"The Crown" and the Bard

     Claire Foy has blue eyes. Open and slightly shining, they seem to take up about a third of her face, as if she were a sort of British anime character. Olivia Colman, on the other hand, has brown eyes. Smaller, but still engaging, they tend to twinkle with just a hint of mischief – part of what makes her such a good comedian. Why should I care, beyond a chance to gush a little in prose over two comely actresses? Because both women play Queen Elizabeth II on the Netflix series “The Crown,” albeit at different stages of her life, and because it is a truth universally acknowledged that, whatever else age may do to one’s appearance, it does not radically alter the color of one’s eyes. The makers of “The Crown,” however, seem not to care. Likewise, this series, in its early going, puts (American, mind you) John Lithgow in the role of Winston Churchill. Lithgow is a capable actor, and has an established line in intelligent, beleaguered pomposity of the sort a Prime Minister might need – but he’s also six-foot-four, giving him almost a foot on the historical Churchill. However gamely Mr. Lithgow hunches and shuffles, I couldn’t shake the feeling, when he was onscreen, that someone had stacked a Winston Churchill atop another Winston Churchill. But again – the creative minds at the helm seem not to care. All of which is a long, long way into saying, that if you go to “The Crown” looking for pinpoint historical accuracy, you have come to the wrong shop entirely. It’s mostly well-written; it’s historically dodgy but socially perceptive; it’s a wonderful showcase for talented actors – but its best speeches are about ideas, not characters. What the show offers instead is something like Shakespeare’s history plays, ramped up for film.

     Consider what Shakespeare does with his historical kings. Henry V, Richard II, Richard III – all are great parts for an actor. All get great speeches. What they lack is much depth. Yes, Henry changes, from gadabout Prince Hal in the Henry IV plays to the fierce titular monarch of his own play – but that’s less a character arc than a character about-face. He’s a symbol of the changing face of responsibility and the sacrifices a ruler has to make – from embracing his drinking buddies to rejecting and in some case executing them. The toll on them is noted by the Bard; the toll on Henry, less so. Instead, Henry becomes an embodiment of kingly traits, for good or ill. And so with the others – Richard II is the sum of his anxieties, Richard III a study in greed and manipulation. Even Henry IV himself is the occasion to worry over the ethics of usurpation, before being symbolically and narratively overshadowed by his son. This is exactly what “The Crown” does with its modern royals – strips each down to some constituent element of personality or plot function, in order to ruminate through story on the nature of monarchy. Thus: Princess Margaret becomes a chaos engine, the Queen Mother a spokeswoman for tradition and duty, Prince Philip the grumbly demi-outsider who speaks sense to his wife, and so on.

     Which brings me back to the Queen’s varying eyes. Fidelity to the real Elizabeth’s peepers (light blue, but narrower in actuality) is not at all the point. Each actress is chosen for what they embody about the Queen at that particular stage of life. The first two seasons, Elizabeth is following the Prince Hal track – she’s a clever but traditional girl who enjoys her family and her horses, but who finds herself thrust by her uncle’s abdication and her father’s early death into a royal role she never sought, but must adapt to. Thus, Foy’s wide, bright, ingenue eyes are exactly what’s required. By the time the Queen is a fortysomething matriarch, she has learned how to play the game, and so Colman’s ability to look both serious and silly and to switch between reserve and outburst on a dime is now what’s needed. In other words, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Elizabeth in “The Crown” is less a person than a part. Likewise Churchill. Hang his height; Lithgow nails the man’s temperament – or, rather, the temperament of the man as he lives in our collective historical imagination: brilliant but bluff, stodgy but sly.

     None of these performances, by the way, slide into caricature. They aren’t mean – just radically condensed. Nowhere should this be borne in mind more than with Josh O’Connor’s take on Charles, Prince of Wales. The real Charles is a complex man – infamously star-crossed in his personal life (more on that in a bit), but also a patron of the arts, a champion of causes, a father, and, of course a monarch-in-waiting (and waiting and waiting). “The Crown,” however, makes him a mass of seething resentments (O, for a muse of ire!) – a sympathetic one early on, when his family seems to overlook him; a deplorable one later on when he checks out of his marriage to Princess Diana. This might seem like an abrupt change from nice kid to villain, but, for one, it’s no more than Prince Hal gets (“I know thee not, old man…” to former BF Falstaff), and, for another, the common thread is how this version of Charles pushes back against many of the royal sacrifices Elizabeth accepted. He, even more than her, is a person stuck in a situation he’d rather not be in – but he never owns that, and he thus becomes the show’s stoop-shouldered embodiment of how the sins of ancestors get visited upon descendants. Charles isn’t monarch yet in “The Crown,” but he’s already a symbol. I don’t imagine that this show gives me any fuller a picture of the real Charles than Shakespeare gives me of any of the real Richards.

     This means, then, that show is free to do what it does best: use these riffs on royals to serve up various meditations on the nature of things like duty, public perception, compassion, gender dynamics, colonialism, loneliness, family, and so on. In other words, “The Crown” is at its best when it stops pretending to be about the royals and instead uses the royals to be about bigger ideas. It has some fabulous exchanges and monologues about these things, and puts them in capable mouths. Jared Harris, as Elizabeth’s father George VI, gets a nice one to Philip in season I about the importance of the Queen (to be, at that point), which Tobias Menzies as older Philip gets to bookend with a similar one to Diana (Emma Corrin) in season 4. Colman as Elizabeth gives a great in-show speech to a packed house that simultaneously praises and rebukes a man she knows (but the crowd does not) to be a Soviet spy. The Prime Ministers get their share, too – Jason Watkins as Harold Wilson gets a fantastic exchange with the Queen about how leaders both shape and bow to public perception, and Gillian Anderson serves up some wonderfully mannered monologues as Margaret Thatcher – who, like the Queen, is a woman affecting a pose to succeed in a man’s world, but has chosen an opposite pose to her monarch’s. Even Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell) gives a nice lecture to Charles on the dangers of living in a fairy tale. It’s this sort of move that I most appreciate about the show (and Shakespeare) – that, beneath its sudsy façade, it prompts thought about bigger humanist issues – power, mercy, love, responsibility. Google is right there if I want to look up the real timelines (the show compresses events like mad) or personalities. What shows up on screen is an entertaining frame to put around those events and personalities and their problems.

