American Made (2017)

Lest 2017 go down as the year that the otherwise bankable Tom Cruise made a disappointing go of universe building in The Mummy, late in the game comes American Made, which sees Cruise reteam with director Doug Liman, both of whom made a rather good show of it in Edge of Tomorrow (later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. for the DVD crowd, a worse title for the fact that it sounds more like a shampoo tutorial than a science-fictional Groundhog Day). American Made ends up a strong outing in the “hapless intelligence agency” genre, almost as if the Coen Brothers had directed American Hustle.

Cruise stars as Barry Seal, a TWA pilot bored of his repetitive career and too weary even to pay attention to his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright). That’s all about to change for Barry, though, as he meets CIA agent Schafer (Domnhall Gleeson, doing a spot-on American accent), who recruits Barry for reconnaissance flights in Central America. Ever the capitalist, though, Barry, finds his way into smuggling drugs and guns for the cartels and later the Contras, all the while earning more money than he knows how to spend.

Tom Cruise is seldom anything less than engaging on screen. He’s a charismatic presence, a real charmer, but he’s also got a manic glint that makes him a little bit unpredictable, a touch dangerous. Recently he’s used that to great effect in the Jack Reacher films, and he sent up the sociopathic end of the spectrum as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. Here we see a man who is increasingly over his head, in scenarios that are entirely his fault, without the ability, the resources, or the intellect to ask for help. When we first meet him, Barry creates a little turbulence from the cockpit just to liven up the red-eye flight. It’s horrifyingly reckless and self-destructive, but there’s an infectious gleam in Cruise’s eye, an impish madness that invites us to play along. And as we saw in Edge of Tomorrow, Liman knows how to harness Cruise into a performance that bends that mad twinkle into something of comedic value, playing a touch against type as someone who’s not fully in control of a situation. Ethan Hunt, let’s just say, would never have gotten himself into this mess.

As the puppet master of said mess, Gleeson is fascinating. Indeed, I had a very difficult time to believe that Schafer, General Hux, and Tim Lake were all played by the same man within five years, let alone that he’s also the poor chap at the center of Oscar Isaac’s robotic machinations in Ex Machina. I’ve already mentioned his flawless concealment of his native accent for the nondescript voice of Schafer, but what’s truly compelling is the way he manages to make a smile sinister, imbuing subtle menace with every raise of the eyebrow, as if to indicate that things could go very badly for Barry Seal if he utters so much as one incorrect word. From behind that mighty beard – truly not since Aaron Eckhart in Sully has facial hair been so capacious – and in between impromptu dance moves, Schafer presents with the lean and hungry look of Cassius, the frantic desperation to escape blame. As if we needed one more reason to be excited for The Last Jedi, Gleeson proves himself a creditable supporting performer.

Although largely not advertised as such, the true-story nature of the film gives it an uncanny sense of madcap possibility. One almost expects the film to reiterate halfway through, “This is all still true.” (However, a crucial news broadcast, for one, actually aired after the events of the film but is rejiggered for dramatic effect.) But the truth, as they say, is often so much stranger than fiction, and the film gives Barry’s wild exploits just enough allure, wrapped in just enough of the American dream, that the film should also come with a “don’t try this at home” disclaimer. Despite the sparkle of the lifestyle Barry creates for himself, the film is careful to remind us that Barry is either too dumb or too ambitious to know when he’s in over his head – he acknowledges that he leaps before he looks, but it’s done in that disarming Cruise brand of self-deprecation. Nestled between blockbuster season and Oscar season, American Made shouldn’t be drowned out in that middle ground; it’s mind-boggingly true without losing the sense of fun I look to have at the box office.

American Made is rated R for “language throughout and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by Doug Liman. Written by Gary Spinelli. Starring Tom Cruise, Domnhall Gleeson, and Sarah Wright.

Monday at the Movies - February 29, 2016

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” The Oscars were last night, so here’s a look at one of the many nominees.

