→ September 4, 2012
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Bread and Tulips.

Bread & Tulips (Pane e tulipani) was a huge success in Italy when it was released in 2000, sweeping their version of the Academy Awards and even earning “official selection” status at Cannes and at the Toronto International Film Festival. Yet it’s actually a light, tender-hearted comedy about second chances in life and love, especially where kind souls are involved. (It’s available on Netflix Instant video as well.)

Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba, a harried, unappreciated housewife who, while touring ancient ruins in the Italian countryside with her fatheaded husband and their two sons, ends up left behind at a rest stop, for which her husband blames her even though he failed to notice she was missing for a few hours. (He’s a real peach, the lone one-dimensional character in the film, but at least one used to good purpose as the plot’s main punching bag.) On a whim, she hitchhikes to Venice, a city she’s always wanted to visit but has never seen, and through another series of misfortunes ends up settling there, taking a part-time job, and rooming with an Icelandic waiter, Fernando (played by Bruno Ganz), who has to delay his plans to hang himself due to his unexpected houseguest.

The film marries two old movie tropes, the bored housewife making her escape and the stranger in a town of lovable eccentrics, in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The script’s beauty is that it presents these various oddballs as they are, in favorable lighting but without commentary and often without much definition. Fernando’s neighbor, the “holistic masseuse” (and perhaps lady of the evening) Grazia, ends up in an intrigue involving the hapless plumber-turned-detective Constantino, who should be the story’s main antagonist as an extension of Rosalba’s husband but ends up winning our affection because of his determination and ineptitude.

Bread and Tulips is sweet yet seldom sentimental, and if it’s a little unrealistic at times, it’s more to avoid getting bogged down in the mundane details of a woman just taking off without much cash or means of support. There’s a fair amount of slapstick humor along with some good situational gags, such as Rosalba’s husband asking his mistress to iron a shirt or two for him, while Giuseppe Battiston handles the clownish role of Constantino in a way that engenders sympathy for him as even he tries to ruin Rosalba’s fantasy.

The only false notes in the film, to me, were the dream sequences, in part because they’re not set off from the film in any clear way, and in part because they felt like a clumsy method of demonstrating Rosalba’s own inner turmoil at her abandonment of her family obligations. Awake, she seldom shows any guilt, and relishes her freedom, her independence, her ability to put herself first and revisit long-dormant dreams, including an apparent passion for music that resurfaces when she finds a disused accordion in the wardrobe of the room she rents. The dreams seemed forced, as if the writer or director felt that we needed a reminder that she’d fled her family or that she at least loved her two sons.

Roger Ebert’s review of Bread and Tulips praised the film, but contains one line in the first paragraph that I found shocking to the point that I was slightly offended by it:

Not a classic beauty, not a ”movie star,” but a 40-ish dreamer who’s just a little overweight, with the kind of sexiness that makes you think of bread baking, clean sheets and that everything is going to be all right. 

Man, I like Roger Ebert, but this is a seriously cracked view of beauty. Maglietti – who was around 45 when the film was made – looks gorgeous as soon as she gets to Venice and out of her frumpy-mummy clothes, spending most of the film in flattering sundresses that would certainly have exposed her as “a little overweight” if she had had any weight over. And I’m not even sure where to go with Ebert’s opinion on what’s sexy about an attractive 40-year-old woman (or about the type of women who bake bread?). Besides, if everything’s going to be all right, maybe you’re doing it all wrong.

What Ebert might have said was that Maglietti’s sex appeal is paired with a youthful visage that makes her seem more approachable, not just for the audience, but to lend credence to the idea that strangers in Venice would just take to this woman, offering her a place to rent, a part-time job, or help keeping her location a secret from her husband (who seems to want her back to take care of the house, not to be his wife or lover). Maglietti doesn’t look close to her age in this role, playing a woman in her late 30s with a cuteness that renders Rosalba’s personality as something even younger. She carries the film, with plenty of help from her supporting cast, in the kind of romantic comedy that would never be made by a major U.S. studio because it relies too much on tired tactics like strong writing and actors who bring their characters to life.

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→ September 3, 2012
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The Descendants.

I’ve been less motivated to watch all of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture than I was the previous year, with a few films in this year’s batch in which I have absolutely zero interest (The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and the winner, The Artist failing to meet expectations for me – to say nothing of the time I’ve spent watching rookie league games the last two months. I finally got around to watching The Descendants this weekend, and I’m struggling to find a credible reason why it wouldn’t beat out The Artist in a fair fight, one based strictly on the quality of the films rather than what I presume was a nostalgia move.