     It is entertaining, by the way. I’ve made the show sound terribly serious – but it is also just plain enjoyable. The sets are lavish, the costumes lovely, and the writing mostly well-done. That said, “The Crown” does tend to occasionally lack subtlety. It underlines and re-underlines points. Edward VIII’s abdication, for example, is repeatedly held to be the original sin of the Windsor line – to the point that the show has a character comment on it. Nor does the show miss a chance to light Diana with a flashbulb or two (wink, wink, ugh). Hans Zimmer’s music is fitting, but also sometimes a bit much (think: Elgar, but with more caffeine). Though in all fairness – subtlety wasn’t always Shakespeare’s strong suit, either.

     If this last season gets a bit wobbly in any way, it’s because it has to deal with a problem Shakespeare didn’t have. He wrote, mostly, about kings long-dead by his time. Not so here. For my generation, the events of the fourth season especially are in easy memory. I discussed and enthused about Charles and Di’s wedding with a good girl friend of mine as kids (I loved the ceremony – and sword-wearing – of it, she loved the glamour of it). I learned what a Falkland Island was from reading news of Britain’s fighting there. I had respect from afar for Mrs. Thatcher’s sheer gumption. Thus, as much as collective memory helps smooth out the earlier seasons, it makes this latest one bumpier, especially with Charles and Diana. People have shared pictures of Churchill and his ilk, but people have shared feelings about these two, and I don’t envy the actors trying to embody them – even if they do think in terms of (as I said above) parts-not-people. It’s harder to get distance here and let the story be about something more, which it should be. The suds start to rise up and take over, and the tension between meditation and melodrama is more evident in that storyline. Familiarity also breeds temptation to see the show as a revelation of what “really went on” rather than as a narrative speculation on it. This temptation (as the show’s Queen might say), is to be avoided, but moving ahead (there are, as I understand, two more seasons planned), the show has a minefield to negotiate – not least of all given the presence of series creator Peter Morgan’s 2006 film The Queen, which covers some of the same ground, and does so very well.

     Reviewing the 1998 film Elizabeth, about the first Queen of that name, Roger Ebert wonders what Shakespeare would have made of her – had commoners been allowed to write about reigning monarchs. “No doubt,” Ebert writes, “he retired in sheer frustration.” The next seasons of “The Crown” may either prove that to be true, or indicate that the playwright bowed out with a certain sense of relief. 

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

     It should be said up front: The Force Awakens is not going to be The Thing. It can’t be The Thing, because the original three Star Wars movies already were The Thing. Nothing can repeat what the original Star Wars movie (now known as Episode IV: A New Hope) was and what it did for both the art of cinema and for our cultural imagination. We simply cannot go back to a world without Star Wars in it (or even without the prequels in it – and some of us have tried) and experience it for the first time again. Now, with Star Wars references peppering everything from politics to sports, the movies bearing the name can only be regarded as part of a tradition. This is not a bad thing, of course (ask James Bond), but it needs to temper expectations of any new Star Wars films. Never again will they change the world. They might just be able, however, to provide (ahem) a new hope for some entertaining hours in a dark theater.

     There are thus two questions to be asked about The Force Awakens: is it a good movie, and is it good Star Wars? The much-maligned prequels faltered because they were mediocre on both counts. Stylistically, they exacerbated all the problems the original trilogy had in varying degrees: overreliance on spectacle, stilted dialogue, and a tendency to balance seriousness with silliness rather than genuine humor. Thematically, though they refocused the arc of the Star Wars tale on Anakin Skywalker in some interesting ways, they undercut the original mythology with pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and byzantine political plotting. The challenge facing The Force Awakens is avoiding such missteps while still maintaining some continuity with all that has gone before.

     So, first: Is it a good movie? Yes. The Force Awakens is as competently-made a piece of space opera as you could want. Like the trilogies before it, it is much less real “science fiction” (for that, may I suggest The Martian) than a Western/caper film/action flick gussied up and set in outer space. And this is as it should be, since Star Wars is what popularized this genre on our screens in the first place, just as Mr. Bond helped launch a thousand spy thrillers. All the elements are in place: exotic planetary locations, plucky heroes, ominously-costumed villains, spaceship dogfights that play fast and loose with physics, highly-technical macguffins everyone wants, and so on. There are thrills, and scares and laughs, and, yes, lightsabers. The Force Awakens shows that the Star Wars franchise still has the moxie, creativity, and budget to hang with, and outdo as needed, its genre progeny like Serenity and Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a good time.

