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.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
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.
Friday, November 20, 2009
La Vie En Rose (2007)
Here’s how much I knew about French singer Edith Piaf before watching La Vie En Rose, the 2007 movie about her life: doodly-squat. And here’s how much I know after watching it: almost doodly-squat. This is one of the least factually informative “bio-pics” I’ve seen. I’m not being mean here: that’s a description of style, not quality. La Vie En Rose does a remarkable thing: it doesn’t so much look at a “life story” as simply at a life. If you want story, hit the library for books about Piaf. This is a movie of impressions.
Piaf’s father was a soldier who, before the first World War broke out, was a circus acrobat. Her mother was…a woman who thought she could sing. She couldn’t. She goes broke, and the father returns from war to pluck young Edith out of poverty to live with his own mother, a brothel-owner. Later, she lives with her father in the circus. Turns out, unlike her mom, Edith can sing, and can make money at it. So she does, first for her father, then for a pimp, then for managers. Some, she keeps for herself. She is famous. She has lovers. Her health fails and she grows addicted to various drugs to stop crippling arthritis pain. Eventually, as we all must do, she dies.
Such, I gather, is the outline of her life. But it is almost secondary in this movie. The movie instead lingers over moments and aspects: the doting care of the whores in her grandmother’s brothel; Edith’s confusion when an early benefactor is murdered by criminals; Edith’s vision, as a young girl, of Saint Therese, who says she watches over her. And, of course, the music. Piaf had quite a voice in her tiny, often bent body, and the film lets us hear it. Physically, she is embodied for the majority of the film by Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar for her efforts. Her Piaf is by turns feisty, afraid, stupid, savvy, endearing, and annoying. The performance is seamless. Had I seen this movie on its release, I might have dismissed it. But having first seen Cotillard as herself, and as a tough gangster’s moll in Public Enemies, it becomes clear how much artistry was needed to turn graceful, willowy Cotillard into fragile, arthritic Piaf (Cotillard does not, however, do the singing: you hear Piaf’s own voice). Supporting players are a mixed bag. Emmanuelle Seigner is heartbreaking as the whore who largely “adopts” young Edith, only to lose her, and Sylvie Testud is memorable as Edith’s long-time, tough-as-nails best friend Momone. Gerard Depardieu, for all his physical presence, hardly registers as an ill-fated nightclub owner.
The movie flashes back and forward somewhat, which tends toward confusion. Characters come and go without clear identification, or even sometimes resolution. And yet, by the end, it makes a kind of sense. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button used as its tagline Kierkegaard’s maxim that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. That movie didn’t deserve that tagline (not least because the whole premise is that Button does live backward). This one does. The final 15 minutes or so masterfully weave together one of Edith’s last public performances, her death and deathbed recollections, and a slightly earlier event where a young woman interviews Piaf with something like a version of “the Proust Questionnaire.” No coincidence, that: Proust was also French, and also knew something about looking backward at life. The movie lets these events comment on each other: things Piaf says in the interview recall events the dying Piaf remembers, which in turn fit with the notes of her singing. Some scenes recap what we have seen, others introduce new information. We learn, for example, that as a young woman, Piaf had a child, which died. Other movies would have made Freudian hay of this from the start. But the real Piaf did not reveal this to many people, and so the film withholds it as well.
And this is exactly right. We do not understand life forward. People do not walk into our lives with handy labels like “future spouse” or “career-changing expert.” Labels like that happen, and we apply them later, as needed. Nor do we know the ends of all the paths that cross ours. All biographies are constructs, and this movie understands that. It does a better job of any biography film I’ve seen, with the possible exception of A Beautiful Mind, of getting inside its subject’s head—both for good and ill. Piaf’s head was not, it seems, always a pleasant place to be. But it is where we must go to understand her life.
I’m supposed to be writing about a movie here, but I keep wanting to write about time and memory instead. That’s what La Vie En Rose made me think of, more than of Edith Piaf herself. While the movie contains its share of beautiful and wry moments (When, at the height of her career, her manager chides Piaf for holding up an appointment to let an amateur composer play her a new song, she replies, “What is the point of being ‘Edith Piaf’ if I can’t do this??”), I admired it in the end more for its artistry than its entertainment value, and some early parts are indeed tough going. It is an odd film, to be sure, but its differences are just as much virtues as flaws. American-made bio-pics, in any case, seem to be slumping of late (the recent Amelia was lamented as competent but soulless), and this offering from a couple of years ago and across an ocean provides a refreshing alternative to formula.
