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50/50 (2011)
50/50 is based upon the experience of screenwriter Will Reiser, a writer for HBO’s Da Ali G Show who contracted cancer before his 30th birthday. Reiser’s real-life travails with his buddy Seth Rogen (who serves as executive producer) through the good times and bad. I guess when you get cancer it helps to have an established movie star as your good friend. It also helps when you write a terrific script, which Reiser has accomplished. Originally titled I’m With Cancer, I guess the studio felt that a movie with “cancer” in the title was a hard sell to mass audiences (On a related note, Showtime’s comedy-drama The Big C, about Laura Linney finding the humor through cancer treatment, was previously titled The C Word. I don’t know about you, but when I heard “the c word” the first thing that comes to mind is not “cancer.”). Even with a more oblique title, 50/50 manages to walk between comedy and drama with flair. It’s probably the funniest movie you’ll ever see about cancer. Definitely funnier than My Sister’s Keeper.
Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a relatively healthy 27-year-old. He likes his job writing for a Seattle National Public Radio station. He likes his girlfriend, Rachel (Bryce Dallas Howard), an aspiring painter. He likes his best friend, Kyle (Rogen), a dude prone to speaking whatever is on his mind. Then one doctor’s visit changes everything. Adam has a very serious form of spinal cancer. He begins chemotherapy to try and stop the tumor’s growth. Rachel drives him to his hospital treatments, helps him during his long nights of nausea, but ultimately it proves too much to bear. She leaves him. Luckily, Adam has a young therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick), helping him put his life in order. Adam’s chances of surviving this rare cancer are exactly as the title proclaims, 50/50. As he comes to grips with the measures needed to survive, Adam finds himself growing closer to his therapist in a completely unprofessional degree.
50/50 may be the least sentimental movie I can recall about the realities of living with cancer, and that is its greatest attribute. That doesn’t mean that the movie doesn’t cover serious issues in a flippant manner. Instead of hitting cheap sentiment and milking cancer for easy tears, the movie, thanks to Reiser’s sharp script, forgoes false feelings and finds something more rare and true. There’s no real playbook for something as unexpected as a person in their 20s being diagnosed with terminal cancer. It seems like a cruel irony to be stricken with an illness so young. Adam doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t even drive due to the danger. He’s pretty mild-mannered and a bit of a pushover. Adam tries to not let cancer get to him, to shrug off the heavy implications, and to just make it seem like any other personal setback. If he doesn’t treat it like a big deal, maybe it won’t be and his friends and family can follow his lead. This kind of self-manufactured blasé attitude, even in the face of cancer, seems like an apt approach for a younger relaxed generation. Naturally, this denial-heavy approach doesn’t exactly work. It’s too easy to confuse numbness with acceptance. Fortunately, Reiser does not let his story slip into easy maudlin theatrics. We don’t need anybody reminding us, or Adam, how serious his situation is. On the other hand, we also don’t need anybody moralizing about any self-help slogans. Not everyone sees adversity as a blessing into Discovering Who You Truly Are. Reiser refrains from his characters making anything approximating Big Life Statements. Cancer does not lead to automatic personal epiphanies. If it did, we’d have a lot more people inhaling carcinogens and volunteering to work in the Chernobyl ruins.
50/50 doesn’t ignore the sometimes odd and dark humor that arises from life’s predicaments. That means this is the only cancer movie where the guys try and use the disease as a way to convince girls to sleep with them. At no point do I remember this occurring with Terms of Endearment or Beaches. And this opportunistic babe hunting doesn’t make the boys come across as sleazy. Adam can’t even enjoy the one-night-stand as his back pain robs him of the pleasure of his nubile well-wisher. The tone is very controlled. The raunchy comedy is not a distraction; at no point does any situation feel like a comedic setup. The comedy comes from the characters being genuine to who they even through the trying circumstances. If your friends are funny, chances are they’ll still be funny talking about cancer. The humor doesn’t make light of things nor does it just play everything for laughs. Humor is how we humanize, how we make the insurmountable digestible.
50/50 also treats its characters with a bittersweet sense of reality; these people are flawed and relatable. They are not instantly made into self-actualized saints thanks to cancer. Adam’s girlfriend actually breaks down because she cannot handle the extra responsibilities and emotional wear and tear. Their relationship fizzles. This seems far more realistic considering many people will feel like they did not sign-up for sleepless nights, 24-hour care, and watching their loved one waste away. It’s a strong individual that can endure that kind of collateral pain, but the movies make it seem like every romantic partner is unnaturally selfless. They become ideal partners, but really most of us would just bail. Reiser easily could have easily written his ex-girlfriend as an insensitive shrew. While she does cheat on the guy, thus making her easy to dispel, Howard makes her vulnerability relatable. She even comes back trying to make amends, forcing kisses upon him to weaken Adam’s resolve. Kyle relishes the opportunity to finally be able to tell off Rachael, a girl he admits to disliking from the start. I don’t get the instant hate, but maybe it’s my complete adoration for Howard even when she’s playing a bad girl that blinds me to her offenses. To dismiss her as a “bitch” seems unfair. How would you react if your boyfriend/girlfriend were suddenly diagnosed with cancer? Could you last?
I found all of the characters to be empathetic and relatable (though a lead who waxes about the glory days of radio and works for NPR seems a bit hipsterish), especially in their personal struggles surrounding Adam’s illness. Adam’s mother, Diane (Anjelica Huston), can be overbearing and would have easily been kept as a caricature in other movies. In 50/50, the film examines her own struggle – a husband with Alzheimer’s who can’t talk to her and a son with cancer who chooses not to talk to her. The isolation she feels, the loneliness, always putting other people’s needs ahead of her own, this is culmination of the caregiver, a role as I’ve stated that too often gets canonized. In 50/50, the reality of living with illness is dealt with in a meaningful manner. The people surrounding you are also affected by your illness. You cannot shut them out to spare them from pain. Adam realizes this too as the film progresses to its moving conclusion.
The heart of 50/50 concerns two sets of relationships. The one that will catch the most attention is Adam’s budding romantic relationship with his therapist. Their romance feels like it emerges naturally, albeit in a slightly hurried up pace for our small timetable. It’s a romance built upon the chemistry of the two actors, the strength of their individual performances, and the fact that Reiser forgoes anything obviously romantic. He cleans out her car. She gives him a ride home. It’s little things that seem like they matter on a personal level, not the outsized theatrics of romantic gestures. The movements are small but they add up, and we can feel it too. So when Adam, at his lowest point, calls her and says, filter down and radiating in emotion, “I bet you’d be a good girlfriend,” it’s a moment that feels earned. I also greatly appreciated Katherine’s own insecurity about being a therapist. Too often movies depict therapists as omniscient beings that have a fortune cookie answer for all of life’s mysteries. Kendrick hides behind evaporating smiles as her character’s defense mechanism. In 50/50, we get to see a character that is honest about her insecurities about a job that advises others. It’s refreshing. The other main relationship is between Adam and his best friend, Kyle. His best buddy is his spark, the guy who gets him out, who shakes him from moping around. He cares but goes through unorthodox methods to show that care, including trash talking and ball busting. He remains likable to his shaggy core because he has Adam’s best interests in mind, even if that means scoring with girls.
Director Jonathon Levine (The Wackness) gives the movie an improbably beautiful look. This is one cancer comedy that is simply pleasing to watch for the cinematography alone. He doesn’t overpower the narrative with self-aware visual touches, though there is one that stands out. When Adam receives the news from his doctor, the audio becomes distorted after the shocking word “cancer” is uttered. The picture becomes blurred. The world seems to have been swept away. I imagine this sonic body blow is pretty much how Reiser recalls receiving the news, and if not it still feels authentic. The score by Michael Giacchino (Up, Super 8) is subtle and doesn’t intrude too often, ably assisting the drama instead of smothering it.