     The set-up is this: decades after the fall of the Galactic Empire, a kind of Republic has re-emerged, but complete peace has not been restored. The work of the Dark Side is still being carried out by a neo-Imperial army known as the First Order (similarity in name to the Third Reich being not at all coincidental). Led by the shadowy Supreme Leader Snoke (a motion-captured Andy Serkis) and mobilized by ruthless soldier General Hux (super-sneery Domhnall Gleeson) and Darth Vader acolyte Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, in a mask, of course), the Order aims to restore Imperial rule by any means necessary. Opposing them, with a nod from the new Republican government, is the stubborn Resistance (the name “Rebel Alliance” having been trademarked, one supposes) now headed by General (formerly Princess) Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) and bolstered by the services of crack space pilots such as Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac, adding another piece to a very, very good year of roles). It is Dameron, by the way, who owns the supercute rolling droid you’ve already seen in all the merchandise. Both sides would love to know the whereabouts of the galaxy’s last remaining Jedi, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who has gone into hiding after the failure of his attempt to train new Jedi. A clue to Luke’s location becomes the macguffin in question, especially when, in the usual fashion, it ends up in the hands of a third party: desert-planet scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley), whose mundane existence is interrupted, in short order, by the arrival of both Dameron’s droid and disaffected stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega). How, why, and where these various players converge I will not say, in the interest of minimizing spoilers – but you already know from the trailers that Rey and Finn get an assist or two from old spacehands Han Solo (Harrison Ford, grimmer and grayer but still cocky) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). Chewie, it should be noted, seems not to have aged a day.

     As events play out, The Force Awakens offers a fine space adventure. Yes, there are special effects galore, but they don’t overwhelm the action. I could generally tell who was who and what was what and where we were, even during frenetic battle sequences. Director J. J. Abrams and his crew also elected to go for a nice mix of practical live effects and CGI, which adds some extra reality to the look of things, and also provides a nice connection to the lower-fi world of the original Star Wars trilogy. The world itself, er, the worlds themselves look great as well, from Rey’s desert planet Jakku (everyone loves a desert planet, from Mad Max to the aforementioned Martian) to the icy surface of the First Order’s sinister base (everyone loves a fight in the ice, too, from Inception to Spectre) to what seems to be a Buddhist temple/pirate bar (yes, please). I also appreciated that the movie has time for little fun flourishes of world-building, like the way Rey sleds down a massive sand dune or Kylo Ren’s ability to stop a blaster bolt in midair. Even better are the times that The Force Awakens decides to be a real movie, and employ real, effective visual storytelling. Notice, for example, the way we’re able to track Finn through his first (and a markedly unfair) fight, even before he removes his helmet, or the moment in which the camera pulls back to reveal two distinct groups of people having very different reactions to some outcomes of the final battle. These touches help to balance the clichés and genre in-jokes, and give the movie a sentimental character that is also in line with its better predecessors.

     Which brings up the second question: Is The Force Awakens good Star Wars? Well, mostly. As I said, my hopes for it were similar to my hopes for a good Bond film: it would hit the proper beats, avoid fatuousness or jarring missteps, and do something fun with a world and characters I know and love. This it does, though with varying levels of success. Most happily from my point of view, the film returns to a more strictly spiritual understanding of the Force. This may just reflect my own bias in favor of pseudo-Daoist talk over pseudo-genetics talk, but I was quite pleased that no one mentioned “midichlorians.” The movie deals better with the Force than a number of the previous outings, both in how it dramatizes the unseen power in action, and in how it lets the Force be a matter of connection, a way for people to know things they might otherwise not about others or themselves. This, too, increases the sense of The Force Awakens as a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s films rather than the prequels. Complete missteps are few. There is no Jar-Jar-Binksian clowning, for example. Humor is allowed to come from situations and wry dialogue, much of it delivered by Ford (the dialogue is overall less stilted than ever before, which is good, though it sometimes achieves this with modernish colloquialisms, which sound ever-so-slightly odd in a galaxy far, far away). Finn and Rey have a wonderful exchange or two about who exactly is helping whom, and there is a scene which shows that perhaps Stormtroopers have finally learned how to handle the tempers of their Dark-Side-embracing superiors. One of the things that The Force Awakens has in common with the first trilogy is an overall sense of fun. The events in the film are important in the film, but it doesn’t take itself as seriously as the prequels seemed to, in their rush to fill in gaps and Set Everything Up. Good Star Wars is good entertainment, and this installment certainly has that going for it.

[Warning: if you want to be completely unspoiled, here’s a good place to stop, knowing that yours truly feels generally favorably about the film, is cautiously optimistic about future installments, and thinks that, if you have an interest in space opera overall or Star Wars in particular, it’s worth a few hours of your time. What follows brings up some plot points in a general way.]

     Still here? OK, then let’s get to the hitting the proper beats question. Does it ever. Almost, in fact to a fault. The Force Awakens so leans into the “reboot” feel of a new creative team tackling an old franchise that it pretty much steals plot points from Episodes IV-VI. There is a droid with key information. There is a planet-wrecking superweapon with a dangerous design issue. There is a space creature bar. There are emotional losses and perilous escapes. There is a fraught father-son relationship and a key confrontation between that father and son. On a space-station catwalk, no less. If the movie has a weakness, it’s that it verges on being an homage to the point of retread. And Abrams’s exuberant style sometimes makes this worse (“Look! Look! It’s a cool escape in the Millennium Falcon, just like in that earlier movie! Eh? Eh?!”) But, of course, if you’re going to steal, you may as well steal from the best (as Return of the Jedi did from A New Hope). The nod to what has come before is clear, as is the traditional aspect – these sorts of things are what happens in the Star Wars universe – and in its better moments, the familiarity helps create a variations-on-a-theme feeling, as though we really are starting in a place we know, but in a different key, and with different characters. Plus, in a series whose spiritual base (when it remembers it has one) is in Eastern traditions which emphasize cyclical time, repetition of events may not be exactly a vice.

