edges with interesting designs: rockinghorse insects, talking flowers, moving mushrooms, and the like. Burton also has great fun with his actors, using effects to alter their appearances. Obviously Sheen-as-rabbit, Rickman-as-caterpillar, and the like are animated, but Depp’s Hatter has enlarged eyes, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are unusually short and stocky, Stayne looks and moves like a stretched-out Tin Woodman, and the Red Queen’s head is half as big (at least) as her whole body. The reason for these changes is not always apparent, but they create a lingering sense of unreality. Alice is pretty sure throughout that this is all a dream—and I couldn’t really blame her.
The movie is, of course, peopled with talented faces and voices, though not all are around long enough to register. Of the creatures, Rickman’s clipped delivery is exactly right for the word-parsing caterpillar, Fry is delightfully droll as the airy Chesire Cat, and Harry Potter baddie Timothy Spall gets to do a nicer turn this time as a basically stand-up dog named Bayard (Burton also has small voice parts for his perennial favorites Michael Gough and Christopher Lee). The humans are a more mixed bag. Mia Wasikowska, as Alice, has the thankless job of being the “straight” character around whom all the madcappery happens. Her Alice is appealing and thoughtful enough, but she somehow lacks the spark of madness the character should have. Depp has the madness to spare, but we’ve seen him do weird before, and this is not one of his standouts. Part of the problem is that the Hatter is not a lead character, and so Depp has neither the time to develop an actual odd “hero” (as he did in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow) nor the license to go totally off the leash (ala Jack Sparrow). The Mad Hatter is…well, he’s mad, and, despite Depp’s best efforts and facial tics, that’s as far as the script lets him go. If there is a standout here, it’s Bonham-Carter, whose bitchy queen takes wonderfully bandersnatch-sized bites out of the scenery. The Red Queen manages to be what most of the other characters are not: genuinely interesting, even if it’s for how appalling she is. Glover as Stayne and Hathaway as the nicer (though still not really sane) sister have less to do: he strides and glowers and she prances and smiles—and that’s about it.
There were plenty of things I liked about Alice in Wonderland. I liked the cloudy gymnastics of the Cat. I liked the anarchy of the Hatter’s tea party, where sugar lumps are thrown and no one passes something when they can walk across the tabletop and get it themselves. I liked the way the White Queen always moves as if she’s escaped from a production of Swan Lake, and I liked the Red Queen’s peculiar way of shouting “offwithhisheeeeaaad!” But the movie never grabbed me, or rose above the sum of its parts. I didn’t care about this world or its people, however colorful both were. Never mind the Red Queen’s threats. This movie’s head is perfectly safe—it’s the heart that’s off.
Alice’s famous literary encounter with Wonderland (as many of us remember) takes place when she is a young girl. For this movie, that’s background. The story here (screenwritten by Linda Woolverton, previously of The Lion King and other Disney projects) borrows from both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in parts to create a story featuring a 19-year-old version of Alice. Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is the free-thinking daughter of the late Charles Kingsleigh (Marton Csokas), a visionary businessman who bequeathed his child his imagination and a hint of madness…but not his trading company. Instead, Alice is to be married to the boorish Hamish Ascot, the son of Charles’s lordly business partner. This is not exactly Alice’s idea of a good time, and so, when the watch-holding rabbit she recalls from a childhood dream shows up in the Ascots’ garden, Alice is quick to run after him to escape a fate worse than boredom. After she takes a fateful tumble down the rabbit’s hole, Alice finds herself in Wonderland (or Underland, as its inhabitants insist on calling it) and in the company of the usual gallery of odd folk: the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen); an unerringly precise, hookah-smoking caterpillar (Alan Rickman); the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), whose vapory body seems to pivot in all directions around his unmoving head; pudgy, indecisive, and argumentative twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both Matt Lucas); a feisty pin-wielding Dormouse (Barbara Windsor); a gibbering March Hare (Paul Whitehouse); and, of course, Mr. Depp’s wild-eyed Mad Hatter. All these live in fear of Wonderland’s reigning despot, the vain, petulant Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter). The Queen rules through fear: she commands an army of seemingly robotic playing-card-men led by the tall, one-eyed Knave, Stayne (Crispin Glover)—as well as two fearsome Wonderland beasties: the Frumious Bandersnatch (a sort of bulldog-leopard-shark hybrid…I know…don’t worry about it…) and the great dragonlike Jabberwocky. The citizens of Wonderland would much prefer to live under the Red Queen’s gentler sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway)—but she is out of power, and requires a champion to fight her Red sister’s evil creatures. Of course everyone is looking at Alice…
This is all an attempt to create some sort of forward-pushing narrative out of books that mostly consisted of Alice wandering about and running into eccentric-scary persons and animals. This turns out to not necessarily be a good idea. Alice in Wonderland has been taken to task for resorting to the now-usual battle climax, but the script actually earns this by letting the battle stand for a conflict taking place within Alice herself. It’s not the end that’s the problem, but the middle of the movie. Alice has a history in Wonderland; we don’t, and so are suddenly immersed in the politics of a world we don’t know. Sometimes it can be fun to get to know a world on the fly—but here it’s frustrating. The movie throws odd details our way—many of the animals’ proper names, for instance—but not much in the way of motivation. Details are not in themselves explanations, nor does the fact that a character (say, the Hatter) has a backstory mean that we the viewers will comprehend that backstory. This is an odd movie that all feels like a third act. It’s a sort of imprecision that, ironically, most of Lewis Carroll’s original characters would not have stood for. I would gladly have exchanged some of the intrigue here for a leisurely nitpicky talk over tea.
