The Beaver (2011)
– The Beaver is a cautionary tale,
but the warning it carries bears no relationship to the movie you may have
seen. Rather, it’s an advisory not to
trust the marketing campaign of a film. If
you’re expecting a kooky comedy in which Mel Gibson sorts through his
psychological problems and reunites with his family thanks to the help of a
lovable British beaver puppet, you’re out of luck. The
Beaver is extremely depressing, albeit with good performances all
around. Gibson communicates his
character’s illness effectively, leading the viewer to feel on edge as he falls
further from sanity, while Jodie Foster as his wife (and the film’s director) is
appropriately earnest. Cinema King
favorite Anton Yelchin’s hatred of his father seethes off the screen, and his
chemistry with valedictorian Jennifer Lawrence is perceptible and plausible
(after an initial clichéd first encounter).
And perhaps there’s a very good movie in here somewhere, an honest
depiction of mental illness led by an allegedly troubled actor, and perhaps
this is merely a case of expectation misaligned with reality; that is, maybe my
preconception of the movie got in the way of my appreciation for the film. What I can say, though, is that The Beaver was a very unpleasant and
uncomfortable viewing experience, making me squirm in more than a few places
and grimace in others. If this is what
Foster was intending, job well done, because this is a very depressing
movie. But if we’re meant to be inspired
by the film, mission not accomplished.
Hemingway &
Gellhorn (2012) – Ordinarily TV movies aren’t quite under the purview of the
Cinema King, but we have a bit of a Hemingway thing going on here lately. After being disappointed by the (mis)use of
Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I was gratified to see that HBO was working on a biopic about
Hemingway’s tempestuous marriage to Martha Gellhorn. Even better news: Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman – a talented
cast, mind you – were headlining. (Recall,
I was clamoring loudly for Clive Owen to succeed Pierce Brosnan as James
Bond.) So much for the good news. The bad news?
The result, Hemingway &
Gellhorn, is unorganized and meandering, focusing more on character than on
plot. Ordinarily this would be fine, but
the characters here are too static to be interesting. Owen and Kidman are very compelling and
capture the essences of their characters, but they neither do anything very
interesting nor evolve in any significant way.
The same is true for other big names who appear briefly – Tony Shalhoub,
Robert Duvall, David Strathairn, etc. Consequently,
we have a novelty act that wears off once you realize it’s careening around the
globe without purpose. Worse, the film
muddles history by implying that Gellhorn’s divorce from Hemingway caused his
suicide years later, a move which seems to contradict the film’s attempts to
canonize Gellhorn. Ironically, the film
finds many characters telling Hemingway that a film adaptation of A Farewell to Arms failed to capture his
work accurately; similarly, our great
Hemingway film, it seems, is yet to be.
The Ides of March (2011) – Continuing the trend of people who
should be doing better work, George Clooney (who did so well with Good Night and Good Luck) directs Ryan
Gosling (whose work was a surprise gem in Lars and the Real Girl) in this fable about American politics. Gosling plays an idealistic campaign worker
who falls for the American dream pitched by Clooney’s candidate, but Gosling is
jaded by a series of revelations about the way the political scene really
operates and drops his idealism for cynical throat-cutting and
backstabbing. Again, a fantastic
supporting cast – Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel
Wood, Jeffrey Wright, even President Logan – turns in good performances all
around (Hoffman especially is, as always, engaging) but is criminally underused
in yet another story that goes nowhere.
Literally. The film ends just as
it’s picking up steam, and all we’re left with is yet another film that offers
up the trite moral “American politics is a dirty game.” With so many interesting characters assembled,
one wishes the writers had pushed the material at least one step beyond what we
already know. It’s not that The Ides of March is a bad movie; what
we have is entertaining enough, but there’s no “pay off.” It’s a lot of sound and fury, but it
signifies nothing, ending as only a tale told by an idiot can. If I can channel my inner Gene Shalit for a
moment, “Beware The Ides of March.” That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week! (And hopefully things turn around before July 20, because that’d be a heck of a dry spell otherwise.)
No comments:
Post a Comment