     The redeeming factor is character. Early on, it’s hard to really care about anyone in all the running about, but the more time I spent with the new characters, the more I liked them. By the finale, I was genuinely moved and thrilled by their endgames. The repetition of elements makes it tempting to play matching games – who’s the new Han? Who’s the new Leia? And so on. But this is to be avoided. After all, the movie still has the old Han, Leia, and Luke kicking around. One place The Force Awakens succeeds is in making the newcomers interesting. They look like new versions of old characters, but slowly emerge in their own right. I liked the way Rey obviously figures things out as she goes along, and is both ingénue and adventurer. I liked the way Poe Dameron was a Top Gun-style adrenaline junkie who seems into his job less for political conviction than for the joy of flying (Isaac and Boyega make a great buddy-pair, too). I liked the way that Finn humanized the Stormtrooper trope, and was equally charming and out of his depth. There’s also something very interesting about Kylo Ren, whose tall, imposing presence and Sith-like powers are undercut by what I can only describe as a streak of immaturity. He starts as a clear and self-conscious Vader knockoff, but turns into something more complex. Handled the right way, he could become someone like Wilson Fisk from Netflix’s “Daredevil” show. There seems to be real interest in making these people real people, with imperfections and weird quirks. The supporting players are also good, if sometimes underused (as in the case of Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma, or the weird brief appearance of Max von Sydow) with Serkis and Gleeson probably giving the performances closest to Star Wars cliché – though I was glad to see General Hux be less cowed by The Force than most of his uniformed predecessors. Also of note is the increased diversity of the cast in terms of ethnicity and gender. The obligatory pans through crowds of alien critters is nice, but it’s good to see the real breadth of humanity represented as well, not to mention an uptick in the overall girl-power quotient from General Leia to Rey to female First Order officers and Resistance pilots.

     It’s very hard, of course, to know where any of this will go. This feels like a set-up chapter, which it is. The filmmakers have given themselves decent material to work with. The key to making a new crop of successful Star Wars movies will be to take the seeds of newness here and push them forward. We’ve had the fun little nods to the past this go ‘round, so hopefully those will diminish (I dearly love C-3PO and R2-D2, but I’m not sure we still need them around, for example). Abrams and company have shown they can stay true to the letter, now they need to remain true to the spirit of the Star Wars world. This they have done in part here, largely by reasserting the series’ emphasis on adventure and fun. The original films resonated, I believe, because they were primarily Saturday-morning-serial adventure pieces elevated by the mythic touches George Lucas was savvy (or lucky) enough to include. The massive success of the franchise has made it tempting to see them the other way around, as mythology occasionally dragged down by genre-movie elements. That is unfair, and leads to the self-seriousness that crept into the prequels. The Force Awakens is a nice reminder that Star Wars was always first and foremost a thrilling escape to another time and another galaxy. More than that at times, sure – but that at the least. Like many a Jedi apprentice, this movie has a lot of ability, but also a lot of room for future refining. May the Force be with it…er, them…er, us…well, you get the idea…

P. S. – I got great joy from noting that, in what may be the film’s most meta move, Rey is seen to be the owner of a cloth doll dressed like a New Hope-era fighter pilot – thus making this the first Star Wars movie to feature, in the movie itself, a Star Wars toy. My inner kid is grinning.

     

Spectre (2015)

     Spectre puts me in mind of a bit from a webcomic I read, wherein two characters are having a karaoke contest. When one busts out the Jay-Z song “99 Problems,” the other cries in frustration, “I can’t top Jay-Z! Even Jay-Z can’t top Jay-Z!” The last James Bond film, Skyfall, was a smashing success and a brilliant blend of good filmmaking, action, and Bond-canon nostalgia. Naturally, the filmmakers would want more from a follow-up, and highbrow director Sam Mendes is back at the helm…but it seems even James Bond can’t top James Bond. Spectre is a quality entry in the Bond series, but it’s no Skyfall. So the bad news is that this latest film isn’t the best of Bond. The good news is that even an imperfect Bond film is still better than a lot of the major-franchise fare out there.

     

     Spectre reunites most of the gang from the last installment. Daniel Craig is back as Bond, and is backed by the “new” team introduced in Skyfall: Ralph Fiennes as MI-6 head M, Naomie Harris as his girl Friday Moneypenny, and Ben Whishaw as gadget-master and hacker extraordinaire Q. New on the spy side of things is MI-5 chief Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), an oily operator who hopes to replace expensive human agents of the double-O type with drones and electronic surveillance programs. His efforts are given a boost by Bond’s actions in the opening sequence, a tense chase through (and above) a seething crowd on Mexico’s Day of the Dead that’s a bang-up sequence in more ways than one. Bond’s payoff for all the destruction? The death of an Italian hitman and the acquisition of a creepy ring inscribed with a tentacled logo. Figuring that so much chaos in pursuit of a ring doesn’t play well outside of Middle-Earth, M grounds Bond before he does any more damage. Bond, of course, never takes such orders well, and is soon off in search of SPECTRE, the organization whose members sport the spooky rings. Bond’s interest is further piqued when he learns that SPECTRE is headed by a man from his own past called Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) – a man Bond thought was dead. On his way to Oberhauser and his secrets, Bond finds time to seduce the Italian hitman’s widow (a gorgeous and underused Monica Bellucci), fight it out with deadly SPECTRE strongman Hinx (Dave Bautista), and develop feelings for sexy shrink Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux).

    

     One of the odd things about Spectre is that what I just outlined feels simultaneously like too much plot and not enough. While all of Bond’s chasing names and memories around the world leads to some great action sequences, it never really feels like there’s a lot at stake. The surprises the script has to offer are also not really that surprising; most viewers familiar with the formulas of spy thrillers and/or the history of Bond films will be able to spot the connections and identities pretty easily. And while numerous locales and fight scenes here recall famous bits of the Bond canon, they don’t give the sort of unexpected joy that similar echoes in Skyfall did. At times the movie seems too invested in the “reboot” mode – the dullest bits are when Spectre seems to be more focused on explaining Bond’s world than doing something entertaining in that world.