50/50 is an unsentimental film that manages to be moving and genuinely entertaining on its own terms. It can be rude but that doesn’t mean it lacks sincerity. The characters and their dilemmas feel all too relatable, even the ones we hope don’t become us. The 50/50 production has followed a subdued edict, forgoing sappy melodrama and easy pathos. These emotions are earned the old fashioned way, through characters we care about and drama that feels truthful. The mixture of the course and sweet gives the film a decidedly Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) flavor even though his name is nowhere to be seen. Gordon-Levitt, who at this point can do no wrong in my eyes, gives one of the best performances of his already accomplished career. The comedy, lead by Rogen’s obnoxious best friend, keeps the movie from being bogged down in melodrama. It’s the only way to stay sane, and 50/50 recognizes this and delivers a film that earns its tears and laughs.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Moneyball (2011)
Moneyball, based on the non-fiction book by journalist Michael Lewis (The Blind Side), finds a new way to reinvent the David v. Goliath tale with a man who reinvented the business model of baseball.
In 2001, the New York Yankees (team payroll: $125 million) have just knocked the Oakland As (team payroll: $41 million) out of the playoffs. Oakland General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) also has to suffer a summer where his biggest players leave the team to sign hefty free-agent contracts with bigger teams. He’s left with sizeable holes, a meager payroll, and the expectations to carry on winning. Beane is convinced that his group of paid scouts will be of no help. They’re men of an older era, sticking to the old ways of selecting talent (why the hell do these guys even calculate stuff like “good face” and “ugly girlfriend”?). Beane finds a kindred spirit in Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale grad with a degree in Economics. Brand’s mathematical data focuses on one all-important stat – on-base percentage. Without getting on base a player can’t score runs, and no runs make it hard to win a game. Brand and Beane calculate a series of players undervalued by other teams. Their more cost-efficient model for success becomes known as “moneyball.” Together they put together a team of castoffs and misfits to contend for a championship against teams that have three times the Oakland As’ payroll.
Moneyball could be described as a baseball movie for people who don’t like baseball, but that’s a little too glib by half. It’s very much a sports film but it takes the underdog approach in a new, sleekly modernized manner. It’s about a guy bucking the traditional mode of thinking, the established order, and the chaffing and nay saying of those entrenched in the traditional, outmoded, establishment. There’s always something inherently entertaining about an innovator fighting the system and eventually being proven right after all the trials and tribulations. And with Pitt, a major movie star, giving a movie star-caliber performance, self-effacingly charming with a twinkle and a swagger, Moneyball just seems to fly by like a spirited caper. We’re watching a smooth operator work the room, playing other general managers off one another and secretly accruing his talent while duping his peers. At its best moments, Moneyball feels almost like a breathless con game. The intelligent, stats-heavy dialogue doesn’t stoop for much exposition. The stats and acronyms whiz by, with Social Network-style crispness thanks to Oscar-winning screenwriters Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin. It’s a pleasure listening to top actors savoring the smart dialogue. You just want to kick up your heels and relax like you’re watching a game at home, rooting for your team to pull out an unlikely coup. Moneyball plays best for baseball fans who won’t bat an eye at the stat-heavy chat. For non-fans of the game, well, you can watch Pitt spit chewing tobacco into a cup a lot.
Beane chooses not to get to close to his players so that eventual roster cuts and trades will be all the easier without emotional involvement. The movie kind of follows suit. The characters are kept at a surprising distance. The movie seems practically ambivalent about people. Moneyball seems to lack an emotional center; and people thought The Social Network was cold. Beane is given flashes of back-story about his flameout in the majors, which supposedly provides the guy a motivation to prove himself against his legion of detractors. But these flashes are not enough. Director Bennet Miller (his first film since 2005’s Capote) incorporates way too many scenes where we watch Beane driving, silently contemplating his life-changes. The feud between Beane and his curmudgeon manager, Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman with the unkindest of haircuts), never comes to a head. Howe is upset at the thankless job of corralling a team of misfits and cast-offs into a competitive team. But like many other conflicts, the movie ducks from finding a real purpose for its integration. Howe just seems to be another naysayer who shakes his head at Billy. Surely the relationship between GM and manager should be more complicated than as presented. The Beane family flashbacks and his scenes with his daughter (the adorable Kerris Dorsey) are attempts to further humanize a man who has abandoned the advice of people for spreadsheets.
It’s easy to get caught up in the romanticism of the nation’s oldest sporting games, but Moneyball’s tone seems to toggle between reality and romanticism. For Beane, there are no small victories. Even success is deemed failure under the metrics of championship-or-nothing. “People only remember your last out,” he says despondently. So when the Oakland As fail to make a run into the playoffs (is a 2002 playoff series considered a spoiler?) the movie is left with a listless conclusion. Brand tries to prove to his boss the significance of what they have accomplished on their meager payroll, at one point winning a record 20 games in a row. But a winning streak of 20 games is not the same as a championship. Moneyball rightly proclaims the game of baseball as a rigged sport, where the divide between “haves” and “have nots” is vast. It is the only major league sport without a salary cap. The teams with the big pockets can afford the marquee talent. There’s a reason Lewis’ book has the subtitle “The Art of Winning and Unfair Game.” The implications of Beane’s accomplishments are unclear. His cost-efficient, stat-heavy approach was co-opted by the Boston Red Sox and turned into championships in 2004 and 2007. Is that a real vindication for Beane? It seems to me that the game’s issue of wealth disparity is still in full effect. Even if teams follow Bean’s approach, it still means that the bigger city, wealthier teams like the Red Sox or the Yankees can still outspend their competition. So it seems like to me that Bean’s moneyball approach simply meant that the focus changed on less costly talent. It did nothing to alter who could outbid their peers for the now-cheaper talent. It’s hard to squeeze a happy ending out of a story that concludes with the rich getting richer.
The movie is pretty much a buddy comedy, granted Beane is a much more dominate personality. Pitt feels like he’s coasting on charisma, though the actor gives a greatly entertaining performance. It’s not so much nuanced but he’s enjoying himself. The man looks eerily to be aging into Robert Redford, which begs the question about the nature of time travel. Hill (Superbad, Get Him to the Greek) gives a surprisingly adept dramatic performance. The comedic actor seems subdued next to the charisma of Pitt, like the character is continually awed by Billy. The Oscar-talk for the comedian seems a tad premature. He’s good but just because Hill delivers a good dramatic performance does not mean people should automatically start fielding his name as an award contender. That’s like saying let’s give an award to Paris Hilton because she could remember her lines. It’s also fun watching actors like Chris Pratt (TV’s Parks and Recreation) portray players that are still recognizable.
Moneyball says that baseball is not a game about heart, sweat, or the love of the game. It’s about numbers. That’s something of a cold message but Billy Beane is not one for false comforts. At its best, the film is a breezy caper with crisp dialogue and slick editing, but it’s also hamstrung by an inconsistent tone, a methodical pacing (133 minutes!), and a dearth of strong characterization. Beane was destined to be a baseball star but it wasn’t to be. Baseball is the most mental of all national sports, and it’s hard to crack such an insular model of play. That’s why baseball movies resort so much to romantic staples about the lore of this game. This is not a romantic movie; it toys with romanticism but ultimately sides with the science and number crunching. The emotion seems to have been squeezed out of the story thanks to the statistics. Moneyball is a baseball movie that fantasy baseball nerds have been waiting for. I’m not particularly a baseball fan (too slow), but I still found the movie to be a rewarding night out sans crackerjacks.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Future (2011)
Miranda July is a writer/performance artist/filmmaker whose unique voice earns as many praises of “precocious” as it does hails of “pretentious.” Her previous effort, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, had such oddities as a group of cars creating a caravan to save a goldfish left atop one’s roof and children engaging in online sex chat over sharing feces from behind to another ( ))<>(( is the visual articulation of this function). Yeah.
With her second feature film, The Future, we follow Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a couple who decide to adopt an injured cat they find. Named Paw-Paw by Sophie, they must wait 30 days for the medical checks to clear before they can pick up the cat. They believe that they are doing a kindness and giving the cat a good place to live in its last month of life. Then the vet informs them that if bonded, the cat could live an additional five years. Sophie and Jason will be 40 in another five years, and this realization stops them cold in their tracks. Both are unhappy with their lives, he works as a technical help guru and she teaches dance to preschool-aged children. They decide that for the next 30 days they will reinvent themselves. They will take the road less traveled and see where it takes them. Jason volunteers to be an environmental solicitor on a whim. Sophie wants to do 30 dances in 30 days but is crippled by fear. She reaches out to Marshall (David Warshofsky), an older single dad who proves to be a source of unlikely temptation. Along the way to the conclusion of those 30 days, Jason will utilize his abilities to stop time, speak with the moon, an old T-shirt will crawl will come alive, and the story will be narrated at turns by Paw-Paw.