But if its inhabitants are a bit lackluster, Wonderland itself is surely not. As always, Burton’s artistic background comes through, ahem, wonderfully. Wonderland is a splendid mix of wild color in some spots and a dreary wasteland in others. The Red Queen’s palace looks like a playing card designed by M. C. Escher, while the White Queen’s castle more resembles Rivendell painted by Maxfield Parrish. Like James Cameron’s Pandora, Wonderland is almost entirely computer generated, as are most of its inhabitants. Also like Pandora, Wonderland is crammed to the edges with interesting designs: rockinghorse insects, talking flowers, moving mushrooms, and the like. Burton also has great fun with his actors, using effects to alter their appearances. Obviously Sheen-as-rabbit, Rickman-as-caterpillar, and the like are animated, but Depp’s Hatter has enlarged eyes, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are unusually short and stocky, Stayne looks and moves like a stretched-out Tin Woodman, and the Red Queen’s head is half as big (at least) as her whole body. The reason for these changes is not always apparent, but they create a lingering sense of unreality. Alice is pretty sure throughout that this is all a dream—and I couldn’t really blame her.
The movie is, of course, peopled with talented faces and voices, though not all are around long enough to register. Of the creatures, Rickman’s clipped delivery is exactly right for the word-parsing caterpillar, Fry is delightfully droll as the airy Chesire Cat, and Harry Potter baddie Timothy Spall gets to do a nicer turn this time as a basically stand-up dog named Bayard (Burton also has small voice parts for his perennial favorites Michael Gough and Christopher Lee). The humans are a more mixed bag. Mia Wasikowska, as Alice, has the thankless job of being the “straight” character around whom all the madcappery happens. Her Alice is appealing and thoughtful enough, but she somehow lacks the spark of madness the character should have. Depp has the madness to spare, but we’ve seen him do weird before, and this is not one of his standouts. Part of the problem is that the Hatter is not a lead character, and so Depp has neither the time to develop an actual odd “hero” (as he did in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow) nor the license to go totally off the leash (ala Jack Sparrow). The Mad Hatter is…well, he’s mad, and, despite Depp’s best efforts and facial tics, that’s as far as the script lets him go. If there is a standout here, it’s Bonham-Carter, whose bitchy queen takes wonderfully bandersnatch-sized bites out of the scenery. The Red Queen manages to be what most of the other characters are not: genuinely interesting, even if it’s for how appalling she is. Glover as Stayne and Hathaway as the nicer (though still not really sane) sister have less to do: he strides and glowers and she prances and smiles—and that’s about it.
There were plenty of things I liked about Alice in Wonderland. I liked the cloudy gymnastics of the Cat. I liked the anarchy of the Hatter’s tea party, where sugar lumps are thrown and no one passes something when they can walk across the tabletop and get it themselves. I liked the way the White Queen always moves as if she’s escaped from a production of Swan Lake, and I liked the Red Queen’s peculiar way of shouting “offwithhisheeeeaaad!” But the movie never grabbed me, or rose above the sum of its parts. I didn’t care about this world or its people, however colorful both were. Never mind the Red Queen’s threats. This movie’s head is perfectly safe—it’s the heart that’s off.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Hurt Locker (2009)
“War is all hell,” said William T. Sherman, who knew something about it if anyone did. The epigraph to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker also tells us war is a drug. Bigelow’s film takes us inside the lives of three men for whom war is sometimes both of those things, but for whom it’s most often something more pedestrian: a job.
The Hurt Locker follows a bomb disposal squad stationed in Iraq, where “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) are the current insurgent weapon of choice. Those IEDs are these men’s job. Someone reports one, they go defuse it. It’s that simple—and that complicated. The movie explores what happens when the squad loses a member in action and gains a replacement. The replacement is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). He joins Sergeant J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), a no-nonsense security expert, and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), a crack mechanic but slightly nervous soldier. Sanborn and Eldridge have a routine, laid down by James’s predecessor. James doesn’t care. James is brash, self-reliant, and scarily competent (asked by a superior how many bombs he’s defused, his answer is over 800). Under James’s guidance, the team is successful, but their nerves fray. Which will blow first—one of the IEDs, or the squad dynamics? This sounds like not a lot of plot for a two-hour-plus movie. And that’s right, it’s not. But neither is there much “plot” to the bomb squad’s existence: wake up, find bombs, destroy them and try not to die. Try telling them that’s not exciting enough.
The Hurt Locker’s strength is exactly that it takes an outrageous situation and treats it with the utmost normalcy. There is little flash to this film: the leads are, mostly, unknown or little-known actors; the special effects do not call attention to themselves; and action scenes, when they unfold, feel natural, not choreographed. The script is based on the recollections of Mark Boal, a journalist who spent time shadowing one of these bomb squads in the real Iraq. The result not only earned Boal an Oscar, but also a lawsuit from a soldier who found the film too close to home. It’s thus no surprise that the film almost feels like a documentary. Only the occasional slow-motion scene or artistic camera shot reminds us that we’re watching art and not life. This is not a “war movie” with grand marches or epic battles. There is no “sweep” to these three men’s war—only a daily grind. Human enemies are seen only fleetingly (though the movie establishes that almost anyone in Iraq may be an enemy). The real enemies for James, Sanborn, and Eldridge are bombs, and time. And, to some degree, themselves.