     There is nothing to fault in the acting. Craig is well-settled into his version of James Bond by now, even down to the signature cuff-straightening-during-a-fight move. His Bond remains a man of action over ideas, who has many lovers but few real loves, and whose wryness is equal parts real humor and defense mechanism. If you like Craig as Bond, you’ll have no complaints here. Bond’s supporting cast is given a little more to do this time around, and all do it well. The mix of patrician hauteur and grit required for M is right up Fiennes’s alley, just as Q’s nerd chic is right up Whishaw’s, and Harris is still just right as a Moneypenny who is as much spy as secretary. Seydoux’s part is somewhat underwritten, but she is a nice addition to the recent slate of “Bond girls” who are certainly damsels but are rarely in distress. Most of the new blood is on the adversary side, and here also, everyone does what we expect them to do. "Sherlock" fans know that Scott has a great gift for smarmy menace, which is most of what is required for Denbigh. Bautista’s Hinx is one of a long line of Bond strongmen who let their actions talk for them (he utters only one word in the whole film), but he has the good sense to style those actions after iconic henchmen like those played by Robert Shaw and Richard Kiel (and seems to have even taken some notes from "Game of Thrones"). Waltz does what I can only describe as the Christoph Waltz Thing, which is to make even the most causal chat sound like a threat, and the other way around. Waltz has a tough gig in some ways – the “international supervillain” character has been roundly parodied in settings as disparate as the Austin Powers series and Despicable Me. Fortunately, he is just the man for the job, and manages to carry off the role without summoning the (ahem) specter of Mike Myers. If anything is missing, it’s a sense of visceral danger from his character – Oberhauser is less obviously nasty than Javier Bardem’s gleefully vengeful Silva or Mads Mikkelsen’s casually amoral Le Chiffre in previous films. Yes, he’s meant to be the brains of the operation and not the brawn, but I want to squirm a little more when a Bond villain is around.

     Like Skyfall, Spectre looks great, despite a change in cinematographers, and the costumes are, as usual, impeccable and mouth-wateringly attractive. Bond the character and Bond the franchise have nothing if not style. Composer Thomas Newman does the best job yet in the Daniel Craig era of blending new music with iconic Bond melodies. Sam Smith’s theme song, however, is forgettable – no match for Adele’s soaring offering the last go ‘round.

When the movie fires on all cylinders, as in the Mexico City opening, it’s thrilling, and there are some fine set-pieces and bits of acting. Indeed, the recent Bond films have had an embarrassment of riches in that regard. When Fiennes and Whishaw and Rory Kinnear (as a fellow operative) go sneaking across London rooftops, it’s easy to wonder whether they’re up to spy games or up to staging guerilla productions of Hamlet. And those are just the supporting players. Spectre is a well-made movie; there’s not much to argue about that, and yet it feels like less than it could have been. The internet is apparently abuzz noting that the “octopus” in the SPECTRE logo is in fact sporting only seven arms. An Oberhauser oversight? Perhaps – but an appropriate one. Like that logo, this movie has the right feel and the right pedigree, but in the end it doesn’t quite all add up. 

A Few Words About Robin Williams

The best metaphor I have for the death of Robin Williams is that a note just dropped out of the bass line of modern entertainment. Some people are entertainment icons because they are towering presences in their field – Williams always felt more like a constant presence. Somehow the worlds of acting in general and comedy specifically were better because he was out there, a seemingly inexhaustible resource of silliness and brilliance. And he was prolific. The Internet Movie Database lists over 100 entries for Williams as an actor alone.

As a performer, Williams came across as an inch deep but a mile wide. Sure, his output was uneven (there was The Birdcage, say…but also Death to Smoochy), but, God, was there a lot of it. Williams played silly, he played sad, he played evil, he played supernatural, he played alien, he played loud, and he played soft. But he always played. There was a sense of fun about whatever he did. I’ve heard that the late actor George C. Scott evaluated others’ performances on whether or not the actors seemed to be enjoying themselves. Williams invariably passed that test, whatever he was in. And his energy was contagious. I defy anyone who watched movies or TV from the 1970s until now to tell me that that some Williams performance or appearance didn’t move you to laughter or tears or a wonderful mixture of both.

Personally, I was always in awe of his improvisational abilities. There’s quick-witted…and then there was Robin Williams. Anything, and I mean anything, could be grist for his comic sensibilities when he got going, and Williams was always going. Consider the “Inside the Actor’s Studio” bit now justly making the Youtube tribute rounds where he takes a scarf from someone in the audience and riffs with it, putting the crowd and usually self-possessed host James Lipton in stitches. Practice? Sure. But that’s a gift. Robin Williams had a mind for comedy. It’s just how he worked.

The circumstances of his death are especially tragic. There will be a tendency to view his career through the lens of his end, and his reported depression: “That mix of laughter and tears onscreen…that’s what was going on in his soul, man!” But I think that’s unfair. Depression is awful and life-destroying. Neither of those are words I would choose to attach to Robin Williams. Plus, we have no way to know what was ever in his mind as he performed. It’s enough that the tragedy ended his life without also letting it define his life.

I instead will remember a man who gave a lot of joy to the world. My personal favorite performances? His Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting, with its mixture of hurt, wisdom, and humor; and his madcap turn as the Genie in Aladdin, where animation liberated Williams’s machine-gun wit from even physical constraints. I confess I am not really a fan of Dead Poets Society, which many people are referencing in tribute, but there does seem to be something right about connecting – as that movie did -  Williams to Walt Whitman. Whitman also was infinitely observant, voluble, big-hearted, individualistic and yet fond of an audience. “I am large,” he wrote. “I contain multitudes.” So did Williams: multitudes of characters, multitudes of words, multitudes of emotions. It was our good luck that he decided to share them with us.