It should be obvious at this point that July is not going to be everyone’s taste. You could just as well furrow your brow at all these pseudo-intellectual bohemian artsy smartsy pretensions and make snide remarks under your breath. And I can’t say I’d blame you at points. However, if you happen to catch a ride on July’s funky wavelengths, then The Future becomes a poignant, observant, and occasionally profound rumination on human connection. July’s two main characters encounter a full crisis of self, fearing that their lives will essentially be over upon turning 35, which they reason is almost 40, which is practically 50, and all that back-half stuff is “loose change” (not enough to really get what you want). I believe I heard none other than Jessica Simpson herself utter a similar statement on her ill-fated Newlyweds reality TV show. She said, “I’m turning 23, which is practically 25, which is almost 30.” Perhaps Ms. July was also watching that episode, and if so this will be the only time in print that I congratulate Jessica Simpson for anything. This manufactured anxiety over doing something of worth and lasting value with your time on this planet is nothing new but it is deeply relatable, despite the silly numbers game the characters endure. It’s a paralyzing existential doubt. Who doesn’t want to feel like their life had purpose? You only get one. July makes a series of observant comments about human interaction. For their life project, Sophie decides to cancel the couple’s Internet connection. They have but moments, perhaps seconds left, before the Internet is lost to them for 30 days, and they scramble to open their laptops to do important stuff. “Only look up stuff we can’t find in books or by talking to people,” Jason intones. Slowly, both of them come to the same realization and close their laptops. It’s a silent admission that the technology we feel dependant upon might not be so.
There’s a striking clarity when an artist cuts through everything and finds something dwelling inside your grey matter. For me, July is that kind of artist. I loved a sequence where Sophie, out of slumming desperation, takes a job as a receptionist back at her old work place. One day two of her female friends come into the studio. Both women are several months pregnant, and Sophie is aghast that she let time get the better of her. She keeps shaking her head, rationalizing that it must have only been a couple weeks since last she saw her friends. Then through a series of edits, we witness a fantastic fantasy that highlights Sophie’s abject feelings of accomplishing little while time flies by. Every time the camera cuts back to the friends more time passes; we see them hold newborn babies, then we see those babies as kids, then as young adults, and finally as adults who themselves have married each other and wish to enroll their own daughter into pre-dance. They inform Sophie that their mothers passed some time ago. And all the while, Sophie is still in her dead-end job. It’s a terrific scene that highlights the anxiety we all feel about being lead footed in life, watching others skirt by and negatively assessing our own personal journeys by someone else’s accomplishments. The Future is full of moments like this that hit so hard you feel like the ground beneath you has vanished. Jason’s refusal to restart time is painfully identifiable, the wish to stay frozen in time to defer facing the hard pains of a breakup, the rueful knowledge that life will be forever different, and worse, in the passing of a second. The future can be a painful place we’d all like to hide under the covers and avoid.
Like July’s previous film, The Future is more a series of encapsulated vignettes, each with their own peculiarities, than a fully formed coherent story. While I enjoyed the separate vignettes better in Me and You, the overall story congeals better in The Future even if the results are messy. This is a less romantic and hopeful film than Me and You. It’s much more ambiguous (that’s saying something) and bleak when it exposes the missed chances that can haunt, none more so than Paw-Paw, our bandaged feline narrator. Scurry to the next paragraph if you’d like this part unspoiled for you, sensitive animal-loving readers. Paw-Paw speaks about her new sense of happiness, about having owners that will be kind to her, and this new sense of belonging fills the cat with a ballooning hope that her real life has finally begun. But then Paw-Paw doesn’t make it. She dies a day before either Sophie or Jason comes by to pick her up. But the cruel irony is that Sophie and Jason missed picking up their cat/metaphor of their relationship on its release date. Paw-Paw could have spent her last day on earth with the people she had yearned to be with, the people she wrote an imaginary letter to telling them how grateful she was and how much she promised to love them. Instead, the cat dies, forever waiting. That’s pretty rough, and even though July’s scratchy, high-pitched Paw-Paw voice can be annoying, God help me if the pet lover in me wasn’t in tears every time this damn cat was narrating, including after its death. That’s the kind of film The Future offers. It does not dish out easy answers for life’s Big Questions. Even as the end credits roll, you’re left to ponder whether you believe that Sophie and Jason will reconcile.
July, resembling a cross between Kristen Schaal (Dinner for Schmucks) and Juliette Binoche (The English Patient), is probably also her biggest hindrance. She’s not that developed as an actress, or is being purposely opaque, and thus Sophie seems to be lost in a medicated fog. This was less of a problem with Me and You because the ensemble was larger. Here, it’s mainly three actors. July delivers every line in a flat style that makes her character harder to decipher and harder to empathize with when she goes off into her affair. The entire storyline with the sign making “other man” is kept at a mystery. We’re not really sure why Sophie would be attracted to this man or what problems are ailing her relationship with Jason. I suppose the early mid-life crisis could serve as a fire to get Sophie to reach out to someone who offers more security, but that’s merely my best estimation. It’s a detour that could use more attention to explain its significance. I suppose it could be July’s version of a romantic comedy staple of being with the wrong man and finding out late your mistake. It’ll be up to the viewer which guy fills the role of “wrong man.” Luckily, Linklater (TV’s New Adventures of Old Christine) is a winning presence, affable without being offbeat and striving for meaning without coming across as pompous.
Whether it’s a dance inside an oversized T-shirt or choosing a song to communicate undying love in the event of amnesia, The Future is chockablock with memorable moments, images, insights, and peculiarities. Whether all of that comes together into a fully realized movie is another matter. The scattershot nature and July’s own acting shortcomings clip the film’s momentum, but the uniqueness of voice and observant vision of July as writer/director makes me forgive much of The Future’s faults. It’s not exactly an easy sell of a movie, especially to concerned pet lovers, but July is one of those polarizing artists I’m glad finds the time to empty their brain every now and then. I may not fully understand everything but The Future held enough promise for me to leave feeling satisfied.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Debt (2011)
A tense and mature spy thriller that’s as well written as it is acted, The Debt is a thriller that even stops to ponder some serious moral ambiguities along the way. Back in 1965, a group of Israel agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas) were sent to Berlin to capture a notorious ex-Nazi doctor (Jasper Christensen) and bring him back for justice. When things don’t go according to plan, the group must decide what is justifiable in the name of moral cost. In 1997, the aged former agents (Helen Mirren, Cirian Hinds, Tom Wilkinson) have to deal with the full consequences of their actions. A far majority of the film takes place in the 60s, and it’s for the best considering that’s where most of the tension and interest reside. As a thriller, drama, and non-linear mystery, there’s always something going on. The film is not without its genre clichés, but the sequences of holding Christensen (Quantum of Solace) hostage rise beyond genre mucking. He is a true monster and his dialogues with the various agents are chilling, reminiscent of Hannibal Lector’s tête-à-têtes. The cast is uniformly good, even Worthington, but the real star is Chastain (The Help, Tree of Life). She is magnetic. It’s a shame that The Debt felt it needed to tie up its loose ends in a conventional ending that discards the film’s more ambitious moral quandary. I suppose the toll of false identities and moral relativism just doesn’t make audiences happy like good old-fashioned vengeance. I guess that’s a debt everyone would rather have paid.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Contagion (2011)
For the germophobes amongst us, you probably want to skip seeing the new thriller, Contagion. Like for life. Never see this film if you’re the type that needs a paper toilet seat cover before sitting down to do their business. Contagion is a movie that makes you reevaluate basic human interaction. You may not leave the house again without covering yourself in plastic and a year’s worth of Purel. Director Stephen Soderbergh (Che, Ocean’s Thirteen) has assembled an all-star cast to drop like flies like only Hollywood’s most talented can do. Contagion is an intelligent, unnerving, technically authentic thriller that will make you cringe just watching people cough.