George Clooney plays the starring role as Matt King, a successful Hawaiian attorney whose wife, Elizabeth, suffers a serious boating accident at the start of the film, leaving her comatose and eventually without hope of recovery. Matt’s two daughters, the wayward Alexandra and the sassy Scottie, were already struggling before the accident, and the situation is made worse when Alexandra informs her father that Elizabeth had been having an affair. This revelation launches Matt, with Alexandra’s help, on a quixotic quest to identify and confront the man who has cuckolded him, only to find that he, too, has a family likely to be devastated if the adultery is unearthed. It’s clear as this storyline unfolds that this is not only Matt’s way of dealing with his two-headed grief, but a way that his remaining family nucleus can come back together and try to heal as a single unit, rather than three individuals drifting apart on a sea of sorrow and hurt.

None of the film’s characters, even side characters like Alexandra’s sort-of-boyfriend Sid, ends up one-dimensional, a rare trick in a movie with this many people in pivotal roles. The film could easily have demonized Elizabeth’s paramour, and while he’s hardly a good guy, he’s more than just a dark presence around the story’s periphery. Elizabeth’s father similarly appears with a purpose but with a severe underlying pain that governs his anger towards Matt and Alexandra, anger that presents Matt with a difficult decision near the end of the film. I had a little trouble with Judy Greer as the oblivious wife of Elizabeth’s lover, although that was primarily because every time she talked, I pictured Cheryl from Archer (whom Greer voices brilliantly).

The movie’s subplot, however, has all of the sentiment and overstatement that the main plot lacks. Matt is the sole executor of the trust overseeing the 25,000 acres of “pristine” land on Kauai that must be sold before the trust dissolves in seven years, and most of the various cousins involved in the trust want to sell out to a developer who’ll build a resort, golf course, and and other commercial properties, making the cousins instant millionaires. I doubt I need to explain what course Matt ends up taking, although the film offers minimal explanation for it beyond his soliloquy at the time he makes it (in which he acknowledges that he has no immediate solution to the problem caused by the rule against perpetuities); the parallel between his attempt to save the land and his newfound attention to the consequences of his actions and his similar efforts to save what remians of his family is obvious and forced, the one false note in a film that otherwise succeeds on how often it feels true.

George Clooney excels in the role of Matt, although I did find it hard to accept one of the most famous actors in the world in this sort-of-everyman role – doesn’t everyone around Matt realize he looks a lot like George Freaking Clooney? – and the attempts to frump him up a little, like tucking in his shirts, greying his hair, making him run oddly in flip-flops, and so on, only emphasized the disconnect between the character and the actor, much like Cary Grant in his final film role, Walk, Don’t Run. Clooney is at the point in his career where any performance in a serious film that isn’t worthy of an Oscar nomination is a surprise, so I was far more taken by the performance of Shailene Woodley, making her feature-film debut as Alexandra, who begins the film away at a reform school where she’s supposed to be getting help with substance-abuse issues. Her character develops far more over the course of the film, sometimes in mildly surprising ways, as she goes from spoiled, snotty, justifiably-angry daughter to her father’s main emotional supporter and partner-in-crime. Woodley had to show more range than any other actor in The Descendants, from the heartbreaking scene where she learns that her mother isn’t going to recover to the just-as-heartbreaking scenes at the end where the family says goodbye – delivering subtle grace notes like her movements as she brings her younger sister into their mother’s room – enough that I’m surprised she didn’t receive more attention come awards season. With that kind of ability and the requisite beauty (Hollywood accepts no less), Woodley looks like a star in the making.

Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen so far, I’d put The Descendants on top, ahead of Hugo, which I loved but which didn’t have the subtlety of The Descendants and relied more on fantasy to drive its main plot forward. That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it’s harder to make a great film while trying to keep the characters and story firmly grounded in reality, and of course The Descendants couldn’t fill space with special effects or long flashback sequences. The Descendants also found significant humor in the cracks between the darker sequences in the film. Both movies make The Artist look like paper-thin in comparison.

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→ July 21, 2012
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Pelotero.

The stellar new documentary Pelotero shines a light on the way Major League Baseball has used the Dominican Republic as a pipeline for talent over the past forty years by following a pair of up-and-coming prospects leading up to Signing Day in 2009. The 75-minute film is screening in select cities, and is also available as a rental for $6.99 via both amazon and iTunesicon.

Pelotero started out as a simple documentary about the way MLB mines talent in the Dominican Republic, focusing on two young players, Miguel Angel Sano and Jean Carlos Batista, as they approached their 16th birthdays and the July 2nd date after which they’d be allowed to sign pro contracts. The directors appear to have gained almost unfettered access to both players, their families, and their trainers, as well as a surprising number of on-camera quotes from scouts with major league teams operating in the Dominican. That alone would have made the film worth seeing, but it probably wouldn’t have had much narrative greed to keep the attention of a larger audience.