Stories We Tell (2012)

It starts with a man speaking, saying something unusually profound about stories. Then you get the citation – Margaret Atwood. The man is quoting a famous writer. The man himself is an actor, with some fame in Canada. He is Michael Polley, father of actress Sarah Polley, who created and directed Stories We Tell, a documentary – this documentary—about her own family. The next shot is Sarah installing her dad in a fancy recording studio, to do the voice-over for the film. He wrote his lines himself. But is the Atwood epigraph his, or Sarah’s? She’s on camera, too, joking (maybe) that this is both interview and “interrogation.” Stories We Tell claims to be a documentary. Yet here we have started with two professional actors, on camera, speaking words they have thought about beforehand. That’s not deception; it’s a signal. Stories We Tell is more than it appears to be…but of course, the stories people tell always are.

What it appears to be is a documentary about Sarah Polley’s family, focusing on the life and untimely death (from cancer) of her mother, Diane. The film comprises a collection of home movies, pictures, and interviews with “storytellers” (as the credits call them) from Polley family history. These are Sarah’s father, her siblings, some aunts and uncles, and also various colleagues of Michael and Diane (both worked in show business). Sarah, too, is heard asking questions and seen in both archival and present-day footage. Her opening gambit with the storytellers is always the same, however: tell what you know “from the beginning.” The beginning of what? Not Diane’s life, exactly…more, perhaps, their family life. The story seems to really begin when Diane and Michael meet. The children and friends predictably begin with characterizations of the couple; Michael begins with his tale of their meeting. The film is then off and running on a rather predictable track, especially for anyone who follows show-business marriages. What makes Stories We Tell interesting is that it will, in fact, jump that track. How it does so and why I dare not reveal. I will only say that the ground on which Polley’s documentary appears to rest shifts several times over its running. Remember those opening signals…

All this may make it sound like the film is some sort of trick. It isn’t. Some of its surprises are, in some ways, hiding in plain sight. Polley’s aim is not to cheat or disorient, but rather to point up the complexity of any given narrative. Any story is, by its very nature, an act of interpretation, and it is that act of interpretation, rather than any mystery around her mother, that seems to have captured Polley’s attention. She never ducks the fact that her “documentary” is itself a carefully shaped and constructed work of art. At least two interviewees, in fact, call her on it, on camera. And note the way we get “pre-interview” scenes with the family storytellers, self-consciously preparing to talk. One sister is sweating so much with nerves that she changes her clothes. Two of the brothers clearly love the idea of being filmed as raconteurs; they joke and twinkle their way through their sections the way Shelby Foote and Wynton Marsalis did for Ken Burns. Other storytellers object, hesitate, or simply lapse into silence. These moments are important, for the people themselves are at least as much of the story as what they say. 

In the end, Sarah Polley has produced something that is less a documentary of a life than a meditation on many lives, and how those who lived them (including herself) have made narrative sense of them. Does the movie reveal what “really” happened to and with Diane? Maybe. By the end, I didn’t care. The movie instead reveals something more slippery and profound about stories and families and the human experience. It asks us to accept the stories its participants tell not because the movie presents them as solidly true, but because each teller believes them to be true. If some of them are telling lies, well, they are lies that the tellers themselves believe…which means they’re actually versions of truth.  A hashtag I see occasionally online these days reads “#nofilter.”  Stories We Tell cries foul on that notion. While the truth it first seems to be about dances farther and farther away, it slyly hands us another truth: in the stories we tell, there is always a filter. The filter is us.

Locke (2013)

Locke is a strange film. That’s not a criticism. I guarantee that you have never seen anything else like it. It focuses on one actor who stays (except for a brief opening shot) entirely in one location, even though that location moves. The location is the inside of a nicely-equipped BMW, traveling to London from a site roughly two hours north. The actor is Tom Hardy, who plays the title character, Ivan Locke. Locke is a construction foreman who, in the late evening before an important job, takes a phone call. In London, a woman with whom Locke had a one-night stand months ago is giving birth to a child – Locke’s child. Locke, a diligent, competent worker and devoted family man, decides that he must be there for this birth, tossing all else to the wind. The film follows him on his journey more or less in real time as he uses the hands-free cell phone in his car to communicate about his decision to his boss, coworkers, family, and the mother of the child.

This is the sort of thing that is often described as “high concept,” but it is part of Locke’s appeal that it makes the concept seem perfectly ordinary. In today’s ultra-connected society, after all, a businessman phoning nonstop while he drives is nothing unusual. Given the list of contacts he scrolls through, it probably isn’t unusual for Ivan Locke, either. What is unusual is the particular situation he is in, the way in which he chooses to respond to it, and his reasons for doing so. It is best to leave the revelation of those things to the film itself. I will only note that Locke, like any master builder, starts from a carefully-laid plan but finds that he must deviate from it as circumstances warrant, and also that his reasons for heading to London lie farther back in his past than a few months.

90 minutes in a car may not seem like all that much fun, but Locke is engrossing throughout its running length. Writer-director Steven Knight is better known for the first half of that title, and for good reason. Locke is a textbook example of how to reveal character and plot entirely through dialogue and detail. This is especially impressive when you realize that only one actor involved—Hardy—is visible. The other characters exist only as voices, but each is distinct and fully realized. There is, of course, only so much plot to be had here, but Knight allows events to unspool at a pace that builds suspense without ever seeming unrealistic. There is no melodrama here—no cheap shots or cut corners. And the dialogue can be just plain good, with just enough poetry to remind us that this is a constructed work of art. Listen, for example, to Locke’s rhapsodizing about “the piece of the sky we will steal” with a well-made skyscraper, or his wife’s noting how the concrete Locke tracks home hardens into stone footprints on the floor. The visual touches in the movie don’t quite match the verbal ones—Knight probably fades in and out of a few too many shots of headlights and taillights, for example—but the ones that hit home, such as the shots of Locke’s GPS screen with blank spaces ahead and Locke’s particular use of his rearview mirror—only enhance what is written.