Much rides on the performances of the three leads. True, they lack starpower—but that proves and advantage here. These actors cans slip easily into roles without our making assumptions based on casting. Imagine how much mystery would be lost if Will James were played by, say, Tom Cruise. Instead, we are allowed to get to know these men by what they say and do. Yes, Sanborn is uptight—but he has his reasons for that; it helps him survive. Yes, Eldridge seems a little troubled (he sees a shrink) and maybe naïve—but he’s also quick with a joke at the right moment and fiercely loyal to his team. And, yes—James is a loose cannon. But he, too, has his reasons. His off-putting manner is a function of his confidence. Renner creates a complex man, a man who is, in his way, in love with war because it’s what he excels at. James keeps a box of trophies under his bed—parts of bombs he’s disabled, which he keeps out of respect for their makers. James finds it awe-inspiring to hold in his hands “things that almost killed him.” His partners think he’s nuts, which tells us a great deal about them, and about James. That The Hurt Locker takes time for moments like that is what makes it special.
The film has been sometimes described as an “action movie,” but this is unfair (especially given the sorts of films that label often adheres to). It’s a human drama laced with intense moments of combat-related suspense. “There is no terror in the bang,” said Alfred Hitchcock, “only in the anticipation of it.” Much of The Hurt Locker seems constructed around this principle. Bigelow maintains our interest as much through what isn’t happening onscreen as what is. At a time when more and more movies seem compelled to use cheap CGI to create massive battles, it’s refreshing to find one that strips combat down to its essentials: a moment of life or death. Other movies centered on the Iraq conflict(s) have tended to emphasize the resulting cynicism (Three Kings) or the fears of corruption and conspiracy (Syriana, Body of Lies). The Hurt Locker stands out for taking neither of those routes. It does not shy away from the fact the war is hell, nor does it neglect the often irrational behavior of wartime bureaucracy—but those topics are left in the background. They are a part of the bomb squad’s world, but not the center of that world. The center is survival. Politics is for the folks back home, or in offices.
Is The Hurt Locker the new template for war movies? Probably not. There will always be a place for the more conventional combat story. What Bigelow’s film gives us is an unusual marriage of action and ideas. It has fun flipping our ideas of convention on their heads (notice that all the “name” actors here—Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse—have little more than cameo roles), but it also quietly subverts some of our notions about war and those who fight it. How do you cope with a job that places you daily in the way of the worst kinds of harm? What do you have to do to yourself to face that? And what if you enjoy it? Yes, war is hell. And it can be a drug. And—oddly enough—it can come to be home. Many of us don’t like the idea of war. We’d sleep better at night in a world at peace. But what about a man like Will James? How well would he sleep, with no bombs to go after? It’s for allowing questions like that to linger at the edge of my mind, after keeping me on the edge of my seat, that I recommend this movie.
The Hurt Locker follows a bomb disposal squad stationed in Iraq, where “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) are the current insurgent weapon of choice. Those IEDs are these men’s job. Someone reports one, they go defuse it. It’s that simple—and that complicated. The movie explores what happens when the squad loses a member in action and gains a replacement. The replacement is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). He joins Sergeant J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), a no-nonsense security expert, and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), a crack mechanic but slightly nervous soldier. Sanborn and Eldridge have a routine, laid down by James’s predecessor. James doesn’t care. James is brash, self-reliant, and scarily competent (asked by a superior how many bombs he’s defused, his answer is over 800). Under James’s guidance, the team is successful, but their nerves fray. Which will blow first—one of the IEDs, or the squad dynamics? This sounds like not a lot of plot for a two-hour-plus movie. And that’s right, it’s not. But neither is there much “plot” to the bomb squad’s existence: wake up, find bombs, destroy them and try not to die. Try telling them that’s not exciting enough.
The Hurt Locker’s strength is exactly that it takes an outrageous situation and treats it with the utmost normalcy. There is little flash to this film: the leads are, mostly, unknown or little-known actors; the special effects do not call attention to themselves; and action scenes, when they unfold, feel natural, not choreographed. The script is based on the recollections of Mark Boal, a journalist who spent time shadowing one of these bomb squads in the real Iraq. The result not only earned Boal an Oscar, but also a lawsuit from a soldier who found the film too close to home. It’s thus no surprise that the film almost feels like a documentary. Only the occasional slow-motion scene or artistic camera shot reminds us that we’re watching art and not life. This is not a “war movie” with grand marches or epic battles. There is no “sweep” to these three men’s war—only a daily grind. Human enemies are seen only fleetingly (though the movie establishes that almost anyone in Iraq may be an enemy). The real enemies for James, Sanborn, and Eldridge are bombs, and time. And, to some degree, themselves.
Much rides on the performances of the three leads. True, they lack starpower—but that proves and advantage here. These actors cans slip easily into roles without our making assumptions based on casting. Imagine how much mystery would be lost if Will James were played by, say, Tom Cruise. Instead, we are allowed to get to know these men by what they say and do. Yes, Sanborn is uptight—but he has his reasons for that; it helps him survive. Yes, Eldridge seems a little troubled (he sees a shrink) and maybe naïve—but he’s also quick with a joke at the right moment and fiercely loyal to his team. And, yes—James is a loose cannon. But he, too, has his reasons. His off-putting manner is a function of his confidence. Renner creates a complex man, a man who is, in his way, in love with war because it’s what he excels at. James keeps a box of trophies under his bed—parts of bombs he’s disabled, which he keeps out of respect for their makers. James finds it awe-inspiring to hold in his hands “things that almost killed him.” His partners think he’s nuts, which tells us a great deal about them, and about James. That The Hurt Locker takes time for moments like that is what makes it special.