As some of you probably remember, Sano ended up at the center of a controversy over his actual age and identity, one the directors were able to follow in real time and to expose in a way that has to have MLB and the Pittsburgh Pirates deeply unhappy. The film makes it quite clear that the family blames Pittsburgh’s top scout in the Dominican Republic, Rene Gayo, for starting the rumors about Sano’s age and then colluding with the MLB investigator (who, off camera, tells Sano to sign with the Pirates for $2 million to make the investigation go away) so he can acquire the player at a discount. The most damning evidence, obtained via a hidden camera, has Gayo strongly implying to the family that he is the reason Sano was partially cleared – and that they should sign with Pittsburgh as a result. The unfolding of this drama, as well as a similar if smaller-scale issue affecting Batista, and the associated effects on the players’ families, turns an ordinary documentary focusing on the exploitation of young Dominican players into a scathing indictment of corruption in MLB’s operations on the island. (The film concludes with a note that MLB declined an opportunity to respond on camera, and that MLB now claims that the depictions in the film are “inaccurate” and no longer reflect the league’s operations and conduct on the island. Gayo is still employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates and says, in another statement displayed before the credits, that he simply did his job. You can read some of MLB’s comments here and here, and it is fair for them to argue that their regulation in the Dominican Republic is stronger today than it was in 2009.)

Setting aside the specific questions of culpability in the Sano case, which may have cost him $1-2 million off his ultimate signing bonus, the film’s greatest contribution is its exposure of how Dominican prospects are treated like chattel in a factory system where independent trainers will develop players on contingency, taking up to 35% of their eventual signing bonuses, while MLB teams pay lower bonuses there than they do to comparable American- or Canadian-born prospects. The new CBA, which caps each team’s total international expenditures on all players in this signing season at a figure less than what the seventh overall pick in this June’s draft received by himself, only makes the varying treatment of players by their places of birth even more stark. Pelotero shows how much Dominican players’ families come to count on a large signing bonus as their lottery ticket out of poverty, with some players (including Sano) living in heartbreaking conditions before they sign – and relative opulence afterwards. The promise of a life-changing bonus leads to a clear sense of entitlement on the sides of some players, to Batista’s mother apparently viewing her son as a cash cow, and to incentives for players to try to cheat the system by lying about their ages or identities. MLB and Gayo come off as the villians of Sano’s story, but that doesn’t mean the players or their camps are heroes.

The directors of Pelotero deserve much credit for staying out of the story, with minimal narration from John Leguizamo that offers some slightly pro-player commentary early in the film but that largely drops off as the Sano controversy takes over. The flip side of their hands-off style is that once that storyline becomes the film’s center, the balance begins to shift, unavoidably, to Sano’s side – we are watching it from his house, and hearing most of the commentary from him, his family, and his agent, but other than Gayo, who comes off horribly, we don’t get MLB’s side because they declined to comment on film. There was little the directors could have done to restore the balance without participation from the Commissioner’s Office, but the film does suffer slightly in the end from their absence. It is an outstanding film even with that caveat, a must-watch for any baseball fan. After you hear a trainer casually toss out “planting seeds” and “harvesting” as a metaphor for how he develops teenaged prospects before they turn 16, you will find it hard to look at any Dominican prospect the same way.

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→ July 15, 2012
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Brave.

Brave is by far the most beautiful animated film I have ever seen, with details so clear and so lifelike that the movie exceeded any expectations I had for how realistic computer-generated images could be. It features a strong female protagonist, something I appreciate as the father of a six-year-old princess-obsessed daughter, and a stirring score primarily written by Scottish composer Patrick Doyle, with two songs performed by Scottish singer Julie Fowlis. Unfortunately, the story is a lot less nuanced than previous entries in the Pixar canon, with a more predictable plot and none of the secondary storylines we’ve come to expect from a studio that has produced so many masterpieces.

The warrior princess at the heart of Brave, Merida (voiced by, who else, Kelly Macdonald), is being groomed for eventual betrothal to one of three princes from allied clans in the Scottish highlands, yet has no interest in an arranged marriage or any fate written for her by her domineering mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson). Her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), is happy to encourage her tomboyish habits, giving her a bow and arrow for a birthday present and making fun of her would-be suitors with her, yet defers to his wife on all matters of import. Merida runs away after a blowout quarrel with her mother over her refusal to accept any of the princes, ending up in a witch’s cottage in the forest, which, naturally, leads to a spell that goes awry, the effects of which Merida must spend the remainder of the film trying to undo.

The animation of Merida’s unruly, curly, red hair is an absolute marvel, both an obvious symbol of her fiery independent spirit and a chance for Pixar’s animators to show off their tricks, which are even more impressive now than they were in Ratatouille, perhaps my least favorite Pixar film but which featured remarkable animation of Colette’s hair. Pixar re-wrote its animation system for the first time in 25 years to allow for more realistic depictions of human characters, and it shows all over this film, even in the depiction of the fur on the two ursine characters and in breathtaking panomaric shots of the highland forests, cliffs, and waterfalls. It is a new high-water mark for computer animation in the movies.