The movie’s strongest asset, understandably, is Tom Hardy. Locke is a chance for Hardy to essentially put on a clinic, and he does. I’ve seen Hardy play everything from an aggrieved spy to an alien to a comic-book terrorist, and one thing his performances all have in common is a kind of solidity. However outlandish whatever is going on around him is, Hardy always seems to belong. That quality serves him very well in Locke. All Hardy has to work with is the upper half of his body, and yet Ivan Locke emerges as a complete character, complete with motives and, yes, even body language. The things to praise about this performance are many. There is, for example, the way the calmness in Locke’s voice is never quite matched by an equal calmness in his eyes, or the slight difference in tone Hardy uses when Locke is speaking something he’s rehearsed rather than something off the cuff, or Hardy's expressions on the occasions when Locke cannot speak at all. It’s not the least of the compliments I can give the actor that he simply held my attention, all alone, for an hour and a half in a theater. Those on the other end of the phone have less to carry, of course, but their contributions are still important. Ruth Wilson, as Locke’s wife, proves to be the emotional opposite to her measured, deliberate husband. Tom Holland and Bill Milner, as Locke’s sons, have some gut-wrenching exchanges with their father. The most fun, however, is had by Andrew Scott (most famous as Sherlock’s creepy-crazy Moriarty) as the good-hearted but high-strung subordinate Locke trusts with continuing the construction job in his absence.

I saw Locke two days ago, and the film has stayed with me. It’s a thought-provoking piece of work, for both (to steal a distinction from the late Roger Ebert) what it is about, and how it is about it. The concept never overwhelms the characters, and the characters find themselves in interesting places. There are existential questions here (the dialogue name-drops Waiting for Godot) about what makes a person who they are, and how much change is possible or acceptable. There are social questions here about the ways we are connected to each other, and how those connections can be strained or pay off in trying situations. Finally, there are moral questions here as we see Locke struggle to do good and do right, and have to face the fact that those may not be the same things, or even mean the same things to different people. Locke is well-written, nicely shot, and very well-acted. It’s a construction of which its meticulous title character would be proud. If you can, I recommend letting it steal a piece of your time. 

Noah (2014)

      Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is three different movies at once. It’s a kind of film everyone’s making these days – the sci-fi/fantasy adventure – wrapped around a kind of film everyone used to make – the Biblical epic – itself wrapped around a kind of film hardly anyone makes – the kind that deals with real, deadly serious questions of religion and the human condition. That these three don’t always coexist seamlessly is not really a surprise; the surprise is that they mesh as well as they do. I’ve seen Noah described as weird, epic, flawed, ambitious, fantastic, and scary. It is, in its way, all of these things. It also offers over two hours of riveting cinema.

     Noah of course has its roots in the Book of Genesis. The bare outline of the story is familiar and simple: dismayed at the wickedness of humanity in the generations after Adam and Eve, God decides to start over. A great flood will cover the earth, destroying all life. A man named Noah and his family are tasked with building an ark to contain enough of every animal to repopulate the world after the waters subside. This they do. Biblical narrative, however, is famously spare, and to fill out the story, Aronofsky and his co-screenwriter Ari Handel have dipped into a number of traditions. One is the Jewish literature of midrash – writings by rabbis which attempt to fill the frustrating gaps and bridge the puzzling inconsistencies of the scriptural text. The filmmakers have said, in fact, that they see their film as belonging in its own way to the midrashic tradition. At the same time, however, Noah also partakes deeply of cinematic tradition, absorbing the work of artists such as DeMille, Kurosawa, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson. This is not, in other words, a Bible storybook put in motion. Noah is, instead, an attempt to bring the story of God’s flood and Noah’s clan’s survival to cinematic life, with all of life’s ups and downs and tragedies and deep questions.

     So it is that we are treated to a tale of two clans: the line of Cain (the first murderer) and the line of Seth. Cain’s line, led in this generation by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) has systematically despoiled the earth for raw materials, building a great industrial civilization at Creation’s expense. Seth’s line consists at this point of Noah (Russell Crowe), his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and their sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman), and Japeth (Leo McHugh Carroll). Filling out the edges of the family are Ila (Emma Watson), an orphan rescued and raised by Noah, and Noah’s wizard-like grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins). This clan lives close to the land, gathering plants to eat and protecting what parts of creation they can. In a dream, the Creator (the movie’s only name for a ruling deity) warns Noah of the impending destruction of the world by water. Aided by narcotic tea cooked up by Methuselah, Noah has a further vision setting out the nature of the ark he must construct to survive the deluge. He is helped in this task by the Watchers, a troop of fallen angels whose punishment is to have been encased in the rock and mud of the earth they loved too much. Noah is opposed, naturally, by Tubal-cain and his followers, who rather understandably fail to see the fairness is the Creator’s sparing of only one human family. Adding tension are some intra-family squabbles in the Noah clan. Shem and Ila seem made for each other – but what of the other two sons? Are they to have families after the flood? As Noah comes to increasingly despair of the wickedness of the Cain tribe, the answer seems more and more negative. By the time the family enters the ark, in fact, Noah is actively planning the end of his own line, telling his youngest son he will be “the last man.” However, other forces are at play, including a vengeful, stowaway Tubal-cain and the magic operations of Methuselah.

