Monday at the Movies - July 30, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Eight of “Monday at the Movies.”  A few romantic comedies on tap this week, plus a film so disturbing I feel uncomfortable saying I enjoyed it.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) – A long, long time ago, I directed readers to an essay by David Bordwell in which he draws the distinction between an excellent film and a film that is to one’s liking.  I invoke Bordwell here because I think he might be the key to my take on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; it’s a great film, certainly, excellent by technical standards and one of Kubrick’s more accomplished films, but it’s entirely different to “like” on a purely evaluative level.  For one, its protagonist Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell in the epitome of a career-making performance) is a brutal sadist who spends his evenings raping and engaging in “ultra-violence.”  Perhaps worse, Kubrick’s filmmaking attempts to get us to sympathize with – and even like – Alex, a disconcerting premise once you realize what’s afoot.  I’m probably in the minority on this one, but I usually find Kubrick a bit... boring; Dr. Strangelove is, I admit, genius, but I’ve never been able to watch 2001 or The Shining in one sitting because they seem plodding and aimless – which may be the point, perhaps, but they’re just not “to my liking.”  (The first hour of Full Metal Jacket, though, is brilliant.)  But here Kubrick displays his ability to keep a scene moving even if the camera is stationary, and though much of the film is repulsive on a moral level, it’s transfixing on an aesthetic one, helped in no small part by the quirky yet unspeakably evil performance McDowell turns in.

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) – I’m on record as not being the world’s biggest Steve Carell fan, and Crazy, Stupid, Love does very little to swing me in the other direction.  Which is not to say that the film isn’t enjoyable – halfway far from it.  I say halfway because there are really two movies going on in Crazy, Stupid, Love (one, it seems for each unnecessary comma in the title):  in one, divorcee Steve Carell tries life without his wife Julianne Moore, while in the other his womanizing wingman Ryan Gosling reforms his ways after meeting girl-of-his-dreams Emma Stone.  As is usually the case with these kinds of films, it’s the latter plot, the supporting one, that succeeds far more than the former.  The problem, perhaps, is that Carell is too real as a man who’s had his heart ripped out; just when the supposed comedy is getting to the funny bits, Carell mopes into frame with his sad-sack character to remind us just how miserable he is.  It’s a shame, because Gosling and Stone are so talented and so charismatic together that one wishes for a movie revolving solely around them.  As a consequence of being so schizophrenic, the film’s message is a mixed one – is love possible or not?  Or is it merely difficult but worthwhile?  If the latter, tell me something I don’t know.  Aside from the Gosling/Stone scenes, I will credit the film with a rather clever third act twist, something I didn’t know to see coming.

Friends with Benefits (2011) – Remember that time that the two leads from Black Swan starred in separate movies about casual sex?  I certainly do, but after seeing Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached (with an uninspiring Ashton Kutcher as her co-lead) I wasn’t exactly ready to join Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits.  Turns out the joke was on me, because Friends with Benefits is by far the better of this odd couple.  Director Will Gluck, who made such a winner out of Easy A with Emma Stone, creates a solidly funny film here, which is by and large victorious thanks to the infectious chemistry between Kunis and Timberlake; their characters are likeable from the first, and – pivotally for a comedy film – they’re funny, too.  Also back from Easy A is Patricia Clarkson, who reprises her role as the kooky and sexually liberated mother, this time of Kunis’s character.  The only part of the equation that doesn’t fit is Richard Jenkins as Timberlake’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted father, whose outbursts lead not to comic relief but to unexpectedly heartfelt pathos.  While the film falls prey to the clichés of the romantic comedy genre, it does so more credibly than No Strings Attached, without asking us to cry for the protagonists when their bizarre experiment complicates itself.  Wisely, the film remembers that we have to like our characters in order to want to see them together, and Gluck and company – particularly his leads – achieve both by leaps and bounds.

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

The Social Network (2010)

I think we can all agree on two things: David Fincher is a solid filmmaker (even though I'm probably the only person on the planet who isn't keen on Fight Club [long story], I'm considering giving it a second watch), and The Social Network is kind of a step out of bounds for Fincher, whose filmography - including Se7en, Zodiac, and The Game - reads more like a list of "creepiest movies of our generation" than an application to direct a biopic-of-sorts about the founders of Facebook. But Fincher's nothing if not dextrously versatile, and The Social Network adds another notch to Fincher's "here's what I'm capable of" belt.

The Social Network is a highly unflattering portrait of the people who claim to have "invented" Facebook, arguably the most high-profile Web site since Google - the antisocial and nominal founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), his financier and best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Napster founder and Facebook's demi-PR guy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), and rowing team twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), who claim intellectual property rights - and the lawsuits that divided all of them. The film cuts between legal depositions of the main characters and the events they describe, methodically and deliberately leaving the audience to interpret what went wrong and who (if anyone) stole from whom.

Fincher does a solid turn directing here, deftly keeping the pace moving as characters register slights as betrayals and as alliances crumble under the weight of paranoia and profit. Though the film's first cuts between testimonials and actual events are a little jarring for those who didn't follow the Facebook news feed (pun intended), Fincher quickly sorts out who's after what but wisely refuses to spoonfeed us a good guy/bad guy dichotomy. True, the film and its Aaron Sorkin screenplay cast Saverin in a more sympathetic light than Zuckerberg receives, and the Winklevosses are portrayed as jock heavies more than intellectual heavyweights, but it's not clear by the end of the film how we're supposed to feel about the whole thing.

