Monday at the Movies - January 28, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two films wildly different in tone and yet unmistakably British in their sensibilities.

The Death of Stalin (2018) – Few people can make me laugh as hard as Armando Iannucci, he whose British series The Thick of It can’t be enjoyed on a single viewing because you’ll miss half the jokes while splitting your sides at its creative profanity and monumentally madcap antics. After Iannucci ravaged the mundanely moronic ("All roads lead to Munich") in the lead-up to the Iraq War in Thick of It’s spinoff film In the Loop, he turns his satirical eye to the Soviet Union in the wake of Josef Stalin’s death and finds the Communist Party in chaos, beginning with the puddle of urine in which the party leader’s corpse is found. The cast is as unpredictable as the punchlines – we now live, folks, in a world where Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev (and yes, Virginia, there is a “bury you” joke). Meanwhile we’ve got Jeffrey Tambor as the melancholy Georgy Malenkov, ill-suited to the leadership role he inherits; noted Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale as the oily Lavrentiy Beria of the secret police; and Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, all too eager to lead his army into open revolt. It’s a cast of all-stars (including Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as Stalin’s children), but the biggest draw is the film’s pitch-black humor, depicting Stalin’s worst atrocities as something akin to a Karl Marx Brothers film. There are moments when one is not quite sure whether to laugh or recoil in horror, as when an executioner just gives up halfway down his line of victims, but Iannucci is quite successful at capturing the ambient paranoia that comes from not knowing who to trust in a totalitarian regime – and the absurdity when a brood of vipers is forced to try to trust one another.

Paddington 2 (2017) – With the benefit of hindsight, Paddington 2 might well be one of the best films of 2017. A film like this has no right to be as charming, intricately constructed, or genuinely emotional as Paddington 2 manages to be. Now that the well-mannered Paddington (Ben Whishaw) has taken up residence in London, he goes in search of a birthday present for his Aunt Lucy, only to find the perfect pop-up book out of his price range. After a series of odd jobs, Paddington is framed for the theft of the book, landing unceremoniously in a Victorian-era prison where he befriends the entire population – including prison cook Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson) – through the powers of civility and marmalade. Paddington 2 is even better than its predecessor, somehow more earnest now that it’s dispensed with the need to explain how and why an affable bear is living with ordinary people. Instead the filmscape is opened up to boundless adventures where Paddington’s relentless cheeriness persists, undaunted by his circumstances. Whether he’s shoved into the role of accidental barber or whether he finds himself teaching a prison how to make orange jam, Paddington is so endearing that it’s almost a personal offense when something unfortunate befalls him; “how dare they,” I said aloud at one point, “how dare the filmmakers do this to such a nice bear!” For all the antics and charm that the film possesses – really, I cannot overstate just how charming this movie is – it has an astonishing emotional depth rooted in Paddington’s love for his Aunt Lucy, and the film’s final moments are guaranteed to get you teary-eyed in a way that I thought only Pixar had been able to capture with computer-generated characters.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Stay tuned for Wednesday’s final Batman animated review!

The Accountant (2016)

The Accountant was something of a surprise to me. The trailers looked intriguing, but I had little sense of the plot and knew only that it carried a very strong cast attached to the project. There’s no accounting for taste, but there’s much about The Accountant that should compound your interest.

Put another way, if we’ve just been through the McConaissance, which saw Matthew McConaughey score big in a slew of major projects, does this mean we’re well and truly in the age of the Benaissance? Has Ben Affleck well and truly (and finally) redeemed himself after Gigli and Jersey Girl? Has the Dark Knight returned?

Ben Affleck stars as the eponymous accountant, Christian Wolff, whose unassuming demeanor conceals his dangerous work as a bookkeeper for the most dangerous illegal operations, cooking the books for drug lords, terrorists, and enemy states. While two Treasury agents (J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) pursue the mysterious accountant, Wolff is hired to investigate the books of a robotic prosthetic company after a low-level employee (Anna Kendrick) reports a revenue leak to her boss (John Lithgow).

Perhaps the key to enjoying The Accountant is not quite knowing what to expect, and the delight of it is that there’s a little bit of everything in this movie. We’ve got espionage, both corporate and political, organized crime and disorganized shootouts, nascent friendships and deep family connections. You might even think of The Accountant as a superhero origin story, showing how Wolff goes from a troubled boy on the autism spectrum to one of the world’s most capable – and surprisingly dangerous – financial analysts. Indeed, we might think of Christian Wolff as an autistic Jason Bourne, with a mathsy dose of Batman sprinkled in for good measure.

(Sidebar, and without going into too much spoilery detail, am I the only one who feels that J.K. Simmons was very much on a trial run for Commissioner Gordon here? I wouldn’t be surprised to see a little bit of this characterization carry over, and I think the hat would be a good fit too.)

I’ve had high praise for Ben Affleck over the last decade or so; he’s evolved into a fine director, and I stand by my statement from back in February that he’s “an excellent choice” for Batman, on whose capable shoulders DC seems to be resting their cinematic franchise. As Wolff, in a portrayal where it might have been easy to phone it in, Affleck does more than one might expect with monotone deadpans and escalating senses of panic brought on by moments where he’s unable to finish a task (his dominant trait, I’d say, is his single-minded devotion to completion). I’ve seen this movie touted as a thriller, and while I wouldn’t go quite that far – it seems to defy categorization in a way that I found refreshing (while others wanted more focus in genre) – I would say that there are thrills to be had when we see Wolff encounter a situation we know is going to trigger him, and we feel that same building tension within ourselves, as when a cleaning crew begins to erase his dry-erase marker work. Credit to Affleck for crafting a character whose reactions are consistent and easy to understand and to anticipate, and credit to director Gavin O’Connor for giving room for Affleck’s performance to shine.

Although there are other wonderful performers in the film – one senses, for example, that Anna Kendrick’s character could have been a downright sidekick in another version of this film, or that Jon Bernthal’s shadowy hitman could dominate a movie all his own – it is first and foremost Affleck’s show, and he handles it with grace. Points for creativity (hat-tip to writer Bill Dubuque for an original and fulfilling script) and points for the wow factor of surprise, but the bottom line is that it’s Affleck’s balance sheet and the rest of the cast are just numbers that add up to one heck of a film.

The Accountant is rated R for “strong violence and language throughout.” Directed by Gavin O’Connor. Written by Bill Dubuque. Starring Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, and John Lithgow.