The film has been sometimes described as an “action movie,” but this is unfair (especially given the sorts of films that label often adheres to). It’s a human drama laced with intense moments of combat-related suspense. “There is no terror in the bang,” said Alfred Hitchcock, “only in the anticipation of it.” Much of The Hurt Locker seems constructed around this principle. Bigelow maintains our interest as much through what isn’t happening onscreen as what is. At a time when more and more movies seem compelled to use cheap CGI to create massive battles, it’s refreshing to find one that strips combat down to its essentials: a moment of life or death. Other movies centered on the Iraq conflict(s) have tended to emphasize the resulting cynicism (Three Kings) or the fears of corruption and conspiracy (Syriana, Body of Lies). The Hurt Locker stands out for taking neither of those routes. It does not shy away from the fact the war is hell, nor does it neglect the often irrational behavior of wartime bureaucracy—but those topics are left in the background. They are a part of the bomb squad’s world, but not the center of that world. The center is survival. Politics is for the folks back home, or in offices.
Is The Hurt Locker the new template for war movies? Probably not. There will always be a place for the more conventional combat story. What Bigelow’s film gives us is an unusual marriage of action and ideas. It has fun flipping our ideas of convention on their heads (notice that all the “name” actors here—Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse—have little more than cameo roles), but it also quietly subverts some of our notions about war and those who fight it. How do you cope with a job that places you daily in the way of the worst kinds of harm? What do you have to do to yourself to face that? And what if you enjoy it? Yes, war is hell. And it can be a drug. And—oddly enough—it can come to be home. Many of us don’t like the idea of war. We’d sleep better at night in a world at peace. But what about a man like Will James? How well would he sleep, with no bombs to go after? It’s for allowing questions like that to linger at the edge of my mind, after keeping me on the edge of my seat, that I recommend this movie.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Avatar (2009)
Here is an all too rare thing: a film that uses visual effects not to stun the audience into submission, but to create and display a totally new world. Never mind that Pandora—the fictional planet of James Cameron’s Avatar—is a place where everything seems to have evolved based on art direction rather than Darwinian theory; I feel as if I’ve really been there. Along with Oz, Middle-Earth, and that galaxy far, far away, Pandora joins the ranks of deeply, beautifully, and fully realized imaginative places. If National Geographic sent a team to Pandora, I’d buy the pictorial issue. How does a director top re-sinking the Titanic? This is how. And in 3D, no less. Avatar is a visual wonder.
Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine who has been injured in the line of duty and paralyzed from the waist down. This limits his prospects somewhat. It turns out, however, that Jake’s twin brother, a scientist, was involved in a special research project on the planet Pandora. The project involved using specially bred “avatars” (surrogate bodies) to blend with the natives of the planet—tall, blue, graceful, vaguely feline humanoids called Na’vi—to learn their ways. Before he could voyage to claim his avatar, however, Jake’s brother was killed by a mugger. Avatars, it seems, are expensive. Shame to waste one, especially since Jake—as a twin—is perfectly set to take over his brother’s job. The rewards, men in dark suits tell Jake, might even be lucrative enough to pay for surgery to fix his mangled spine and legs. And so Jake is off to Pandora, a planet which is composed mostly of rainforest and happens to be the one source of a powerful and costly substance called Unobtainium. No, really. Once there, Jake joins the avatar operation under the watchful eye of the cranky Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and the trigger-happy Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). It has been discovered that the primary Na’vi village (housed in a huge—and I mean huge—tree) sits right over the top of a rich Unobtainium deposit. The humans want the Na’vi to move. Of course Dr. Augustine the scientist and Col. Quaritch the marine have different ideas of how this move should be encouraged. And when Jake in his avatar body befriends Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the Na’vi chieftain, both parties take an interest. But where do Jake’s interests lie?
There is little to nothing original about this plotline. It’s Dances With Wolves by way of Ray Bradbury, and the beats will be predictable to anyone familiar with either Westerns or science fiction. Avatar’s originality lies in the setting, not the story. So thoroughly does Cameron bring Pandora to life that, at times, the film feels more like a nature show than an adventure film. I didn’t know entirely what was CGI and what was location, and I didn’t care. Here we have floating mountains, shark-nosed rhinoceroses, brightly-colored soaring dragons that nest in cliffs like swallows, tree seeds that float and bob like airborne jellyfish, entire sections of forest that light up like glow paint in black-light, and fragile fan-like plants that retract at the slightest touch. Yes, I know the plants aren’t there, and are made of pixels—but they’re fragile. I can tell. The movie made me believe it. And the little fluorescent lizards that fly less like dragonflies than like helicopters? They’re pretty cool, too.