Contagion’s main character is a virus that begins its origin in a Hong Kong casino and quickly spreads from there. A British model takes it to the UK, a Chinese waiter goes home infected, a Japanese businessman keels over dead on a return trip home, and Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) comes home from her business tripe back to Minneapolis and goes into seizures. The next day, she’s dead and soon after having her brain dug out for an autopsy. The spooked docs alert the Centers for Disease Control immediately; something is definitely wrong with Paltrow’s brain (insert Coldplay joke here). The head of the CDC, Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), and his specialists track the expansion of the virus. He dispatches Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), to Minnesota to coordinate inter-agency action and interview Beth’s husband (Matt Damon), who appears to be immune to the virus. He’s in shock and isolated from his remaining daughter. He’s still trying to make sense of how quickly everything fell apart for his family. Capitalizing on fear, anti-establishment medical blogger Alan Krumweid (Jude Law) steers a panicked public toward a homeopathic medical alternative that he just so happens to have a financial stake with. The World Health Organization sends Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) to investigate the Hong Kong casino and overview hours of security footage to glean the origins of the virus. But she, like others, soon find themselves in ever-increasing danger as the world races against time to beat this new threat.
For those expecting an action-thriller with plenty of doctors barking moral quandaries and racing against time to escape government agents… you will be sorely disappointed. Contagion is much more cerebral, cool, like a scientific procedural that plays the premise out in a realistic fashion, which means it’s often short the fireworks that mainstream audiences have come to expect from disaster movies. The CDC is really the main setting as they try and determine the origin of the virus, breaking down the virus, and projecting its rate on infection and contamination. Soderbergh has onscreen titles indicating how large the population centers are for the plot settings, reminding us simply with text how vulnerable to danger all those people are. The real pleasure of the film is watching A-level Oscar actors puzzle out how to solve this multi-faceted crisis. The movie does a minimal amount of explanation and expects an audience to be able to keep up with its scientific analysis. Soderbergh’s film is much more in keeping with The Andromeda Strain than Outbreak (find that monkey and all will be happy again!). You witness smart people doing smart things and still making little traction. This isn’t necessarily Irwin Allen territory of disaster. It’s a disaster that seems all too reasonably possible rather than being trapped in the belly of a ship that has turned upside down. Getting sick is a lot harder to avoid especially in our modern world. Globalization has done many wonders for the world, but by making the world a smaller place it also means that we’re all much more susceptible to the spreads of pandemics. No longer can geography be held as a total defense. We’re all one flight away from the spread of the next great illness (as the end credits to Rise of the Planet of the Apes also remind).
Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!) cast a wide net all over the world to see the ramifications of crisis. Things go rather quickly. By the end of the first week, the CDC is coordinating its resources and media strategy to not inflame panic. Easier said than done when ignorance and fear are in large quantities. The reaction to the news, the intra-government squabbles over resources and money, the exploitation of fear by opportune business types, the rising resentment of those left out of the loop, and even the kidnapping schemes for those known to have access to medicine. Contagion works because it gets the details right without losing track of the big picture. The film feels eerily plausible at every beat. Nurses are on strike refusing to be near the sick until uniform safety protocols are established. Funeral homes refuse to handle infected bodies out of health concerns. These are absorbing details that feel completely authentic yet would easily have been overlooked in other disaster pictures. The movie even addresses recent pandemic fears related to H1N1, SARS, and the perceived “overreaction” when these potential worldwide disasters turned out to be milder bugs. A government agent asks the head of the CDC if some terror organization could have weaponized the bird flu. “They don’t have to. The birds are already doing it,” the CDC head replies.
While Burns lies out a host of characters and scenarios with increasing tension as stakes mount and the death toll rises, Contagion just kind of drifts into an ending for the last 20 minutes. I was expecting another big wallop, some kind of sudden plot turn that reestablished an ongoing threat, but it wasn’t to be. The tension just sorts of lets out slowly like a balloon, playing against movie laws. That means that Contagion, wile tense, eschews a dramatic buildup for a climax. Burns and Soderbergh instead to play out their realistic “what if” experiment to its conclusion, which makes for a realistic if somewhat inert final act. There’s no chasing monkeys or butting with government agents willing to sacrifice infected town for “the good of mankind”; it’s just government employees doing good work and trying to minimize damages. It’s exciting to watch smart characters break down a nasty new virus and try to understand it and get ahead of it, but once they succeed, it’s not as exciting to watch the aftereffects of people getting better and returning to a normal existence (minus 30 million people on the planet – the solution to fixing unemployment?).
Because the emphasis is on the cross-sections of plot and scientific breakdown, the emotional connection to the characters is limited. There are a lot of famous faces that appear in this movie; even bit parts are taken up by the likes of Bryan Cranston (TV’s Breaking Bad), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Demetri Martin (Taking Woodstock), Enrico Colatoni (TV’s Veronica Mars). Damon (The Adjustment Bureau) is probably the closest thing the film has to an emotional center. He’s immune to the virus but he has to watch his family fall apart with the knowledge that his wife was Patient Zero. On top of that, he has to deal with the fact that she was cheating on him. That’s a healthy brew of emotions to confront in such a heightened situation, and Damon does a nice job of putting a human face to the mass tragedy. Winslet (The Reader) is superb as a CDC investigator, so duty-bound that even when she awakes to discover she has become infected she goes through protocol trying to investigate who serviced her room so that others will not share her fate. Law (Sherlock Holmes) is suitably sleazy as a moral relativist trying that uses his army of Internet followers to discredit the government’s response. Fishburne (Predators) has terrific poise as the man in charge of scrambling the response forces, keeping his cool, and being the public face of the government response until an all too human scandal tarnishes him. But perhaps the best performer is Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Glory, The King’s Speech). She plays one of the chief CDC scientists studying the virus and takes some extreme measures to test a potential vaccine. She has a scene with her sick father that is likely the most emotionally affecting moment in the film. Her sturdy determination even when most vulnerable is selfless.
Contagion is a smart by-the-book procedural thriller that may not be dramatic enough for audiences fed by Hollywood disaster films. The film is far more analytical and detail-oriented to its benefit and sometimes detraction. It’s got stars galore and some plenty of rising tension, but the film also follows a realistic blueprint toward a rapid world response to a new pandemic, which means that well-developed characterization is spared amidst all that fraught scientific lingo. As a result, Contagion feels more like a docu-drama than an amped-up Hollywood thriller with its finger firmly pressed upon American anxieties. Contagion is a bit overextended and data-heavy. It’s a stripped down indie in studio clothing. Soderbergh’s movie is a bit too lean and clinical to be fully satisfying and emotionally engaging, especially with its somewhat inert ending. It’ll sure make you look at free bowls of peanuts differently. And Gwyneth Paltrow’s skull.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
I owe the makers behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes a huge apology. I have been vocally dismissive of a new Apes film from the first moments I heard about the project. I just thought rehashing this material was a stupid move. Then I heard James Franco (127 Hours) was going to be the lead, and I sighed. Then I saw the trailers and verbally impugned them in my theaters. Upon the conclusion of the trailer I yelled, “You can still shoot them!” and my criticism drew applause from those around me. The concept that we suddenly made apes smarter and they could now enter the Bronze Age, brandishing spears, didn’t overwhelm me. Just because the apes suddenly had tools didn’t seem like enough to topple mankind from the top of the evolutionary ladder. So in the months and weeks ahead I sneer, jeered, and overall dismissed Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And then the reviews came out and they weren’t just good, they were ecstatic. I went begrudgingly into the theater, waiting to hurl my own feces at the screen (figuratively, of course). Then I was completely taken aback by how much I unabashedly loved it.
Will Rodman (Franco) is a young scientists working hard at create a miracle cure for Alzheimer’s. His corporate company has been testing their drugs on chimps to mixed results. One day a promising ape, made smarter by a dose of ALZ 112, goes bananas and is put down by security. The lady ape left behind a baby ape that has taken on traits from the ALZ 112. Will takes the little chimp home to care for the “company property.” But then he ends up adopting the chimp, which his ailing father (John Lithgow) names Caesar. Due to the super drug, Caesar shows remarkable intelligence and looks to be getting even stronger. It looks like Will might have found his cure, and his boss (David Oyelowo) will make billions. But then complications ensue, as they always do, and Caesar is taken to an animal preserve facility run by a crooked father/son team (Brian Cox and Harry Potter’s Tom Felton). Caesar is mistreated and distraught to adjust to a life in pens. He makes plans to escape but then decides to rally his fellow imprisoned apes to a greater cause with the help of some of the ALZ 112.