While my daughter enjoyed the movie tremendously, adults will likely find it a little too predictable, and the resolution relied on what was, for Pixar at least, an abnormal amount of just straight-on physical combat between man and bear and eventually between the two bears themselves. The mother-daughter bonding that occurs after the spell takes hold is poignant without becoming too sentimental, with the usual Pixar message of the need for characters who disagree to open their minds and work together. Merida’s three younger brothers, mischievous triplets who are too young to speak but are old enough to understand and use simple machines, steal most of the scenes in which they appear and seem tailor-made for future appearances in Pixar shorts, if not in a film of their own. Yet they don’t have any sort of story, appearing as comic relief and to help Merida and her mother try to break the spell. I also thought the film had less of Pixar’s trademark humor, relying on more obvious sight gags and even some mild bathroom humor to fill that gap.

However, I know I’m holding Pixar to an impossibly high standard – one they set through their first eleven films. (I still haven’t seen Cars 2.) No studio has been so good for so long and it may be unfair to expect every one of their films to be as good as The Incredibles or Up. Brave is an excellent movie by industry standards and my daughter loved it, not least because it has such a strong female lead. It just didn’t quite meet my very high expectations.

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→ May 8, 2012
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50/50.

My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2012 went up earlier today for Insiders. Twenty-two of them now have full scouting repots, with more to go up over the rest of the month.

—

Last year’s independent comedy 50/50 seems to have garnered little notice outside of some positive reviews, even though it’s quite funny and never as depressing as the premise would indicate (and perhaps not as dark as it should have been). Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a 28-year-old public radio reporter who discovers that a pain in his lower back is actually caused by a tumor on his spine, a rare form of cancer with a survival rate that gives the film its title – yet despite that morbid plot, the film mines substantial humor from all aspects of its protagonist’s experience.

Adam is in a dysfunctional relationship with a somewhat self-centered artist when he gets his diagnosis, but it’s his best friend Kyle (played by Seth Rogen) who rallies, with well-intentioned if not always well-executed attempts to keep Adam’s spirits up through the diagnosis and treatment. Adam’s girlfriend, who doesn’t seem to be that into him before he gets the news, isn’t quite up to the task (and is easily the film’s worst-drawn character, although neither of the other two female characters is all that well fleshed-out), while his therapist, Katherine, is still in grad school and is lost when her sessions with Adam veer off script, and his mother, played affectingly by an almost unrecognizable Angelica Houston, is mostly around to get on Adam’s nerves.

Gordon-Levitt carried Brick and was superb in a minor part in Inception, so it’s no surprise to see him excel here as an overly sensitive, slightly meek guy who gradually comes out of his shell while facing his own mortality. But Rogen, who helped produce the film (based on the true story of the experiences of Rogen’s friend, writer Will Reiser, with a similar cancer diagnosis), stole more scenes than anyone else as the loud, boorish, very crude best friend who also happens to care more for Gordon-Levitt’s character than anyone else in the film, even more than Rachael. I’m sure Adam’s mother cares for him, but she only appears in a handful of scenes and is more of a nuisance than a loving parent until the very end of the film – and even then, Kyle takes center stage when the doctor discusses the results of the last procedure. (I wonder if Reiser was working out his issues through the script here, or how his mother felt about her portrayal.) Anna Kendrick fares much better here than in Up in the Air, putting her great talents for appearing flummoxed and looking vulnerably cute to much better use here as Adam’s therapist, yet she’s still overshadowed by Rogen’s character and ends up short on screen time given how important her character is to the plot.

The problem with 50/50 is that it’s only a witty dark comedy, nothing more. The cancer is merely a plot device for exposing how the patient’s relationships with friends and family change once he receives the diagnosis – but only the humorous aspects of the changes, not the subtleties. I have no problem with cancer being played for a laugh, but when the film was over, I thought of a dozen ways in which the film had fallen short, from Mark’s father’s dementia to the way the film made chemo almost seem easy to the fact that every female character was two-dimensional. It’s a funny film, and it’s a well-acted film, but the script was too superficial for it to have any lasting impact with me.

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→ April 5, 2012
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Drive.

It didn’t take me long to find a 2011 film that I thought was better than The Artist. I admit to a strong partiality toward noir in all its forms, but even adjusting for that, I thought Drive was tighter, more interesting, better performed, and a lot less cliched than the actual Best Picture winner. (Drive wasn’t nominated.)

Based on a novel by James Sallis (just $5.18 on amazon), Drive follows its nameless stunt-driver/mechanic protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling with the bare minimum of emotion, as he moonlights as a getaway driver for hire, a role that gives the film’s car-chase scenes some actual justification. The Driver develops an attachment to a new neighbor Irene, (Carey Mulligan), and to her young son, Benicio, whose father, Standard, is in prison when the movie begins but comes home to find himself pursued by thugs to whom he owes money for protecting him while he was in prison. When the Driver sees Standard take a beating at the hands of the thugs and learns that they’ve threatened Irene and Benicio, he offers to help Standard fulfill the gangsters’ demand that he rob a pawn shop holding a substantial amount of cash, which, inevitably, leads the Driver into a conflict with the gangsters themselves that he resolves (in part) through his skills at the wheel. It’s a pretty simple plot with a small number of characters, but they’re all looped together very tightly, if a little improbably, unless we believe Los Angeles is so small that it only has two gangsters in it.