Much has been made of the fact that Avatar is offered in 3D,and for once the talk is merited. 3D has always struck me—even recently—as a gimmick. To reinforce this, my viewing of Avatar was preceded by a few previews reminding me of the bad uses of 3D: look! something is jumping off the screen! It’s a log! It’s a nose! It’s a chainsaw! Cameron wisely ditches this use almost entirely. He uses 3D to enrich the background rather than the foreground. The forests have real depth. The cliffs have real height (woe to the vertigo-inclined who see Avatar in IMAX format!). The creatures have real presence. When Cameron does fill the 3D foreground with something—plants, say, or floating seeds or falling ash—it serves to enhance setting or punch up the perspective. Only a few things fly at the camera—and those are rare enough to be genuinely effective. The 3D effects are not perfect. Some of the live-action 3D shots still look like 2D chopped up and rearranged. Nonetheless, this is a far more effective and subtle use of the effect than I’ve previously seen. Hollywood should take note.
Equally well-realized are the Na’vi characters (real and avatar). With their blue skin and feline ears, tails, and fangs, they are decidedly alien—and yet I could sense there was a real person in there. Neytiri and her clan are up there with Lord of the Rings’s Gollum when it comes to realistic digital creatures (no coincidence, either—WETA Digital worked on both films). Of course, credit must also go to the actors. Enough of Zoe Saldana (having a good sci-fi year between this and Star Trek) remains in Neytiri to make her by turns fierce, warm, suspicious, and (if it’s not too weird to say) more than a little sexy. Sam Worthington, playing it straight, is at least as convincing an avatar as a U. S. marine (his American accent is a little slippery). As the surly scientist-with-a-conscience, Sigourney Weaver gets to show some love of the tough and regular varieties, and the often underused Stephen Lang gets to chew a bit of scenery as a soldier from the napalm-in-the-morning school.
Avatar, like Titanic, has been running away with box office receipt records—and I would say rightly so. This is a movie that reminds us what movies have always been about: visual entertainment. For all his reputation as a gadgetmonger and gearhead, James Cameron is really a very old-fashioned filmmaker. Titanic was a classic melodrama spiked with a wicked good CGI shipwreck. The Terminator was a basic chase story, and Aliens was a war movie crossed with a haunted house story. Here we have an old school western epic, only set in space and with a budget of millions replacing a cast of thousands. Avatar is storytelling with all the stops pulled out. Those looking for literary subtlety or mythic resonance will be disappointed. Yes, there’s some social commentary thrown in: cracks about “this economy” and lines like “we will fight terror with terror.” And yes, there’s an eco-friendly, anti-corporate-raiding message to the whole thing. But these elements are tossed out as what they are, and are obvious. Themes about Jake, the family-less soldier, finding new communities with his coworkers and the Na’vi are present, but not really explored. And the central conceit of the Na’vi’s spirituality—that their whole world communicates electrically, the way brain synapses do, thus making Pandora a giant mind—is also underused, except as the source of a rousing, though unsurprising, deus ex machina (or, perhaps, anti-machina). Cameron’s Titanic collaborator James Horner is on hand to provide music, all of which is suitably grand. If Horner steals from himself occasionally, well, you should probably be looking not listening anyway.
Early in the movie, Jake, in his new avatar body, ignores all warnings and cautions and runs out into the jungles of Pandora, intoxicated with his newfound freedom and the use of new legs. Something of that breathless, headlong spirit pervades all of Avatar: a sense of freedom, newness, and exploration. There is vision behind this movie, but more than that, there is delight. At the end, I felt I had been somewhere real—not just inside a theater. Avatar is not flawless, but it is truly transporting. This is what big screens are for.
Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine who has been injured in the line of duty and paralyzed from the waist down. This limits his prospects somewhat. It turns out, however, that Jake’s twin brother, a scientist, was involved in a special research project on the planet Pandora. The project involved using specially bred “avatars” (surrogate bodies) to blend with the natives of the planet—tall, blue, graceful, vaguely feline humanoids called Na’vi—to learn their ways. Before he could voyage to claim his avatar, however, Jake’s brother was killed by a mugger. Avatars, it seems, are expensive. Shame to waste one, especially since Jake—as a twin—is perfectly set to take over his brother’s job. The rewards, men in dark suits tell Jake, might even be lucrative enough to pay for surgery to fix his mangled spine and legs. And so Jake is off to Pandora, a planet which is composed mostly of rainforest and happens to be the one source of a powerful and costly substance called Unobtainium. No, really. Once there, Jake joins the avatar operation under the watchful eye of the cranky Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and the trigger-happy Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). It has been discovered that the primary Na’vi village (housed in a huge—and I mean huge—tree) sits right over the top of a rich Unobtainium deposit. The humans want the Na’vi to move. Of course Dr. Augustine the scientist and Col. Quaritch the marine have different ideas of how this move should be encouraged. And when Jake in his avatar body befriends Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the Na’vi chieftain, both parties take an interest. But where do Jake’s interests lie?
There is little to nothing original about this plotline. It’s Dances With Wolves by way of Ray Bradbury, and the beats will be predictable to anyone familiar with either Westerns or science fiction. Avatar’s originality lies in the setting, not the story. So thoroughly does Cameron bring Pandora to life that, at times, the film feels more like a nature show than an adventure film. I didn’t know entirely what was CGI and what was location, and I didn’t care. Here we have floating mountains, shark-nosed rhinoceroses, brightly-colored soaring dragons that nest in cliffs like swallows, tree seeds that float and bob like airborne jellyfish, entire sections of forest that light up like glow paint in black-light, and fragile fan-like plants that retract at the slightest touch. Yes, I know the plants aren’t there, and are made of pixels—but they’re fragile. I can tell. The movie made me believe it. And the little fluorescent lizards that fly less like dragonflies than like helicopters? They’re pretty cool, too.