Even through Franco is the headliner he’s really nothing more than a supporting character, a catalyst. The real star of the movie is undoubtedly Caesar the chimp. After about he 45-minute mark, Franco is reduced to making frowny faces while he scowls, trying to ascertain where his favorite monkey is. His dialogue is mostly reduced to different iterations of yelling Caesar’s name in different locations (the guy even manages to smirk in his sleep in one scene). But the major surprise is that Caesar is not only a compelling leading character but also a well-developed one at that. This is a living, breathing character brought to life thanks to top-notch computer wizardry and the talents of Andy Serkis, the leading authority for soulful motion-capture performances. Caesar may be the greatest single special effect of all time, not because of its life-like quality (it’s close, but again the creature’s features seem too waxy). But the reason Caesar is so impressive is because of the depth of emotion that can be read onscreen. This is a textured performance where you can read varying emotions through the looks of eyes, the twitching of facial muscles, the biting of lips. The emotions are genuinely recognizable; he flashes guilt, anger, frustration, heartache, disbelief, betrayal, fear, shame, just about everything in the book. From a DNA standpoint, chimps and humans share 96 percent of the same genes, so it’s understandable that we can relate to the plight of our distant relatives. Serkis is responsible for providing the groundwork for CGI creations like Gollum and King Kong, so he’s the world’s go-to guy when it comes to providing a framework for animators (Robert Zemeckis, why have you never called this guy?). It’s an amazing special effect accomplishment and works side-by-side with the storytelling to make Caesar a complicated, interesting, and deeply empathetic hero. He’s a terrific center for the movie and a figure that you root for, even with the tacit understanding that cheering on the apes’ escape is also tantamount to cheering the decline of the human race. But by God, during the apes-run-amok climactic sequences you are cheering for mankind’s downfall hardcore.
The Planet of the Apes saga (six films) is, let’s be honest here, rather abysmal. Everybody loves the first movie but the quality sharply drops from there, with four sequels in four years each managing to answer the depressing question, “Can this thing really get any worse?” The 2001 Tim Burton “re-imagining” was just embarrassing and filled with loopy logic (how can the apes take over Earth’s past when Marky Mark crashes on a DIFFERENT planet in the FUTURE?). Given that, the filmmakers behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes did not have to achieve much to separate themselves from the monkey-stank of the sci-fi franchise. The film serves as a prequel to the series but it’s easily the best film since the original. Easily. For one, the storytelling is not overwhelmed by the allegory of sci-fi packaging. The world is decidedly our own and the problems the characters grapple with are fairly relatable. Will may be responsible for the annihilation of the human race but his motivation is pure – he wants to save his ailing father. That’s a believable motivating force that would push the character to action over caution, testing his special serum without fully examining all the side effects. You know what they say about the road to Hell (my friend Eric Muller always suspected Franco would be linked to the end of civilization)? But in a Planet of the Apes movie there is a wealth of thoughtful human drama. Animal rights are one of the more obvious messages the movie deals with, but the film takes a character-driven approach following the animal himself. You care about these characters and when one CGI ape was cradling a dying CGI ape, I swear I was getting choked up over those computer pixels. That’s how emotionally involving this new Apes film can be. It’s refreshing to have a Hollywood action film that has more on its mind than blowing stuff up all good like.
But when the action shapes up, mostly during a stirring man vs. apes climax, the film easily delivers. The nimble screenplay by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (their first film since 1997’s Relic!) is a terrific example of economical big-budget pacing. Every scene moves the story forward and doesn’t waste a frame. The final running time is only 105 brisk minutes but it squeezes in so much entertainment and emotion. Director Rupert Wyatt keeps the thrills coming on a human-scale, never letting the enormity of the events getting too out of hand. Sure suddenly there are like 500 apes all of a sudden and all of them are super smart, but I can roll with that. The stakes are always clear and the action is easy to follow and easier to get swept up in. There are a few shout-outs to the original film’s iconic lines, which will either come across as fun or ham-handed. And thankfully a plausible scenario is put forth to explain why the humans would be overtaken by the apes. That’s not to say that everything is smartly woven into the narrative. Several of the side characters are but crude renderings. Frieda Pinto’s (Slumdog Millionaire) underdeveloped love interest could be completely taken out with minimal effect on the plot. Likewise the Evil Business Head seems to have nothing but speeches that remind you his sole interest is making lots of moolah.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a Hollywood movie with a soul. Finally late in the summer a major studio movie emerges that has the right balance of brains, brawn, and thrills. It’s an exciting action movie, a poignant drama from an animal’s point of view, a tour de force of special effects that manage to make the film more emotionally involving, and a sci-fi prequel that’s actually worthy of its name. Serkis’ gifts for physical performance are invaluable to the emotional core of the movie. By going back to its DNA, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has given new life to a franchise whose best days were 40 years ago. I don’t see where the series can go from here. A prequel to the prequel seems superfluous. A sequel would only really showcase the waning days of humanity and also seem superfluous. Then again, until the moment I was watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes I would have said this very movie was superfluous too. Instead this is the finest summer spectacle of the year and destined to make my top ten list for the year. If you can’t beat them, join them, damn dirty apes and all.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Beginners (2011)
Burying a parent is one of the most gut-wrenching hardships of life, a passage I have thankfully not had to endure yet in my own life. Writer/director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) turned his own heartbreak into a subdued, life-affirming movie called Beginners. This gentle movie is comic, poignant, and frustratingly limited thanks to a miscalculation in its structure.
Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is reeling from the loss of his elderly father, Hal (Christopher Plummer). After the death of his wife, in his seventy-fifth year, Hal came out as being gay his whole life. And he decided to have some fun in those last years too, notably with a hunky younger boyfriend (Goran Visnjic, remember him, ER fans?). We get several flashbacks with Oliver and his ailing father, who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer soon into his gay reemergence. In the present, Oliver, as a dissatisfied graphic designer, is trying to find his bearings after burying both of his parents. Hal’s dog, a Jack Russell terrier, is mourning as well, refusing to be left alone. As a result, Oliver takes the small dog with him wherever he travels, including social events. He meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) at a friend’s costume party. He’s dressed as Sigmund Freud and she mimes having laryngitis. Anna, a young actress who spends most of her life in hotels, invites him back and the two explore the possibility of a relationship. She’ll be off to another film shoot in a month, but the two become inseparable during the time they have together. Anna learns about Oliver and his complicated relationship with the complicated man he knew as his father. Oliver, and in flashback Hal, are beginners on a road to making sense of their lives.
What eventually holds Beginners back is its clipped structure. The film diverges into two main storylines, father and son (60%) and son with new love (40%). The new love stuff is presented fairly linearly, however, the father/son material is not, consisting of memories that can be triggered by objects or offhand sayings. Like (500) Days of Summer, memories are presented not in a linear fashion but through a connection of theme or tone. Rarely do we recount memories in a chronological fashion, and as such Oliver is beset by deluges of images of his father ailing at various points. But it’s like Mills took that fleeting memory approach to heart because Beginners is a slave to the altar of jump cuts. The editing, and the narrative, is constantly leaping forward; scenes rarely last longer than 30-45 seconds, making the film feel like somebody had their finger mashed against a stubborn fast forward button. As a result, the film feels hurried and unsettled, and this clipped structure mollifies the emotional impact of the movie. It’s because the romance only feels like someone’s remembrance of those burgeoning happy beginnings. The film doesn’t feel like it is in its own present; we’re in 2003 and Oliver will occasionally inform us, in High Fidelity-styled notation, of life at that moment. It feels like the entire enterprise is an assembly of past memories ping-ponging off one another. Another hurdle is that Anna and Oliver’s main conflict concerns their fear of happiness. Each had parents who wed as unhappy people, had unhappy unions, and both are fearful that they too will commit to living unhappy lives. It’s not an impossible feat, to be sure, but it does make it somewhat harder to relate to your characters when the main relationship problem is that they cannot accept happiness. While psychologically interesting in larger scope, due to the structure of Beginners, this conflict for Anna and Oliver seems petty and insufficient. The antsy story structure limits the emotional resonance of the movie. What should be a nourishing meal about the human condition ends up being a tidy snack instead.