Ex Machina (2015) – While everyone was excited about Mad Max: Fury Road as a genre film that got nominated for Best Picture, it’s a shame that the smarter film (which, rightly so, was nominated for Original Screenplay and Visual Effects) wasn’t at least beside Mad Max on the top. As part of the post-Inception wave of original moody science fiction, Ex Machina asks probing questions about the place of artificial intelligence, the limits of scientific ethics, and the vulnerability of human life in the face of its greatest creations. Oscar Isaac stars as Nathan, a reclusive tech genius who invites his employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to his cabin to run a Turing test on his latest invention, a sentient robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander). Caleb’s trip, though, takes a turn when Ava insinuates that Nathan is not telling the whole truth. Now I’ll admit I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, a smart piece of science fiction with an intricate screenplay, but there’s no denying that Ex Machina is gripping in the insular way you might expect from a stage play or brisk novella. Rather than go for broke with spectacle, first-time director Alex Garland (who adds this to a number of his other screenplays in the sf genre) keeps the tension internal, raising horrifying possibilities in ways that even viewers who might have anticipated them come to dread. It’s tightly acted between the three central cast members and a supporting fourth, Sonoya Mizuno as Nathan’s silent assistant Kyoko, and compelling in a way that something so much more spectacular might fail to be. Ex Machina is well performed, hauntingly horrifying, and definitely not one to be missed for any self-respecting science fiction aficionado.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

BUT FIRST – heads up, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours Marvel this Wednesday with another installment in “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” so check back then for 2011’s Thor. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in your inbox. Nuff said!

The Revenant (2015)

2016 is shaping up to be the year of “Is it just me?” I’m closer to thirty now than I’ve ever been before, and I’m increasingly feeling out of touch with the critical community; I still love a good Marvel superhero flick, more inclined as I am to forgive/overlook their failings. Meanwhile, critical darlings are drifting past me in severely underwhelming fashion. I sniffed at Mad Max: Fury Road, which now has a Best Picture nomination to its name, and I couldn’t disagree more with those who said The Hateful Eight was the work of a mature Tarantino.

Now here I am at The Revenant, “Certified Fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes and lauded with Oscar nominations and Golden Globes victories aplenty. And again I’m asking the question that seems poised to be on my lips for the rest of the year – did we all see the same movie? For my money, The Revenant was more than a little boring, containing as it does a few viscerally composed memorable moments punctuated by long reels of punishment that border closer to cinematic sadism than awards bait.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in the role which will likely win him his first Oscar (about which, more later), stars as Hugh Glass, a frontiersman left for dead by his comrades (Tom Hardy and Will Poulter). Amid an unremitting landscape and every possible way to die in the wilderness, Glass stumbles, bleeds, and inches his way back to civilization – and his revenge.

I’m a bit of a newcomer when it comes to director Alejandro González Iñárritu, but I thought Birdman was a masterpiece, brilliantly anchored by Michael Keaton’s commanding lead performance with a delightful ensemble cast backing him up. And after The Revenant, I was reminded just how good Birdman was, because The Revenant lacks most of what made Birdman so compelling. Instead of a snappy script with snappier performances and a directorial eye that knows to keep the film moving, The Revenant has one strong performance that plays out its one-note fairly quickly, while the supporting cast is given short shrift in favor of long – and I mean gruelingly long – wide takes of landscape, the likes of which perhaps more properly belonged in an ode to 70mm like The Hateful Eight.

“Belabored” is the word I’d use most for The Revenant. DiCaprio is bludgeoned by the weight of survival, and he does an adequate job portraying a man at the limits of his capacity to survive, but more than two and a half hours it’s excruciating only to a point, at which moment the viewer becomes dulled to the horror of the wilderness, moving instead in the “Well, what else did you expect? Of course [insert tragedy here] was bound to happen at this rate.” Ditto for the unforgiving landscape, which at first seems horrifyingly blank but soon becomes commonplace, painful to the retinas more than to the soul.

And speaking of souls, I sense that The Revenant is going for spiritual commentary in its dreamlike editing, but there is not the thickness of narrative needed to support such intuited depth. The motivations of all the protagonists are, frankly, still somewhat baffling, and the political climate of the time isn’t adequately fleshed out. All the time that could have been devoted to these plots is instead exhausted on calamity and bloodshed and struggling, leading the audience to feel that the point was more about punishment than any narrative arc. One must recognize that there is something much deeper in Hardy’s character than the film permits him to display, and I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to see more of Domhnall Gleeson’s Captain Henry, or perhaps that’s just a reflection of how much I liked his understated sneer of a villain in The Force Awakens.

There are things enjoyable in the film, predominantly the most violent bits in which the plot moves forward and the languorous quality of the film pays off. The bear scene, about which much ado has been made, is brutal in a technically sound way, and the final confrontation between DiCaprio and Hardy does justice to the relationship between the two characters. At the end of the day, The Revenant tries to overwhelm but ends up underwhelming. Though DiCaprio is good enough in the film, he’s not overpoweringly commanding, leading this reviewer to suspect that his Oscar win next month (which is all but assured – or so I predicted about Keaton in Birdman last year) will be more a lifetime achievement award than a recognition that this is as good as it got this year. The same happened to Denzel Washington for Training Day, which was good but not his career best (that honor goes to Malcolm X or John Q).