Piaf’s father was a soldier who, before the first World War broke out, was a circus acrobat. Her mother was…a woman who thought she could sing. She couldn’t. She goes broke, and the father returns from war to pluck young Edith out of poverty to live with his own mother, a brothel-owner. Later, she lives with her father in the circus. Turns out, unlike her mom, Edith can sing, and can make money at it. So she does, first for her father, then for a pimp, then for managers. Some, she keeps for herself. She is famous. She has lovers. Her health fails and she grows addicted to various drugs to stop crippling arthritis pain. Eventually, as we all must do, she dies.
Such, I gather, is the outline of her life. But it is almost secondary in this movie. The movie instead lingers over moments and aspects: the doting care of the whores in her grandmother’s brothel; Edith’s confusion when an early benefactor is murdered by criminals; Edith’s vision, as a young girl, of Saint Therese, who says she watches over her. And, of course, the music. Piaf had quite a voice in her tiny, often bent body, and the film lets us hear it. Physically, she is embodied for the majority of the film by Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar for her efforts. Her Piaf is by turns feisty, afraid, stupid, savvy, endearing, and annoying. The performance is seamless. Had I seen this movie on its release, I might have dismissed it. But having first seen Cotillard as herself, and as a tough gangster’s moll in Public Enemies, it becomes clear how much artistry was needed to turn graceful, willowy Cotillard into fragile, arthritic Piaf (Cotillard does not, however, do the singing: you hear Piaf’s own voice). Supporting players are a mixed bag. Emmanuelle Seigner is heartbreaking as the whore who largely “adopts” young Edith, only to lose her, and Sylvie Testud is memorable as Edith’s long-time, tough-as-nails best friend Momone. Gerard Depardieu, for all his physical presence, hardly registers as an ill-fated nightclub owner.
The movie flashes back and forward somewhat, which tends toward confusion. Characters come and go without clear identification, or even sometimes resolution. And yet, by the end, it makes a kind of sense. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button used as its tagline Kierkegaard’s maxim that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. That movie didn’t deserve that tagline (not least because the whole premise is that Button does live backward). This one does. The final 15 minutes or so masterfully weave together one of Edith’s last public performances, her death and deathbed recollections, and a slightly earlier event where a young woman interviews Piaf with something like a version of “the Proust Questionnaire.” No coincidence, that: Proust was also French, and also knew something about looking backward at life. The movie lets these events comment on each other: things Piaf says in the interview recall events the dying Piaf remembers, which in turn fit with the notes of her singing. Some scenes recap what we have seen, others introduce new information. We learn, for example, that as a young woman, Piaf had a child, which died. Other movies would have made Freudian hay of this from the start. But the real Piaf did not reveal this to many people, and so the film withholds it as well.
And this is exactly right. We do not understand life forward. People do not walk into our lives with handy labels like “future spouse” or “career-changing expert.” Labels like that happen, and we apply them later, as needed. Nor do we know the ends of all the paths that cross ours. All biographies are constructs, and this movie understands that. It does a better job of any biography film I’ve seen, with the possible exception of A Beautiful Mind, of getting inside its subject’s head—both for good and ill. Piaf’s head was not, it seems, always a pleasant place to be. But it is where we must go to understand her life.
I’m supposed to be writing about a movie here, but I keep wanting to write about time and memory instead. That’s what La Vie En Rose made me think of, more than of Edith Piaf herself. While the movie contains its share of beautiful and wry moments (When, at the height of her career, her manager chides Piaf for holding up an appointment to let an amateur composer play her a new song, she replies, “What is the point of being ‘Edith Piaf’ if I can’t do this??”), I admired it in the end more for its artistry than its entertainment value, and some early parts are indeed tough going. It is an odd film, to be sure, but its differences are just as much virtues as flaws. American-made bio-pics, in any case, seem to be slumping of late (the recent Amelia was lamented as competent but soulless), and this offering from a couple of years ago and across an ocean provides a refreshing alternative to formula.
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