One of the hallmarks of the noir genre is understated dialogue, which is one of Drive‘s two greatest strengths. The Driver couldn’t say less if he was made of stone, and even his expressions are so slight that it’s often unclear whether he’s motivated by anger, self-preservation, or the desire to protect Irene and Benicio. He barely smiles or frowns, and is almost inhuman in his calmness under pressure. I wish that understatement had extended to the film’s depictions of violence, which are unsparing (fine) and gory (pandering?), and which added little to the film itself. I expected bodies, but the director seems to take a perverse delight in the destruction of the human head.

With scant dialogue, a movie like this lives or dies on the quality of its performances, which turns out to be the other strength of the film. Gosling is excellent as the Driver, playing him as emotionless without turning him into a hackneyed “tightly-wound hero about to explode” character. Albert Brooks is even better playing against type as a high-ranking gangster who hides an inner ruthlessness behind a somewhat erudite facade. (I’d also give points to Carey Mulligan for being cute, which the role requires since the Driver is supposed to develop feelings for her fairly quickly.)

Gosling’s character is so calm and insular that it requires a precise performance that keeps emotions you’d expect to see in scenes involving fear or rage below the surface, yet Gosling doesn’t come off as a charmless robot or a monotonous antihero. Brooks steals every scene he’s in, even those with Gosling, again by keeping his sinister nature underneath the sarcastic but not humorless exterior; when he’s not taking care of business, he has his charms, yet when he flips the switch and needs to commit some horrible act of violence, there’s no overplaying – this is just business, from a man who knows when something needs to be done. The failure of the Academy to give Brooks a nomination for Best Supporting Actor earned them much criticism in a year when they seemed to screw a lot of things up (Dujardin over Oldman for Best Actor would be one such mistake in my mind), and based just on Brooks’ performance here I can see why, although I still would have given the award to Christopher Plummer for Beginners. Gosling makes the movie, but Brooks elevates it every time he’s on screen.

The story itself doesn’t have much depth behind it, but imbuing a noir film with too much subtext would rob it of its essential noir-ness. Noir is entertaining without targeting the least common denominator: Phrasing is clipped, dialogue is sparse, explanations are few. The viewer is drawn into the film because he has to work a little harder to understand motivations or connections between characters. Drive only veers from typical noir through its depictions of violence, but not the intensity attached – there should be a coldness pervading all conflicts between protagonist and antagonists, which Drive achieves; the gore only served as a distraction to me.

(I should probably mention the plaudits given to the film’s soundtrack, but I can’t say I noticed it at all. Soundtracks and scores almost never make any impression on me unless they’re intrusive.)

The limitation of Drive is that you have to like this style of movies – it’s an action movie without a tremendous amount of action (which led to one of the more frivolous lawsuits I’ve ever heard of), and it’s a sharp movie without a ton of dialogue. I like hard-boiled detective novels for the same reasons I liked Drive, because I like seeing a plot stripped down to its essentials, with tension that’s derived from the story itself. Your mileage may vary.

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→ March 23, 2012
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The Artist.

Here’s my basic problem with The Artist, which I saw two weeks ago: The more I try to think about it, the more I end up thinking about something else.

Don’t mistake my tone there – it’s a very good movie, at different points entertaining, funny, and poignant; beautifully shot and staged; and simply written with little that doesn’t belong. But it didn’t stick with me at all; a great movie will come back to me often, days or even weeks after I see it, with the best scenes replaying in my head regardless of whether I called them to mind. I end up considering and reconsidering themes or questions or ambiguities, often until I see a different film. But The Artist brought none of that. It was a fun way to spend two hours, but I couldn’t call it more than that.

The Artist is, at heart, a tragic romance, the story of a man, George Valentin, who is madly in love with himself – so much so that he can’t seem to recognize it when someone else actually cares about him. The title might even be ironic, and given how he treats most of the people in his life, especially after his career begins to unravel, it might have more accurately been called The Asshole.

Valentin (Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin) is a silent-film star whose life is altered by two major events near the start of the film. One is the advent of talkies, which he dismisses as might anyone who finds his livelihood threatened by new technology or innovation. (I imagine buggy drivers had some choice words for the first automobile as well.) The other is a chance encounter with an adoring fan, the fresh-faced and aptly-named Peppy Miller (Best Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), to whom George gives a role as an extra in his next film. Her star rises with the rise of sound in pictures while he is cast aside, eventually blowing his fortune to produce a silent film that, for a variety of reasons, tanks at the box office, after which his wife leaves him and his life spirals down to the bottom of a series of bottles. He hits bottom twice, and Peppy ends up in position to repay him for his part in starting her career – if only he wasn’t too buried in self-pity to notice.