Much has been made of the fact that Avatar is offered in 3D,and for once the talk is merited. 3D has always struck me—even recently—as a gimmick. To reinforce this, my viewing of Avatar was preceded by a few previews reminding me of the bad uses of 3D: look! something is jumping off the screen! It’s a log! It’s a nose! It’s a chainsaw! Cameron wisely ditches this use almost entirely. He uses 3D to enrich the background rather than the foreground. The forests have real depth. The cliffs have real height (woe to the vertigo-inclined who see Avatar in IMAX format!). The creatures have real presence. When Cameron does fill the 3D foreground with something—plants, say, or floating seeds or falling ash—it serves to enhance setting or punch up the perspective. Only a few things fly at the camera—and those are rare enough to be genuinely effective. The 3D effects are not perfect. Some of the live-action 3D shots still look like 2D chopped up and rearranged. Nonetheless, this is a far more effective and subtle use of the effect than I’ve previously seen. Hollywood should take note.
Equally well-realized are the Na’vi characters (real and avatar). With their blue skin and feline ears, tails, and fangs, they are decidedly alien—and yet I could sense there was a real person in there. Neytiri and her clan are up there with Lord of the Rings’s Gollum when it comes to realistic digital creatures (no coincidence, either—WETA Digital worked on both films). Of course, credit must also go to the actors. Enough of Zoe Saldana (having a good sci-fi year between this and Star Trek) remains in Neytiri to make her by turns fierce, warm, suspicious, and (if it’s not too weird to say) more than a little sexy. Sam Worthington, playing it straight, is at least as convincing an avatar as a U. S. marine (his American accent is a little slippery). As the surly scientist-with-a-conscience, Sigourney Weaver gets to show some love of the tough and regular varieties, and the often underused Stephen Lang gets to chew a bit of scenery as a soldier from the napalm-in-the-morning school.
Avatar, like Titanic, has been running away with box office receipt records—and I would say rightly so. This is a movie that reminds us what movies have always been about: visual entertainment. For all his reputation as a gadgetmonger and gearhead, James Cameron is really a very old-fashioned filmmaker. Titanic was a classic melodrama spiked with a wicked good CGI shipwreck. The Terminator was a basic chase story, and Aliens was a war movie crossed with a haunted house story. Here we have an old school western epic, only set in space and with a budget of millions replacing a cast of thousands. Avatar is storytelling with all the stops pulled out. Those looking for literary subtlety or mythic resonance will be disappointed. Yes, there’s some social commentary thrown in: cracks about “this economy” and lines like “we will fight terror with terror.” And yes, there’s an eco-friendly, anti-corporate-raiding message to the whole thing. But these elements are tossed out as what they are, and are obvious. Themes about Jake, the family-less soldier, finding new communities with his coworkers and the Na’vi are present, but not really explored. And the central conceit of the Na’vi’s spirituality—that their whole world communicates electrically, the way brain synapses do, thus making Pandora a giant mind—is also underused, except as the source of a rousing, though unsurprising, deus ex machina (or, perhaps, anti-machina). Cameron’s Titanic collaborator James Horner is on hand to provide music, all of which is suitably grand. If Horner steals from himself occasionally, well, you should probably be looking not listening anyway.
Early in the movie, Jake, in his new avatar body, ignores all warnings and cautions and runs out into the jungles of Pandora, intoxicated with his newfound freedom and the use of new legs. Something of that breathless, headlong spirit pervades all of Avatar: a sense of freedom, newness, and exploration. There is vision behind this movie, but more than that, there is delight. At the end, I felt I had been somewhere real—not just inside a theater. Avatar is not flawless, but it is truly transporting. This is what big screens are for.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
You’ve seen the trailers, so you know there’s no deer-stalker hat and no “Elementary, dear Watson” in Guy Ritchie’s new take on Sherlock Holmes. What is in it are some solid performances (especially from Robert Downey, Jr.), some fun filmmaking tricks, a good bit of action, and a whole lot of the spirit—if not the letter—of the enduring Holmes legend. This is a Sherlock Holmes movie, all right, but not exactly like the ones before it. No one will mistake this for a BBC production.
The movie begins at the end of a case. Sherlock Holmes (Downey) and his friend, ex-military doctor John Watson (Jude Law) combine forces with Scotland Yard to nab fiendish murderer Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) just as he is about to commit another ritual murder. Seems the aptly named Blackwood has a fondness for butchering virgins amid Satanic scrawls, and has had London in a paranoid religious panic (He styles himself the devil’s wrath on mankind. Or something.). Now, however, he is for the gallows. This macabre case closed, by all appearances, Holmes and Watson return to their civilian lives: Watson to pursue his engagement to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) and Holmes to agitated boredom as he awaits his next challenge—and laments his friend’s immanent departure from bachelorhood and Baker Street. Two things, however, arise to shake Holmes from his cabin-fever malaise. One is the appearance of Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), a savvy con woman and former love-interest of Holmes who bears a couple of seductive offers of work. The second is the apparent resurrection of the executed Lord Blackwood from the dead. Since Blackwood had taunted Holmes with such a miracle after his capture, and since he was declared dead by none other than Dr. John Watson, the pair take a somewhat personal interest. Soon Holmes and Watson are embroiled in a mystery involving secret societies, illicit chemistry labs, and what looks like demonic magic. And of course, there’s the wily Ms. Adler to contend with.