     At this point it may sound like there is, as critic Joe Bob Briggs used to say, too much plot getting in the way of the story. In fact, these many plotlines all serve as variations on a theme, a series of concentric circles around the idea of justice. Should the Watchers be punished for giving divine knowledge to humankind? Should the descendants of Cain really pay for their wicked use of Creation with their lives? And if something in human nature is to blame, why should anyone – even the less wasteful Noah – escape? Why does the Creator “speak” in visions to Noah, but to no other men? Is Noah being used as an instrument of wrath, or of mercy? The film tracks Noah as he becomes increasingly angry at his own kind, and his desire to save creation gives way to a related desire to eradicate the humans he sees as creation’s enemy. Against Noah’s principled zealotry, the movie pits Tubal-cain’s humanist pragmatism (he sees the Creator’s gift to humanity as dominion over Creation, and fails to understand why humans made in a god’s image should not behave in godlike ways) and Naameh’s earthy optimism (it is she who pushes for wives for all the sons, and believes in life itself as good). Caught in the middle are Noah’s children, who must decide when to follow their father, and when to go their own ways.

     There is a lot of substance to Aronofsky and Handel’s script, but in the end it’s deeper than it is smart. Some of the dialogue is a bit tin-eared, and many narrative beats will be predictable to those with some knowledge of cinematic rather than Biblical lore. Like the Creator Noah follows, Noah speaks more powerfully in images than in words. Aronofsky has always been a very visually-oriented director, and much of what makes Noah compelling is in what is literally up there on the screen. A mythic tale like that of Noah and his clan, set in a nebulous scriptural prehistory, gives the director full license to embrace a sort of magical realism, in which fountains and forests sprout from a single seed, hordes of animals march freely into the ark and curl up in ready-made pens, stone-bodied angels clomp about like Ray Harryhausen creations lit from within by sparklers, and the forbidden fruit beats like a living heart. At the same time, the world of Noah is dirty and violent and replete with the depravity of desperate people. These are men and women of myth, but they exist as real men and women –by turns faithful, doubtful, hopeful, vengeful, awful, and beautiful. A film like DeMille’s The Ten Commandments gives us something of the grandeur of Biblical narrative; Aronofsky’s Noah seems more intent on showing us something of the narrative’s humanity.

     After the visuals, the movie’s greatest assets are its characters. They are few, of course, but this allows those who are filled out to actually achieve some resonance. Winstone’s Tubal-cain, for example, is no stock villain. He’s a ruthless man, to be sure, but his concerns are quite fair: why does the Creator choose to kill some of those creatures made in his image and spare others? Like Noah, he wishes to survive – he is simply willing to go to different lengths to do so (it is in keeping with Aronofsky’s visual style that Noah and Tubal-cain often mirror each other in look and manner - variations on a theme again). Connelly likewise is allowed to make Naameh not some long-suffering spouse, but an equal and differing personality to her husband’s, also willing to do unusual things to pursue her vision of the future. Also of note is Lerman as the conflicted Ham, who respects his father, but not all of his father’s ways. The mystical, eccentric Methuselah is a role very much up Hopkins’s alley, and he makes the most of it (the character’s curmudgeonly nostalgia for the ripe berries now mostly missing from a despoiled world provides some of Noah’s few real moments of comic relief). Noah is Crowe’s movie, however. He must essentially play Noah as three men – the hopeful, pre-vision family man; the ark-builder driven by conviction and divine fiat; and the mournful, guilt-wracked survivor of what is essentially world-wide genocide, looking for consolation. This is not an easy journey, but Crowe has long excelled at principled men backed into tight spots, and he uses that to great advantage as Noah. Noah is not a nice man, nor even really a holy one – but Crowe plays him as someone who wants to be a good man, even as he comes to fear that good men are an impossibility. It’s a riveting performance. After all – what would it be like to really be in Noah’s shoes, in the moment, letting millions die while you and your family float to safety? What would it really feel like to be deeply and seriously tasked with responsibility by the Creator of all that is?

     When the film focuses on these human aspects of the Noah tale, it captivates, and these moments make it easier to forgive some of its more indulgent ones (the protracted battle for the ark, for example…but, then, wouldn’t those outside fight to get in? Wouldn’t you?). The movie is about something (which is always admirable), and is about it in a way that often goes for broke (which is its own kind of admirable). Noah’s visuals provoke comment, and its themes provoke thought. It is not a movie for everyone’s taste, and, despite the omnipresence of cuddly Noahs in nursery décor, it is not a movie for young children. For those inclined to struggle with a good story, however, Noah represents an intriguing voyage.

PS – I should say something about the midrashic nature of the film. I believe I’m plain above that Noah takes liberties with the straight Biblical account – some sanctioned by Judeo-Christian lore and tradition, some not. All film adaptations of texts, whatever their genre, make changes simply as a matter of shifting from written to visual storytelling. This is true for scriptural adaptations as well as fictional ones – as true of The Ten Commandments as Ben Hur. I distinctly recall a Jewish professor of mine in graduate school explaining to a Christian questioner that his tradition taught him to argue with and struggle with the scripture. Aronofsky,  a “cultural Jew” by upbringing, has put Noah in that tradition. It adds and interprets, but it does so in a deeply serious way. Midrash was done in an attempt to maintain the integrity of scripture, because the rabbis were uncomfortable with the ideas of gaps and inconsistencies in their sacred text. Obviously, the answers were there to be found, and could illuminate the message rather than obscure it. Aronofsky’s film proposes his own questions and answers about the story of Noah, but, I believe, in a way that he feels highlights and deepens the wisdom and challenge of the Genesis account. Nothing in the film, for example, questions the existence of the Creator, nor the fact of His judgment – rather, the film and its characters wrestle with the nature of the Creator and His judgment. The film depicts Noah in some ways he is not often shown, and some are disturbing. But a story of a world-drowning flood, and of a God who would despair of His own creations is, by nature, disturbing. Noah goes to the heart of that disturbance, and looks for meaning and, ultimately, hope there. That it does so with some of the trappings of a Hollywood blockbuster will strike some as remarkable and others as unfortunate. Both are legitimate responses, with their own justifications. For the record, however, I fall in the former camp.