The strongest aspects of the movie lie in its subtleties, as the plot itself is pretty straightforward and there aren’t any real subplots. Peppy criticizes silent movies once she’s a star by referring to actors “mugging” for the camera, but Bejo and Dujardin mug a lot less than I expected without sacrificing the expression a silent film requires from its stars. I was far more impressed by the mass of activity underneath the film’s surface, some of which holds clues to the small twist at the end of the film that casts Valentin in a better light (but only slightly), some of which just made the film a greater pleasure to watch – such as the scene in the studio’s offices where the camera shows three floors simultaneously, with a flurry of activity around Peppy and George as she tries to reconnect with him, unaware that he’s just been sacked by the studio.

But the production values and strong performances couldn’t quite get me past how sparse the actual story was. Valentin starts at the top, falls to the bottom, nearly dies, considers suicide, but never seems to learn a damn thing – not the need to change, not the value of treating people well, not how to live within his means, nothing. Only at the very end do we see a small sign that he may have learned some humility, but even that is tainted by its circumstances. He waited around for life to come back around and save him. We spend more time laughing at misfortunes of his own making than we do empathizing with him because we never seen the insecurity that lurks behind the pride.

The dog is awesome, though.

—

I was familiar enough with the film going in to try to guard against the reflex reaction that the film only won the Academy Award for Best Picture because it seemed designed to win the award – a black-and-white love letter to nascent Hollywood shot in 4:3 with only two lines of spoken dialogue, coming at the very end of the film. And, to the film’s credit, it wasn’t hard to get lost in the story, even with the twists I kind of knew were coming. But it seemed rather insubstantial for a Best Picture winner, according to the arbitrary standard in my head for that award. I expect more depth from a film deemed the best of the year by that body.

I’ve only seen one other Best Picture nominee from last year, and The Artist was better, but I’m not sure what made this film, stripped of gimmickry, better than, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s prettier, and more mainstream, and not half as disturbing, but none of those things really makes it better. I’ll work my way through the nominees as I did last year, as well as a few movies that film-critic friends of mine have pushed me to see (coughA Separationcough), but I’ll predict now that I’ll find something else I thought was more deserving. Next up is Drive.

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→ January 22, 2012
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Animal Kingdom.

I’m a bit behind here as I’ve been researching and now writing up the top 100 prospects, but I’ll try to at least get some fresh content up on the dish this week.

When I was slowly making my way through the 2010 nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture over the course of the second half of 2011, several readers mentioned the Australian drama Animal Kingdom as an unjustly overlooked candidate for that honor (although Jacki Weaver did receive a Best Supporting Actress nod). It’s a harsh, bleak film that uses crime as a springboard for examining motivations behind individual decisions – including the fungible ties of family – without ever lapsing into pure crime drama, with a minimalist approach to dialogue and plot that kept the pace up even with such stark subject matter. And it was far better than two of the Best Picture nominees I saw, Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right, and is probably ahead of The Fighter for me as well.

As the film opens, we see Jay, a sullen teenager, calling 911 (or the Australian equivalent, I suppose) without any emotion to report that his mother, sitting next to him on the couch, appears to have OD’d on heroin. Even after her death, he calls his grandmother, Janine Cody (Weaver), from whom his mother was estranged, to ask for help, yet still shows very little emotion at all – what could be shock, of course, but turns out to be more than that. Janine is the head of an organized crime family, based on the real-life Pettingill family and the real murder of two police officers of which one of the Pettingill sons was accused, and Jay finds himself gradually folded into the family business without ever quite understanding his role in it until he’s arrested after the deaths of two police officers. From there, Jay finds himself forced to choose between the only family he has left and the morally correct option presented to him by the lead investigator, Sergeant Leckie (Guy Pearce, excellent as always), who tries to offer Jay a way out in exchange for the testimony to damn his uncles.

Although the Cody brothers are violent and disturbed, particularly Andrew (“Pope”, played by Ben Mendelsohn) and the paranoid Craig, the film’s setup puts them in the role of prey rather than predator, which at least explains their actions as those of desperate criminals rather than criminals who are violent for violence’s sake. Pope is at least a sociopath, Craig’s paranoia is the cause or result (or both) of his drug abuse, and it’s hinted that Darren is suppressing his homosexuality; all three in an unhealthy home environment, chased by a crooked police force, create a powder keg that the viewer expects to explode. (That’s not to forgive any of their violent acts, but provides depth to the characters beyond the simple “bad guy does bad thing” motif.) Jay, on the other hand, spends most of the film as its Nick Jenkins, mostly passive observer, occasional fringe participant, until events force him to choose sides and grab the wheel of his own fate.