Don’t get me wrong, Beginners is still a fairly moving film in its own right. Just the very nature of the story, dealing with the last months of an ailing parent and what to do next, is destined to hit poignant pockets of drama. Plus you have gifted actors doing fine work to wring out those tears. Mills’ tale is semi-autobiographical, which allows for several personal insights that can wound, like direct shots of honesty. Oliver narrates the steps taken after a parent’s death, including the mundane yet painful trivialities needed to convince every bill collector that their client has left the Earth. When Hal is informed that he has a spot of cancer the size of a quarter in his lung, the screen flashes to black as the doctor continues her somber diagnosis. A quarter appears. Then five nickels, finally twenty-five pennies. It’s a small little visual insert, and yet it manages to seem like a believable, personally relatable moment when delivered such thundering news. Something the size of a quarter will be responsible for your father losing his life. Five nickels. Twenty-five pennies. The scenes with father and son, coming to terms with saying goodbye, reflecting on lives lived and lives deferred, is what gives Beginners its beating heart. The clipped present-day romance plays more like a post-script attempt to forge a neat resolution after all that heavy grief.
Plummer gives a performance that is equal parts weighed with the gravity of death and the electricity of life. After his wife’s death, Hal finally has an opportunity to embrace who he has been his whole life. Mills and Plummer are delicate with how they handle the relationship between Hal and his wife (Mary Page Keller in flashback). Neither hated the other, and both did express love, but they were together in a marriage of convenience, both of them hiding who they were from preying eyes (Oliver’s mother hid that she was Jewish). Plummer’s celebration of life, the twinkling realization of accepting who you truly are, is an uplifting path for his character, and thanks to both Mills and Plummer it never feels like he’s dancing on the grave of his long-suffering wife. He’s not celebrating her death; he’s embracing who he is in the twilight of his years. He’s looking for a small amount of kindness and comfort while finally being socially recognized without fear or intimidation. Plummer is delightful during Hal’s happier moments and heart wrenching during the realities of his failing body. Plummer deftly bites into one of those juicy, Oscar-bait roles.
McGregor acts very well even if his character is kept in a very tight box of emotional expression. His character seems to sleepwalk from scene to scene; often little is said and much left to the imagination through pregnant pauses or gestures. McGregor does a fine job of balancing the different timelines of grief his character is experiencing. He’s in comic shock about his father’s newfound immersion in a gay lifestyle, he’s in mourning about the recent loss of his father, he’s in annoyance tinged with guilt about the burdens of taking care of a man that was often absent in his own life, leaving him in the care of his mother, resigned to a life of dutiful despondency, and he’s infatuated with the possibility of romantic love, a cleansing force. It’s a lot for one actor to keep straight and McGregor does an admirable job. Laurent does not fare as well. The Inglourious Basterds‘ actress is forced to rely mostly on wry smiles and her penetrating eyes. She also cocks her head to the side a lot, or a least that’s how I recall. She’s given something of a thanklessly underwritten role but she manages to be adorable from her first moment onscreen, which is her most vital acting accomplishment here. She’s supposed to be that happy ending we want Oliver to have.
Beginners is a moving, charming, and perceptive movie. If only there was more of it. The clipped, hurried jump cut-heavy structure keeps the audience at a certain distance and capping the emotional resonance. The father/son stuff is going to be easier to empathize with, both good times and bad, than two good-looking thirtysomethings afraid of being happy because their parents are screwed up. Ultimately, the film’s pretenses of a budding, quirky romance will take away from the more genuine father/son bonding late in life. You’ll get weepy at turns, maybe even swoon here and there, but the rewards are sadly too momentary, never cohesively assembling into a full-fledged narrative. Beginners has an equal number of hard truths and light moments of whimsy (the subtitled dog is a hoot), but ultimately it’s a movie that makes you wish it had left a better impression when it had the chance.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Super 8 (2011)
Super 8 is writer/director J.J. Abrams’ reverent homage to early Spielberg movies. For some, it will be too reverent to the point of being a slobbery love letter.
In 1979, a small Ohio town, 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is reeling from the death of his mother in a factory accident. His father, Jackson (Kyle Chandler), is a police officer who doesn’t know how to raise his boy. He even tries to convince his son to spend the summer at a baseball camp. “It’ll be good for you to spend some time with kids who don’t run around with cameras and monster makeup,” he says. That kid is Charles (Riley Griffiths), a self-possessed amateur filmmaker. Charles is writing and directing a short Super 8 film and all his friends are helping. Joe’s specialty is makeup, given his attention to delicately painting models. Being the makeup guy comes in handy when the gang invites the local pretty girl, Alice (Elle Fanning), to be in their movie. Joe gets to apply her zombie makeup. One night, the gang sneaks out to a train yard to film a scene in their movie. A U.S. Air Force cargo train is passing by and suddenly derails, in grand apocalyptic fashion. Strange things start happening all over town shortly after the train crash. Car motors and electrical equipment go missing, dogs run away to neighboring communities, and people start to go missing. The Air Force comes into town and takes charge. It seems that train was carrying something and that something has escaped.
What Super 8 does best is replicate a time, place, and mood. The movie is successfully awash in nostalgia, and that childhood nostalgia is the best aspect of an otherwise ordinary film. Abrams has fashioned the greatest film tribute to Spielberg in history. But its limited ambition makes it feel like the greatest cover band of all time. You’ve assembled al your talent and energy into replicating someone else’s original work. Congratulations, Super 8 is a glossy tribute to Spielberg. Now what? Well, the movie works well at finding that unique, infectious spirit of being young and full of ideas. Filmmaking, and movies in general, has a magic to it, the synergistic creativity and the sheer possibilities that can abound. Translating the imagination into a communal artistic experience. I’m sure Abrams was just as excited about the possibilities of a camera in his childhood as Spielberg was. That feeling of discovery, that rambunctious creativity, and the endearing clumsiness of amateur productions, it all rings completely true. I made silly movies with a camera and my friends when I was younger; my group of friends and I became known for our video projects in high school. So I could have readily watched an entire movie about kids and cameras and their artistic aspirations (as long as it was better than Son of Rambo). The highpoint of Super 8 for me was, surprisingly, the children’s short film “The Case” that plays over the closing credits. It’s funny and charming and sweetly affable. Finally seeing Charles’ finished film is the ultimate payoff.
Abrams as a director is quite capable of delivering big summer moments. He’s a genre specialist and a geek’s best friend. I’ve even compared his style to that of a young Spielberg in my review of 2006’s Mission: Impossible III. Abrams has a natural feel for putting his camera in the right placement. While Abrams can do exciting action with the best of them, crafting compelling screen compositions to ignite the senses, it’s the smaller touches that connect to his storytelling that impress me most. The very opening shot tells you so much and grabs you. It’s a slow zoom into a factory’s sign proclaiming how many days have gone by without an accident. A man takes down the number plates and the count drops from 750 to 1. There’s a small moment where alice imitates a zombie, cocking her head, lurching, going in to bite Joe. And you see her, in that moment, as Joe does: a lovely young woman who makes your heart melt. With the aid of Michael Giacchino’s very John Williams-esque score, you effectively feel Joe’s burgeoning young love. Then when we pull back there’s a trace of Alice’s red lipstick along Joe’s neck, indicating she made actual contact. It’s a small detail that makes you smile all over. It’s these small details that often play to plot or character that affirm for me that Abrams is a director of fantastic promise, a true Spielberg protégé. Now if Abrams could lay off his excessive use of lens flairs (though it’s not as prevalent as Star Trek; you could make a drinking game into every time there was a lens flair).
The young actors are pretty good despite the somewhat hollow characterization by Abrams. These kids are defined by one-note traits (the kid obsessed with explosives, the wuss, etc.). I was going to be more upset by this until I remembered that movies like The Goonies, deemed a nostalgic classic by my generation, also had flimsy, one-note characterization (the fat kid is fat, the Asian kid has funny gadgets!). The scenes where all the kids are assembled make for some of the best entertainment. The young actors have a great rapport with one another and feel like a true makeshift band of friends. Their camaraderie, uncertainty, and hopes seem entirely genuine. They seem like real kids with real kid problems and worries. Courtney is a strong emotional center for the film. It’s hard to believe this is his first role on the big screen. Fanning (Somewhere, Curious Case of Benjamin Button) has been acting ever since she was the two-year-old version of her famous big sister in I Am Sam. I’m on the record as saying that Elle is a superior actress to her sister, and I feel like that claim bears fruit with Super 8. There’s a scene where Fanning’s character is asked to practice some feeble dialogue. Her cohorts think of her as a pretty girl and a source of transportation. But in this one scene, she turns on a dime, bringing out real emotions that leave the boys breathless and the audience too. It’s reminiscent of the audition scene in Mulholland Drive where Naomi Watts, at the flip of a switch, transformed into a different person, coursing with vibrant life. Consider it the toned-down kiddie version.