Mr. Ritchie made a name for himself with a couple of kinetic crime movies set in the London underworld, and so it’s no surprise that he’s a sure hand with the seamier aspects of the story—murders, double-crosses, and politicians who say less than they mean are all in ample supply here. He also plays up the seamy side of the locale: this London is a muted, early-industrial-Gothic mud-and-brick stew—Dickens by way of Tim Burton. The plot twists and turns, sometimes ridiculously, but never cheats. We are shown everything we need to be shown, even if we—unlike Holmes—don’t realize it. This is surely a decent crime movie. But is it “Sherlock Holmes?”
Well, yes and no. The character of Sherlock Holmes is maddeningly elusive. The things we think we know about Holmes—the accessories, the stock phrases—come from later film and stage interpretations, not from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original beloved detective tales. Conan Doyle reveals little about Holmes’s dress or appearance. The detective’s appeal is in his own mysteriousness and eccentricities—and, of course, his prodigious intellectual skills. The Holmes of Ritchie’s movie has all of these, wrapped up in the rumpled charisma of Robert Downey, Jr. Downey already showed, in Iron Man, that he could play the smartest man in the room. Tony Stark, however, is a showboat. Holmes works just to please himself: because he cannot not work. With no focus, Holmes abuses substances, blows off steam in boxing matches, and engages in half-cocked experiments with anything at hand, such as guns and Watson’s bulldog (not, thankfully, at the same time). The role uses Downey’s looks to great effect, his large dark eyes always wide open, taking in everything around him, his facial tics conveying intelligence and annoyance in equal measure. His Holmes is not a contemplative man, but a compulsive one, a force of crime-solving nature. Yes, this Holmes fights a lot—but the Conan Doyle stories themselves had their fair share of fisticuffs and gunplay.
Downey is ably backed up by Jude Law’s more understated, but still dangerous, Watson. The film wisely recalls that Watson was a military doctor, a man who saw action in foreign wars, and is at least as quick with his revolver as Holmes is with his mind. Watson is Holmes’s ally. The police (story regular Inspector Lestrade makes an appearance) are Holmes’s foils. Holmes should show up the cops, not Watson, and that’s how it is here. Law strikes just the right notes: Watson is competent and sharp, but not the whirlwind Holmes is, which is as it should be. He and Downey engage in banter (much lifted wholly or in part from the stories) exactly as old friends should, with equal parts affection and exasperation. Their chemistry accounts for much of the movie’s appeal. Opposite them, Mark Strong (rapidly establishing himself in the Irons-Rickman line of creepy gentleman villains) is suitably inscrutable and menacing as the seemingly supernatural Lord Blackwood. This is a man so stylishly evil that they let him wear a black leather coat to his own execution. And as Irene Adler, Rachel McAdams at least goes smirk-for-smirk with Downey. I didn’t exactly believe the two as lovers, but they did seem to have great fun scheming together. Who knows? Maybe that’s what love is for a man like Sherlock Holmes.
The movie itself is uneven. Ritchie enlivens the first half with some nifty tricks. Holmes plans out his fights in his head before hand, explaining moves and probable consequences—a nice way of bringing sense to the inevitable post-Bourne-and-Gladiator blurs of action. He eschews expository dialogue and instead replays events after they happen, revealing how they came to happen as they did and saving Holmes some dreary speechifying. Sadly, these sorts of quirks vanish toward the end in favor of more straightforward action. The mystery is still interesting, but the movie has become less so, and that’s a bit of a letdown. One suspects that both Holmes and Ritchie are capable of more. The ultimate, uncovered plot is also probably more contemporary than Victorian, but so it often goes. To complain that this movie feels derivative in parts is a little backwards: after all, almost all our modern mystery tales are descended from Holmes. This isn’t so much a reboot of a formula as a reappropriation of it. And of course there is a set-up for a sequel or two. After all, the only one not totally satisfied when a case is closed is the restless Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes himself is, in a way, timeless. It is true that this is sort of Holmes crossed with Bond, but it’s the movie that’s modernized, not the characters. They stay rooted in their origins. As in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek movie, there are countless little details lurking about to get a nod or a chuckle from devotees of the tradition. Downey and Law are not the definitive Holmes and Watson, but I’m not sure a definitive Holmes and Watson are any more possible than a definitive Hamlet.
Ritchie and company have created two hours of good fun with some familiar characters. It’s only because it’s the legendary “Sherlock Holmes” that we want to expect more. Is Sherlock Holmes basically a mystery-action-adventure story? Yes. But it’s a smarter than average mystery-action-adventure story—and that, after all, is what Conan Doyle wrote, back when they were just stories, and not legend.