Much of the dialogue in the film, especially spoken by Jay and his uncle Darren, is mumbled, and between that and their Australian accents I had to rewind a few times to catch what was said, although I assume the mumbling was by design, as those two characters share a certain reluctance to go all-in on the family’s activities. The film is often dimly lit, adding to the bleak feel but making it a little tough to watch. And since the film is driven not by violence (although there is some) or by action, but by dialogue and reactions between pairs of characters, it doesn’t fit neatly into buckets like “crime drama” or “action film” that might have made it more of a commercial success. (It earned just over $4.9 million at the box office in Australia, which made it one of the top earners of the year in that country – a fact that surprised me, since I tend to think of Australia as more populated than it actually is.)

Animal Kingdom was largely ignored by the Oscars, but it set records in Australia’s version of the awards for both nominations (18) and wins (10), the latter including best picture, director, screenplay, actress (Weaver), actor (Mendelsohn), and supporting actor (Joel Edgerton, as Barry “Baz” Brown, which was an odd choice if you’ve seen the film). It is loaded with strong performances and one of the most perfect endings I can remember to any film – it resolves one major plot strand, yet opens a new one just as large that remains unanswered.

I’d be curious if any of you have seen another Australian film written by Edgerton, The Square, a neo-noir drama that also received much critical acclaim.

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→ January 9, 2012
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Margin Call.

Margin Call jumped on my radar when the late, lamented Yahoo! blog The Projector gave it a glowing review back in October, and then named it their must-see movie of the week a fortnight afterwards. Featuring an absurdly deep cast, the film follows an investment bank or hedge fund heavily exposed to CMOs during a 24-hour period right at the start of the U.S. housing market meltdown. It features no violence, no sex, no weapons drawn, no manufactured drama, and is entirely gripping from the moment a junior analyst (played by Zachary Quinto, whose production firm financed the film) discovers that his employer is, in effect, bankrupt.

Quinto plays Peter Sullivan, a former engineering student turned financial analyst whose boss, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), is fired in the opening scenes after 17 years at the company. Dale hands Sullivan a flash drive with an unfinished spreadsheet on it that he indicates is important – and it is, as Sullivan discovers, dragging his new boss Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) back into the office at 10 pm to point out that the firm’s portfolio has it on the verge of collapse. Emerson goes to his boss, the depressed, disgruntled Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who takes it to his boss, the amoral Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), who eventually calls in the head of the firm, played by Jeremy Irons (I told you the cast was strong) as if this was an updated work of Shakespeare and he is both the play’s central figure and its empty conscience.

Margin Call‘s central energy source is that one bit of knowledge – that the market is close to a panic, and such a drop in the housing market would drive this unnamed firm out of business – which it uses to power all of its characters, allowing us to sit back and watch their reactions. There’s no gotcha moment, no twist of a bit of unknown information revealed in the final scene to change the film’s direction; most of the movie takes place overnight, when U.S. markets are closed and thus can’t move. This movie is about the reactions of professionals with widely varying backgrounds, loyalties, and years of experience in the industry, and how they move in response to the news that the empire they built is crumbling, and that saving it will hurt others, and could even cause a wider financial panic. It’s not quite a character study, as we don’t stay with any one character long enough to give him/her sufficient depth, but a characters study, almost like witnessing a sociological experiment.

It felt to me far more like a great play than a typical movie – or perhaps more like a British film than an American one, with an emphasis on dialogue and interactions to move the story forward rather than exogenous events inserted by the writer(s). Irons’ arguments with Spacey, who seems to be growing a conscience or merely working harder to suppress it, Bettany’s conversation with the seemingly-principled Tucci, and Quinto’s vaguely comic-relief chatter with a younger colleague played by Penn Badgley had me hanging on their words, not just for their import to the story but to how they were structured and delivered. There is, of course, a message about greed, and the disconnect such traders felt with the owners of the mortgages they swapped and sold without regard to the effects on those ‘regular’ people; I also thought the dog symbolized the soul or conscience of its owner (saying more would spoil it). But I was far more wrapped up in the intensity of the conversations, the emotional reactions to the news coming down the wire, and the way characters rationalized their actions to themselves than I was in the larger themes the film might have wanted to express. It had slow moments, including a long ramp-up to the handoff of the flash drive that kicks off the main plot, and some less effective subplots (including Demi Moore, delivering little in an empty role other than appearing in the hackneyed “sitting sideways on window bench overlooking Manhattan” shot), but as a fan of simple, cerebral dramas, I found more than enough strengths to overcome some slight choppiness of the script.

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→ December 24, 2011
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film).

I rate John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy among the best suspense novels I have ever read, a wordy but incredibly tense spy novel from 1974 that borrows from the great detective novels of thirty to forty years prior. Hearing Gary Oldman was set to play the lead in the first adaptation for the theaters was exciting and worrying, not so much about Oldman but about how well such a dense book could be adapted to the two-hour constraints of the modern cinema. The worry was needless, as the adaptation, while dispensing with much of the detail of the book, is extremely faithful to the novel’s plot, and one of the most intense smart films I have ever seen.