Truthfully, the monster stuff is actually the weakest part of the film. Super 8 works best as an endearing, nostalgic trip about being young. It works best as a coming-of-age tale and a somewhat touching first romance between teenagers. It does not work well as a sci-fi monster movie. You can tell that the monster/alien stuff has been grafted on to a separate storyline; the plots have little to no bearing on one another. If the kids happened to never go to that train stop that one night, their storyline would be almost entirely unaffected. It’s like parallel movies that pass each other occasionally but have little shared resonance. I found the human stuff, about being young and hurt and with your friends, to be affecting and interesting. The big-budget explosions, the monster mystery teased far too long, the subterranean third act that ends in a gob smack of logic issues, the heavy-handed metaphor about “letting go” (after only fours months? I think you’re still allowed to be sad four months after your mom dies) – that stuff plays well in trailers, but it’s far less interesting. The monster/alien conspiracy fails to lead to anything ripe in the narrative; the Air Force antagonists are more furtively empty than menacing. They don’t seem to care so much about a group of kids filming around the crash site. They’re pretty ineffective antagonists. The monster is hidden for so long, the film builds to an expectation level that it could never meet. The creature design of the monster/alien looks exactly like a smaller version of the Cloverfield creature (also produced by Abrams). When Super 8 is a poorly mimicking other B-movies, trying to wring tears by the film’s somewhat forced ending, I kept thinking, “The Iron Giant did this much better.” I guess once again aliens or a supernatural encounter helps people heal their family strife, which is something M. Night Shyamalan has been selling for years. This is one monster movie that would have been infinitely better without its monster.
Super 8 is obviously a personal film for Abrams, harking back to his boyhood days of monster movies, amateur filmmaking, and young love. This nostalgic time warp will likely succeed with many audience members. Nostalgia is a powerful narrative weapon. It taps into our warm memories of old. But nostalgia is easy to pattern. What’s difficult is creating a work of art that people will be nostalgic over a generation hence. Super 8 is not going to be an inspiration to a new generation of budding young filmmakers; it reconfirms the joy of monsters, movies, and creative possibility. But the elements don’t gel. The monster stuff feels tacked on to an affecting coming-of-age tale about a group of kids working together to make a movie. Rarely will the two plots really have much traction with one another. I think Super 8 would have been an even better movie had the “summer movie” elements been stripped. No monster. No sci-fi thrills. No military intervention. No train crash. Just kids, a camera, and the emotions of growing up.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Thor (2011)
I had strong misgivings going into Thor. How was a powerful Norse god going to seem remotely relatable? How was the most improbable member of Marvel’s Avengers ensemble going to be explained in a way that didn’t feel like a ton of cheese richly slathered in hokum? I was expecting this movie to be a silly, trippy, LSD-enhanced flashback (rainbow bridges! Pass the bong!) that could barely strain any sense of believability. It’s one thing to have stories about super heroes who have gotten their powers via genetic defect, scientific accident, or act of God. But what about when your character happens to be a god? It just seemed too goofy for it all to be pulled off with any conviction. A Thor movie seemed destined for some Xanadu-level of camp. Get a load of the blonde with the big hammer, boys. Not every super hero flick has to be as brooding and dark as The Dark Knight. Marvel’s own Iron Man was a great example of a briskly entertaining movie. Now that I’ve prefaced my experience, let me publicly admit that Thor is indeed a somewhat silly but mostly fun entry in the mighty realm of summer blockbusters.
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is the god of thunder on Asgard, a distant planet populated by the Norse mythical figures (apparently, they visited Earth and the Scandinavian amongst us worshipped these… space aliens?). Thor waits to inherit the throne from his father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), a wise king who has kept a tenuous truce with the fierce Frost Giants, inhabitants of another planet. But Thor is not ready to assume the responsibilities of leadership. He’s quick to action and temper, arrogant, and defies his own father’s orders by trying to start some intergalactic conflict with the Frost Giants on their home turf. Thor is robbed of his powers, his mighty hammer, and banished to Earth to walk amongst the smelly Earthlings. He crashes in the New Mexico desert and is retrieved by a team of scientists (Kat Dennings, Stellan Skarsgard) led by Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). The group wants to learn where exactly this man from the sky came from. So does the government, led by the S.H.I.E.L.D. agency who takes possession of Thor’s hammer. Thor thinks if he can reunite with his beloved hammer, then he can go home. But for a thunder god, he’s got a lot of lessons to learn. While Thor is out of the picture, his younger brother, Loki (Tom Hiddelston), plots to take what he feels he is owed – the kingdom of Asgard.
The biggest surprise for me was that the Asgard sequences are the best part of the movie; thankfully the majority of the running time is spent in this fantastic realm. I credit Kenneth Branagh’s direction, which neither hides the silliness of the material nor fully acknowledges it. By the time Thor hurtles to Earth, I was completely engaged in the operatic tale of fathers and sons, gods, jealousy, hubris, intergalactic conspiracies, you know, the stuff of juicy drama. It jus so happened that these characters wear funnier costumes. The family dynamic between Thor and Loki, the infighting and the scheming, intrigued me. Some critics have thrown around the word “Shakespearean” to describe the movie’s outsized family conflict, but I think that’s just the critical community getting lazy. Would they even approach that term is Branagh was not the director? This opening section of Thor effectively explains the history of Asgard as well as its place with the other eight worlds, the shaky relationship with the Frost Giants, the family responsibilities at play as Odin must decide the future of his ABBA-infused nation, as well as the various mechanics of how this different world operates, like Idris Elba (The Wire, Luther) stationed at the end of the rainbow as a gatekeeper to the other worlds. I liked discovering how all the pieces of this world fit together. If analyzed out of context, any part of the Asgard section just seems stupid. But taken in the film, Thor‘s crazier, more fantastic elements come together and spark genuine interest. I wanted to spend more time in this magical realm. The more ridiculous and fantastical that Thor got the more interesting it became.
But unfortunately Thor was sent tumbling to our ordinary planet. It is the Earth section that seriously deflates the movie’s vibe. It’s a relief that the fish-out-of-water comic relief is kept to a minimum, because the character of Thor isn’t an idiot, just an arrogant brat. But it’s the period on Earth where the God of Thunder learns his Really Important Lessons and finally understands what it means to be a good leader. It’s all very expected and the execution is less than inspired. The trio of scientists that Thor encounters (Portman, Skarsgaard, Dennings) could easily have been consolidated into one character. Their contributions to the story are weak. Skarsgard is mostly there for fatherly advice and the occasional expository ejaculation. As a gawky little sister scientist, I don’t even know why Dennings is in this film other than to make my eyes happy. I anticipated that Portman would assume the “love interest” spot in comic book movies that we now reserve for Oscar-winning actresses, and I assumed that role would be underwritten. But I never expected Portman’s part to be this underwritten. She’s practically nonexistent except for that winning smile of hers. Over the course of… two days, she falls in love with our banished brute. But to be fair, it’s not every day that a guy looking like Hemsworth falls out of the sky. New Mexico isn’t exactly looking like a great singles mingles hotspot. Anyway, their relationship is supposed to be the trigger that makes Thor realize he’s been a selfish and reckless fool. But their scenes lack any tension, any charm, anything of interest. They feel like two actors sitting in chairs telling stories. You don’t feel any romance between them. The drabby Earth sequences only serve as a losing contrast to the crazy Asgard territory. You can’t compete with rainbow bridges (imagine the tolls on those suckers).
Branagh has never directed anything of this magnitude in size before, and it shows at parts. While none of the action sequences are particularly bring, none of them are particularly thrilling. The beginning battle between Thor and his pals on the Frost Giant planet (Jotunheim) is so poorly lit that the darkness forces you to squint to focus on what’s happening. Why spend $150 million on a super hero flick and shoot a dankly lit action scene? What’s the point in that? The choppy editing can also be too hectic to follow with all the quick-cuts that fail to orient the action geography. Really, there are only three serious action sequences in Thor, but then again I remember Iron Man having a light load when it came to on screen action. That film was devoted to character and performance. This film, under Branagh’s watch, is devoted to just making the entire universe of Thor credible. It’s a lot to take in, and Branagh’s biggest accomplishment is producing a sense of grandeur to the film that saves it from falling into the sticky clutches of camp. The world of Asgard feels convincing in production design and infrastructure; the cities look like pipe organs. Branagh’s film expands the Marvel universe significantly, broadening the scope for future installments. Mercifully Thor does not hard sell the upcoming Avengers movie as appallingly as Iron Man 2.
