Monday at the Movies - February 9, 2015

Welcome to the first “Monday at the Movies” of the new year.  Just in time for Valentines Day, a movie about a love triangle, though I defy you to find anything romantic about it.

Never Let Me Go (2010) – I don’t know anything about the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, so I was instead drawn in by the impressive cast list – Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as boarding school chums who fall in love and seek atonement for wronging each other as children. But Never Let Me Go is not Atonement, that lush and lusty heartbreaker; it is, on the one hand, absolutely heartbreaking, albeit with a relentlessness that Atonement (for all its hopefulness and aspirations for forgiveness) lacked.  I really can’t articulate thoroughly enough just how unceasingly bleak this film is, and if that’s the point, then well done.  The central trio are all very credible, as are the child performers who play them at age 10 or so.  If you want to go into the film completely unspoiled, stop reading now, because I need to talk about a few things. First, the central conceit of the film is that its protagonists, as revealed about thirty minutes in, are genetic clones being bred for their organs, and if that’s not uplifting enough for you the moral of the story is, “It doesn’t matter how much time you get with the people you love, because you’re all going to die anyway, and it wouldn’t have been enough time even if you had a hundred years.”  The film, though unindictably crafted in every way, leaves such a gaping void in the soul of the viewer without offering anything to fill said void. We can’t even take solace in the frankly gorgeous direction by Mark Romanek, because it’s in service of this desperately despondent narrative. It’s a punishing pace to get to a finish line at which point the narrator ruminates on how little she has left and reveals that that, too, shall pass.  I truly wanted to like this film – I wanted to weep with it when I heard the premise – but instead I found myself unable to feel anything other than a crushing, Werner Herzog-like nihilistic despair.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, almost certainly with a review of Kingsman! 

Monday at the Movies - September 2, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies” – this week, we review two films that are really quite draining in an entirely delectable sense.

Drive (2011) – Here’s a movie that’s way more intense than I was expecting.  In Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver, moonlighting as a getaway driver, who becomes embroiled in the underworld after falling in love with his neighbor (Carey Mulligan).  I don’t really know what I thought I was getting into; I’d only heard rave reviews, and I’ve never seen a Gosling performance I didn’t like.  But Drive is such an oddball captivating flick, its glacial pace tempered by Refn’s keen cinematographic eye – the result is something closer to There Will Be Blood than 2001: A Space Odyssey.  All this is not to say that the film is boring; rather, Refn directs the daylights out of some car chases without resorting to shaky cameras or even quick cuts, relying on the natural tension of the narrative and a well-placed close-up on Gosling’s steely stare.  Drive is undeniably Gosling’s show (Refn’s direction, though, giving a run for his proverbial money), but an astounding array of supporters – Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and Albert Brooks as a spooky mobster sans eyebrows – fill out the film with that who’s-who delight enjoyed by moviegoers such as myself.  But boy, is this a violent flick, with some of the most jarring violence I’ve seen in movies recently – and, remember, I loved Django Unchained.  But Refn’s use of violence is sparse, used to jar and interrupt and not to delight; essentially, it does what violence actually does in real life, which makes it all the more effective and/or disturbing.  Drive, then, comes highly recommended.

Take Shelter (2011) – Is there any working actor more intense than Michael Shannon?  He’s always wound tighter than Taft’s bathtub, but when that simmer boils over it’s explosively good fun to watch.  Take Shelter might have been a dull picture with any other front man, but Shannon does fantastic work in an Oscar-snubbed lead performance as Curtis, a family man haunted by nightmares of an impending apocalypse.  As his behavior becomes increasingly obsessive and erratic, Curtis risks alienating his wife (Jessica Chastain), who’s especially worried about the fate of their deaf daughter and what will happen to the family if Curtis’s burgeoning psychosis threatens his own employment as a construction worker.  This is not a movie where much happens; instead, the film relies on the capable performances of Shannon and Chastain, who are more than believable as beleaguered Midwestern spouses.  The film is undeniably Shannon’s, his clairvoyance/psychosis (depending on how you read the film) taking a clear toll on his wellbeing as he grimaces and twitches in quiet moments before squinting into the horizon or, in one of the film’s strongest moments, unleashing his manic frustrations on his friends.  While she stands in a long shadow, Chastain is the emotional anchor of the film, the audience’s point of interaction as voice to a thousand doubts and frustrations; I don’t know where she came from all of a sudden, but her work in the past few years (particularly Zero Dark Thirty) demonstrates that Hollywood needs more of her kind of actress.  More indie than blockbuster, Take Shelter flew low enough under the radar that more people ought to see it – especially those of us needing a little more intensity from General Zod.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!  And don’t forget that this Saturday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month...