(I have not seenthe six-hour BBC adaptation from 1979, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, so I can’t offer a comparison – and, given the differences in duration and thus most likely in pacing, perhaps I’m also not hampered by the comparison either.)

The four words in the film’s title refer to codenames for five* senior British intelligence officers, one of whom is a Soviet double agent, referred to as “Gerald” in the book but only as “the mole” in the movie. As the movie opens, we see a botched operation in Budapest that appears to leave another British agent mortally wounded, after which the head of the unit, known only as “Control,” and senior agent George Smiley (Oldman) are sacked. Several months later, after Control’s death, Smiley is approached by Oliver Lacon, the civil servant who oversees MI6, the domestic intelligence agency known colloquially as “the Circus” (for Cambridge Circus, where Le Carré has located MI6’s offices), to lead an off-the-books investigation to identify the mole. Officially retired, Smiley recruits the young Peter Guillam, still employed by MI6, and one other retired agent to find out how Budapest truly went awry, what happened in Istanbul with rogue agent Ricky Tarr, and to ultimately set the trap into which the mole will walk.

*The fifth is Smiley, who is absolved from guilt when the investigation begins, while the name “Poorman” is used for the remaining suspect.

Oldman plays Smiley with tremendous understatement, especially in comparison to roles like Stansfield or Sirius Black, very much in keeping with Le Carré’s Smiley, who, even when beset by inner turmoil, rarely lets it reach the surface, and prefers to conduct his interrogations as the facilitator rather than the aggressor. This is a film of absent looks and tense pauses, with Smiley setting up the pins for others to knock down. Whether this is Best Actor nomination material or not depends largely on performances I haven’t seen by other actors, but its subtlety might mask its degree of difficulty to the point where voters overlook how key Oldman’s performance was to the film; his one great scene, reimagining a conversation with a briefly captured Soviet agent in Delhi several years previously, nearly explodes with Smiley’s emotional turmoil (and the symbolism of the purloined lighter), yet never quite boils over. One can only imagine the American remake, what with smashed lamps or over-the-top profanity or whatnot.

Aside from Oldman, the cast reads like the leading British actors were all fighting each other to get parts in the film, resulting in some powerful performances by big names in modest roles. Colin Firth appears as the caddish Bill Haydon; Ciarán Hinds (perhaps known best as Albus Dumbledore’s brother in the last two Harry Potter films) is underused as Roy Bland; John Hurt, as Control, is apparently morphing into Ian McKellen; Stephen Graham (of Snatch and Boardwalk Empire) has a critical cameo; and Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in the current BBC series starring that character) is even more critical as Peter Guillam, as tied up by internal demons as Smiley yet less able to restrain them. Even Tom Hardy, as Ricky Tarr, the one character who shows substantial emotions in the film (crossing the line into the pathetic, a deviation from the literary Tarr), manages to avoid sliding into the melodramatic.

The pacing of Tinker Tailor is outstanding, a direction set in the opening sequence, where the screenwriters have heightened the tension by putting the blown operation first. I remembered just enough of the book to follow the story without trouble – I actually remembered the codename of the mole, but not his actual identity, so I wasn’t sure of the ending until the big reveal. However, if you haven’t read the book, the film doesn’t waste much time with explanatory material, and it might take you a few scenes to figure out who’s who and what exactly is under investigation. The flashback scenes aren’t that clearly delineated from the present-day investigation, since they only go back a year or so and can’t be distinguished with hair and makeup. Karla, the fanatical KGB super-agent who never appears in the film except in flashbacks where only his torso is visible, also never receives any sort of introduction before characters begin referring to his existence. We lose some of the backstory of the four suspects, but it’s less necessary in a film that revolves around Smiley and the unraveling of the intrigue, rather than, say, the psychological motivation of the traitor.

The upside of the lack of long-winded explanatory passages is that the film drops you right in the heart of the action, grabs you by the throat, and spends two hours daring you to breathe. And yet there are no cheap, mass-market gimmicks to turn a taut, intelligent spy novel into a mainstream action flick; the furthest it panders is the occasional bit of inserted humor, or the on-screen death of a character whom I think was merely presumed killed by the Russians in the book, but nothing that changes the plot itself, which is ideal as the plot is the book’s greatest strength. (Connie Sacks’ one laugh-inducing line, while funny, is hopelessly out of tune with the rest of the movie, unfortunately.) Deviate from the details if you must, but when the plot’s the thing, leave it be, and the screenwriters – one of whom died at age 49 of cancer before the film was released – did just that.

The only real issue I had with this adaptation is the ending, where the final exposure of the mole’s identity is cut quite short, replaced with a series of wordless scenes set to a recording of “La Mer,” a great song that seemed forced here in a film so reliant on silence through its first 120 minutes. I could have done with less of that, especially the final flashback to the agency holiday party, and more with Smiley confronting the turncoat. It was an average finish to an otherwise plus film, one I’d gladly see again to watch for details I missed because I was so engrossed in the plot.

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