In particular, the film functions a great deal like Cobb's top at the end of Inception (the significance I won't reveal, so as not to spoil it for the DVD-waiters); it means whatever we project onto it, particularly the ambiguous final shot, scored at least somewhat ironically to The Beatles' "Baby You're A Rich Man." It seems, in the opinion of this reviewer, that The Social Network is a kind of light jeremiad against the ugly irony of using the Internet as a way to increase, not detract from, social interaction, and it appears more than slightly condemning of the sort of person who creates something only for public acceptance and the label of "cool." To these people, money is secondary to status, which also subordinates (again ironically) human companionship. One could, of course, read the film's ending as hopeful; title cards let us know that everyone got a little bit of what they wanted all along, but the uncertainty etched into the film's closing cut-to-black is more wobble than topple. It's a testament to Fincher's skill, then, that the ambiguity that pervades the film is more conducive to interpretation than to accusations of waffling.

Fincher also does a fine job pulling together a few "rising stars" (I use the term somewhat skeptically), giving me faith in at least some of the careers-to-be. Jesse Eisenberg, of course, is the undisputed star here, and for good reason; I've decried him as "the B-List Michael Cera" for his turns in Adventureland and Zombieland, but here he's starting to come into his own. The simultaneous wave of revulsion and sympathy you'll feel toward Zuckerberg by the end is equal parts Fincher and Eisenberg, with the latter now wielding a more promising future than his character. Andrew Garfield is more sympathetic as Saverin, pulling out all the stops on the road to pathos by plausibly depicting all the ambivalent feelings of his best friend's so-called betrayal; reminiscent of a young James Franco (wow, how old does that make me, then?), Garfield's making me less nervous about his front role in the Spider-Man reboots (that and the rumored casting of Emma Stone as Mary-Jane). Justin Timberlake's performance is a little more complicated, however, as I'm not sure if it's Timberlake or the character that's a touch hammy; while Sean Parker is flashy and flighty, my perception of Timberlake is much the same. So it's unclear to me whether what I'm seeing is either very poor or very convincing acting.

Maybe this is just me reading a little too much Gail Simone and other feminist theory, but I'm a bit disappointed with the treatment of the female characters in The Social Network. This is a boys'-club movie, with the facts forcing an aspect on the men of the story, but all the female characters are fairly one-dimensional and ultimately little more than impetuses for men to act. Case in point: Sean Parker's introductory scene finds him in bed with a Stanford girl, a fact we learn from a lingering shot of her panty-clad derriere; we learn her name (Amy), her major (French), and little else. Though Amy is an inconsequential character in the big scheme, she's indicative of the role of women at large in the story, which is a shame when you have such a talented female cast on board. I'm dying to see Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it's a shame that all she does as Erica Allbright in this film is break up with Zuckerberg and incite him to start an online revolution after his heart breaks (well, maybe). Brenda Song finally gets a chance to break out of the Disney playhouse (after the unfortunate departure of Ashley Tisdale, I gave up on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Song's ditzy heiress London Tipton), but she's essentially window dressing as Saverin's girlfriend Christy Lee; while she's certainly very pretty, Christy isn't asked to do anything else but hang on Eduardo's arm. We're told that she's psychotic and controlling, but there's only one scene where she's allowed to be that - her last one, which is unfortunate considering how well she does in it. And Rashida Jones, of The Office and I Love You, Man (whose misogynistic title, curiously, gave her more material than here) fame, is credible as a second-year legal associate who delivers the film's closing monologue - and eulogy of sorts - with sangfroid and aplomb; sadly, that's the first time she does anything more than offer meaningful glances and eat a salad. Ultimately, the film hinges on what Erica Allbright will do next, but it's too little/too late for a film that's so masculine-dominated.

This is not to say that The Social Network is anti-feminist or flawed beyond salvation. It's merely a disappointing (and for this reviewer, distracting) sin of omission that doesn't really hurt the finished product. Fincher does such a good job with the rest of the movie that he almost atones for the negligible treatment of the fairer sex. What Fincher has made here is a work that examines both a particular true story and the nature of "true stories" themselves; wisely, the movie is credited as "based on" a book about the true facts rather than on the "true story" itself, which invites a whole host of questions about what's true and what isn't. Like Rashomon, The Social Network suggests that truth is subjective, and (like Lost) argues that who the characters are and how they interact with each other is ultimately more important than what they're doing.

If nothing else, the film might lead a few viewers to go home and deactivate their Facebook profile, so unflattering is the creation myth behind the social networking site. As for the movie itself, though, I can do little else than invoke the already-labored Facebook pun and state simply, "Like."
With content friendly for the Facebook generation, The Social Network is rated PG-13 "for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language." The film implies more than one sexual rendezvous with nothing shown beyond hasty disrobing to the undergarment level; characters abuse marijuana, alcohol, and cocaine frequently, and approximately three F-bombs are dropped.