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Whenever a movie includes a superlative in its title, it always sets up the inevitable puns for reviewers (both casual and formal) to shout, and after a while it gets rather tedious.  But when it comes to the subject of Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, to you, sir, I say, “Not so great, old sport.”

A relatively close adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he recounts his life as a bond salesman in the New York of the Roaring Twenties.  After procuring an invitation to the most lavish party in town – which just happens to be right next door – Nick meets the owner of the house, the ever-optimistic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).  As Nick and Gatsby become friends, Gatsby makes an unusual request – he wants to meet with Nick’s married cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan).

The great American novel, a story of enduring love, required reading for high schoolers the world over – all accurate descriptors for The Great Gatsby.  And it’s not that Luhrmann’s adaptation is absolute rubbish.  It’s just far from great, much less than such a work of literature deserves.  Luhrmann’s Gatsby is not without its virtues, but its weak points outshine the good ones such that I suspect that even Luhrmann devotees might be disappointed.

First, the good news.  DiCaprio and Mulligan are exemplary as Gatsby and Daisy, first-rate approximations of the characters they embody.  It’s difficult to imagine an actor whose own star power better personifies that of Jay Gatsby, the never-say-die millionaire whose optimism is matched only by his opulence.  (Sidebar:  when is DiCaprio getting that Oscar?  He consistently turns in solid work, and while I don’t think he’ll land one here I do think he’s long overdue.)  And Mulligan is solid as the emotionally vapid Daisy, languid in all the right places but without rendering Gatsby’s affection inexplicable.  We too might love Daisy if we’d known her that long ago.  Finally, there’s Maguire, who does exactly what the novel asked of Nick – he observes, he mediates, he explicates.

And therein lies the problem.  The film is too faithful an adaptation in this regard, situating Nick as the main character through whom the entire movie is filtered.  But that technique doesn’t work for a film, because we don’t need a character to explain what we’re meant to see; we can just see it.  Worse, there are moments where Nick narrates what he sees while the camera focuses only on him; in a cinematic medium, this is the equivalent of someone telling you about their summer vacation.  Because Luhrmann is known for such a highly stylized approach to visuals, it’s quite a surprise that he does this so frequently; we know he knows better, but why won’t he let us see what’s going on?  (This is all to say nothing of the odd framing device placed over the film that seems to conflate Nick with Fitzgerald, to varying degrees of confusion.)

As for the visuals, Luhrmann does a decent job with the big parties, lavish set pieces that show off the decadence of the Jazz Age.  It’s classic Luhrmann, velvet vomit to excess and glittery garland as far as the eye can see (and it looks grand in 3D, to boot).  I had initial apprehensions about the use of contemporary music, but I didn’t mind it in the feature film itself; the effect seems to be simulate the shocking avant-garde nature of the music that must have been played at Gatsby’s parties, and it seems comparable to Deadwood’s use of modern profanity in lieu of historically accurate vulgarities. 

But all told, I came away more than just a bit disappointed, surprised at how restrained the movie was in some points (especially for a director like Luhrmann), pleasantly satisfied with the performances, but more-than-mildly irritated with the decision to foreground such a passive observer like Nick.  Build me a movie not around his tepid narration but around the dynamic between Gatsby and Daisy, and I’ll be ready to call that Gatsby “great.”

The Great Gatsby is rated PG-13 for “for some violent images, sexual content, smoking, partying and brief language.”  So you know someone gets hit by a car, and someone else gets shot, and Daisy and Jay are seen in bed canoodling, while Tom has a mistress.  Then there’s all that party stuff that... well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s not appropriate.  But it is weird that they rate movies for “partying.”