The movie begins at the end of a case. Sherlock Holmes (Downey) and his friend, ex-military doctor John Watson (Jude Law) combine forces with Scotland Yard to nab fiendish murderer Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) just as he is about to commit another ritual murder. Seems the aptly named Blackwood has a fondness for butchering virgins amid Satanic scrawls, and has had London in a paranoid religious panic (He styles himself the devil’s wrath on mankind. Or something.). Now, however, he is for the gallows. This macabre case closed, by all appearances, Holmes and Watson return to their civilian lives: Watson to pursue his engagement to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) and Holmes to agitated boredom as he awaits his next challenge—and laments his friend’s immanent departure from bachelorhood and Baker Street. Two things, however, arise to shake Holmes from his cabin-fever malaise. One is the appearance of Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), a savvy con woman and former love-interest of Holmes who bears a couple of seductive offers of work. The second is the apparent resurrection of the executed Lord Blackwood from the dead. Since Blackwood had taunted Holmes with such a miracle after his capture, and since he was declared dead by none other than Dr. John Watson, the pair take a somewhat personal interest. Soon Holmes and Watson are embroiled in a mystery involving secret societies, illicit chemistry labs, and what looks like demonic magic. And of course, there’s the wily Ms. Adler to contend with.
Mr. Ritchie made a name for himself with a couple of kinetic crime movies set in the London underworld, and so it’s no surprise that he’s a sure hand with the seamier aspects of the story—murders, double-crosses, and politicians who say less than they mean are all in ample supply here. He also plays up the seamy side of the locale: this London is a muted, early-industrial-Gothic mud-and-brick stew—Dickens by way of Tim Burton. The plot twists and turns, sometimes ridiculously, but never cheats. We are shown everything we need to be shown, even if we—unlike Holmes—don’t realize it. This is surely a decent crime movie. But is it “Sherlock Holmes?”
Well, yes and no. The character of Sherlock Holmes is maddeningly elusive. The things we think we know about Holmes—the accessories, the stock phrases—come from later film and stage interpretations, not from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original beloved detective tales. Conan Doyle reveals little about Holmes’s dress or appearance. The detective’s appeal is in his own mysteriousness and eccentricities—and, of course, his prodigious intellectual skills. The Holmes of Ritchie’s movie has all of these, wrapped up in the rumpled charisma of Robert Downey, Jr. Downey already showed, in Iron Man, that he could play the smartest man in the room. Tony Stark, however, is a showboat. Holmes works just to please himself: because he cannot not work. With no focus, Holmes abuses substances, blows off steam in boxing matches, and engages in half-cocked experiments with anything at hand, such as guns and Watson’s bulldog (not, thankfully, at the same time). The role uses Downey’s looks to great effect, his large dark eyes always wide open, taking in everything around him, his facial tics conveying intelligence and annoyance in equal measure. His Holmes is not a contemplative man, but a compulsive one, a force of crime-solving nature. Yes, this Holmes fights a lot—but the Conan Doyle stories themselves had their fair share of fisticuffs and gunplay.
Downey is ably backed up by Jude Law’s more understated, but still dangerous, Watson. The film wisely recalls that Watson was a military doctor, a man who saw action in foreign wars, and is at least as quick with his revolver as Holmes is with his mind. Watson is Holmes’s ally. The police (story regular Inspector Lestrade makes an appearance) are Holmes’s foils. Holmes should show up the cops, not Watson, and that’s how it is here. Law strikes just the right notes: Watson is competent and sharp, but not the whirlwind Holmes is, which is as it should be. He and Downey engage in banter (much lifted wholly or in part from the stories) exactly as old friends should, with equal parts affection and exasperation. Their chemistry accounts for much of the movie’s appeal. Opposite them, Mark Strong (rapidly establishing himself in the Irons-Rickman line of creepy gentleman villains) is suitably inscrutable and menacing as the seemingly supernatural Lord Blackwood. This is a man so stylishly evil that they let him wear a black leather coat to his own execution. And as Irene Adler, Rachel McAdams at least goes smirk-for-smirk with Downey. I didn’t exactly believe the two as lovers, but they did seem to have great fun scheming together. Who knows? Maybe that’s what love is for a man like Sherlock Holmes.
The movie itself is uneven. Ritchie enlivens the first half with some nifty tricks. Holmes plans out his fights in his head before hand, explaining moves and probable consequences—a nice way of bringing sense to the inevitable post-Bourne-and-Gladiator blurs of action. He eschews expository dialogue and instead replays events after they happen, revealing how they came to happen as they did and saving Holmes some dreary speechifying. Sadly, these sorts of quirks vanish toward the end in favor of more straightforward action. The mystery is still interesting, but the movie has become less so, and that’s a bit of a letdown. One suspects that both Holmes and Ritchie are capable of more. The ultimate, uncovered plot is also probably more contemporary than Victorian, but so it often goes. To complain that this movie feels derivative in parts is a little backwards: after all, almost all our modern mystery tales are descended from Holmes. This isn’t so much a reboot of a formula as a reappropriation of it. And of course there is a set-up for a sequel or two. After all, the only one not totally satisfied when a case is closed is the restless Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes himself is, in a way, timeless. It is true that this is sort of Holmes crossed with Bond, but it’s the movie that’s modernized, not the characters. They stay rooted in their origins. As in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek movie, there are countless little details lurking about to get a nod or a chuckle from devotees of the tradition. Downey and Law are not the definitive Holmes and Watson, but I’m not sure a definitive Holmes and Watson are any more possible than a definitive Hamlet.
Ritchie and company have created two hours of good fun with some familiar characters. It’s only because it’s the legendary “Sherlock Holmes” that we want to expect more. Is Sherlock Holmes basically a mystery-action-adventure story? Yes. But it’s a smarter than average mystery-action-adventure story—and that, after all, is what Conan Doyle wrote, back when they were just stories, and not legend.
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