Or maybe I’m just out of the loop. But I can’t say that I’d put The Revenant on my Top 10 of 2015.

The Revenant is rated R for “strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity.” This thing is intense, as I’ve said, and Iñárritu is unapologetic in his depiction of blood. There’s a rape sequence in which nothing is shown, though in another scene a dead man is seen naked from a moderate distance.

About Time (2013)

I’m about to say something extremely significant, and for its significance to hit you like it ought, please keep in mind that Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and Gravity all came out this year; each of them received a rather glowing review from yours truly.

Having said that, About Time is very nearly (if not entirely) my favorite movie of the year – a beautiful moving comedy that yanks at those heartstrings without losing sight of its own unique sense of humor.

On his 21st birthday, Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) receives some shocking news from his father (Bill Nighy) – the men in the family can travel through time.  After realizing it’s not a practical joke, Tim moves to London to live with depressed playwright Harry (Tom Hollander) and falls in love with Mary (Rachel McAdams) in a plot that is making me weepy just to think about it.

Truly, I cannot do justice in words to just how hard “right in the feels” this movie hit me.  About Time is a story so well told that it achieves greatness by virtue of its innocuous sincerity.  I’m often accused (sometimes by myself) of taking films too cerebrally, of a chronic inability to surrender to being moved by a film, but I can safely point to About Time as the evidence that proves I can still be swept wholly and completely away by the right film.

About Time is that film, offered as a litmus test for true empathetic humanity.  Aside from the obligatory remark of how refreshing it is to see an original, self-contained film that does everything right without gambling on a franchise, About Time handles characterization with a pitch-perfect blend of spot-on casting (especially with the avuncular ethos of Bill Nighy) and brilliant writing from director/writer Richard Curtis, who already won hearts with Love Actually.  Rather than being didactically instructed which characters to care about, About Time allows us to come to love Tim, Mary, and Dad (and even curmudgeonly Harry) as though we really knew them.  Gleeson distills the brand of endearingly awkward into a compelling performance, McAdams is as stunningly lovable as always, and Nighy is the force of nature that is “Bill Nighy” at his best – paternal, charming, and witty.

The performances are all top-notch (what else would we expect from a predominantly British cast?), but what’s truly remarkable is the plotting of the film, which Curtis’s screenplay unfolds without the typical show-off flourishes of most time travel narratives.  Instead of wowing us with sleight of hand, Curtis opts for an exploration of the basic human condition – the search for the meaning of life in finding the love of your life – that just so happens to include time travel.  As a result, the real surprises of the film come not from “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff” (as The Doctor so snappily put it) but from smart scripting, as when the sideplot involving Tim’s sister develops in the background until its significance becomes foregrounded in a way that’s both surprising and (in hindsight) obvious.  Throughout it all, nothing is wasted, no scene goes by without deepening the characters or furthering the plot.

The greatest surprise, the most fantastic triumph of About Time comes from the astounding emotional resonance the film carries without resorting to the saccharine tropes we might expect from a romantic comedy.  Instead, we get moments of powerful devotion, assisted by the touching chemistry between Gleeson and McAdams, and a brutally slow-burn approach to making the audience cry.  I saw the film with a mostly full house, and the sniffles could be heard beginning an hour from the end; my eyes were on a perma-misty setting I didn’t know I had until the waterworks turned on all the way about twenty minutes to the end, at a point which I could identify precisely if it didn’t spoil one of the most touching scenes in the film.  Suffice it to say that About Time is the film that would move even the stonyhearted Pharaoh to tears – it certainly got me.

With the onslaught of Oscarbait movies coming this month (some of which will probably be very good), I’m holding onto About Time as the movie that moved me the most, which left me physically enervated but emotionally rejuvenated.  Even in a year filled with successful superhero outings like Man of Steel and works of breathtaking artistry like Gravity, About Time has moved into that place in my heart for movies that resonate so profoundly with everything I believe about the world – a movie to which I can point and say, “That’s a movie about the world I live in.”  For those of us looking for that emotionally perfect movie, a panacea for the hopeless romantic in all of us, it’s About Time.

About Time is rated R “for language and some sexual content.”  A topless photograph of Kate Moss is seen in a gallery exhibition, while a few sexual encounters (and their aftermaths) are depicted with no nudity (one does, however, include my new favorite seduction line, which involves the removal of new pajamas).  There is a smattering of strong profanities, and one character is hospitalized with a few cuts and bruises.  Ultimately, a rather soft R.