The acting in Thor is as splashy as the Asgard scenery. Hemsworth gave a notable performance as the doomed father of James Kirk in 2009’s Star Trek. He as only in the film for that ten-minute prologue, and yet the actor found a way to do much with what he was given. You got to see his character hurdle through a gauntlet of emotions: fear, duty, relief, desperation, and acceptance. His sacrifice still can make me tear up, and Hemsowrth deserves some of that credit. However, Thor is a different matter entirely. Obviously it’s going to be a more challenging role to play a buff cocky god with a magic hammer. Buff he does quite well. Cocky he does fairly well, but this is not a great starring vehicle for the actor. Hemsworth looks too self-satisfied, like he’s playing his character as an intergalactic hotel heiress. In sharp contrast, Hiddelston (Wallander) commands your attention. Those penetrating eyes, the cold yet calculated demeanor, this is an actor who feels like he walked off a Shakespeare production and just changed his headgear. You want to spend more time with Loki than watch Blondie futz around on Earth. Loki has much more depth to him than Thor; he feels betrayed by his family and an outcast to his society. I’m glad that we’ll be seeing more from this trickster in future Marvel movies (have I said too much?). Hopkins knows how to sell silliness like few other actors. And for those who have been wondering where Renee Russo has been for the last six years, well here she is, as Thor and Loki’s mother, a role that’s best suited to confirm that she is still alive.
I was expecting far worse judging upon the scraps I had seen from the Thor advertising campaign. So I suppose that beating my low-flying expectations might not necessarily be something to champion. Thor is an inherently goofy, yet mildly satisfying and credible action film. It doesn’t have the style or panache of other heroes, but the fact that Branagh could make a two-hour Thor film that didn’t cause me to laugh derisively from start to finish is an accomplishment. Again, that sounds rather dismissive. I’m just very surprised that this movie works. Because if you take it apart, it doesn’t seem like it should. The acting ranges wildly in quality, with Hiddelston outshining everyone else. Thor is a solid if inconsistent start to the summer season of blockbusters. If you must turn your brain off for some movie, you’d do far worse than Thor. It has pretty colors.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Water for Elephants (2011)
Would you believe at no point does the film Water for Elephants come close to explaining its title? I have never read the best-selling 2007 novel, where I’m sure it’s given some glancing explanation; so allow me to thus pontificate. Rosie the elephant is given tubs of whiskey at several points in the movie, which she happily laps up thanks to her prominent proboscis. So does that mean that the “water” for elephants is whiskey? If that’s the case, then this is really a tale of dangerous enabling. But then again, how do you tell a four-ton pachyderm that she’s cut off?
Jacob (Robert Pattinson) is one exam away from becoming a licensed vet from Cornell in 1931 when he’s delivered some tragic news. His Polish immigrant parents died in a car accident. Distraught, Jacob runs away and hops onto a passing train, stumbling upon a crew of circus performers. The train belongs to the Benzini Brothers circus, led by the fiery August (Christoph Waltz). He’s about to be thrown off the train when he panics and screams that he’s a vet. August hires the kid as the team’s newest vet and Jacob finds animals that are in bad shape and pushed to their limits. He recommends a mercy killing for the main attraction, a white horse that the boss’s wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), performs upon. He takes some initiative and puts the horse out, despite August’s wishes. Lucky for them all, they find a new star attraction – Rosie the elephant. Robert doesn’t know the first thing about elephants, or “bulls” as they’re referred to by performers, but he’s tasked with getting the creature ready to perform or else everyone will be destitute. The man has a way with pachyderms, and the Benzini Brothers experience a windfall of new business, looking to take on Ringling Brothers. But the whole time, Jacob is making moon eyes at the boss’s wife, despite everyone telling him at every turn not to.
The biggest issue this movie has is that the trio of main characters all feel like they exist in separate movies. There is zero chemistry between Pattinson and Witherspoon, further dampening their lukewarm romance. Robert is a character defined by being young and having a moral center. He’s not a person so much as an alternative. Marlena is the damsel very distressed, and Witherspoon plays her part all in all slow cock-eyed glances. If I had to pick one of the three, I’d choose to go with August’s version of the story just because he’s a more interesting character than our do-gooding Jacob. August is a huckster who needs to take care of a caravan of drifters and sell them to the public as the stuff of dream and legend. He has some charisma, he’s constantly leveraged against debts, and he is pressured to keep things afloat and to keep people from mutinying. This is beyond the heyday of circuses, so he knows that too many shows with too few people means that his troupe will be picked apart by circus carpetbaggers. You actually start to empathize with him at turns, and then he goes off and beats animals or his wife and that’s that. August is an interesting, vulnerable, flawed character, and he’s given the thankless role of being setup as sneering villain. I would have rather watched August try and keep his deteriorating circus together than watch another tired romantic triangle.
The romance that so much rides on is about as sure-footed as a drunken elephant. Part of this is the failure of Pattinson to deliver a performance that doesn’t feel wooden and artificial, as if he’s posing more than acting. But the romance, which dominates the film’s narrative, is given such scant reasoning that it expects the audience to simply fill in the blanks. He’s a young, good-looking guy who loves animals. She loves animals. Her husband is a jerk, so what’s the problem? Naturally, she’d just run to whatever available catch she could find to escape her hell so anything that delves into more character detail would be a waste of time, right? The movie seems to think so. The love triangle all inhabit very rigidly defined parts. Just because a woman is married to a nasty guy doesn’t mean I instantly want her to get together with just any alternative. Sure this lady deserves to be treated better, but just because a film presents “Option B,” and that option happens to set teenage girls aflutter, doesn’t mean I’m rooting for “Option B” just because it’s not “Option A.” That’s not enough for me to make a satisfying romance, but that’s all Water for Elephants has its aim set on. I need more effort, movie. It’s no surprise that the romantic moments are the weakest parts of the film.
The real star of the movie is Rosie the elephant. She’s a natural performer and she’s got more presence than Witherspoon. I needed more moments with Rosie. After a somewhat boring first act, I started wishing that Rosie would replace someone in this dull love triangle. Imagine how much more interesting this movie would be if it was the heartbreaking story of one man, on woman, and one elephant. Maybe Jacob likes fat-bottomed girls. For animal lovers, there are some wince-inducing sequences of animal cruelty, mostly at the hands of the temperamental August.
The very opening sets the story up for a colossal disaster in the end, and the fact that we are not delivered disaster is a disaster of storytelling (too much?). I’ll try and keep the spoilers in a general sense without going into specifics. The film is bookended by the framing device of Old Jacob (Hal Holbrook) leaving his nursing home to see a circus and tell his life’s story. During his conversation with a circus leader (Paul Schneider), the young man is taken aback when Old Jacob reveals he was apart of the Benzini Brothers troupe when “it” happened. We’re told that it’s like the third biggest circus disaster in history and it has reverberated through decades. I’m set up for something memorable. I’m set up for a tragic ending, likely involving Marlena so that their love will forever have that tinge of unrequited longing. Then when we do eventually head to our big moment in the big top, well it’s far from memorable. Once you assess the ending, you realize that there is very little to make it number three on history’s lists of circus-related mayhem. If this stuff registered as number three, what the hell was number four? A clown catching his hair on fire? And then the movie carries on to some ludicrously happy ending, which seemed tonally inappropriate given the mood of the film and the poorly written romance between Jacob and Marlena. I was prepared for something operatic and terrible, and skimping out on that after an exasperated setup makes me feel hoodwinked, like listening to August bark about the greatest sights and sounds imaginable when they’re all just a trick. Something tells me that screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (Freedom Writers, P.S. I Love You) was not intending to add some meta commentary on how his story is built for dissatisfaction.
Water for Elephants is a watered-down romance that flounders thanks to three different actors acting like they’re in three different movies. Also, it doesn’t help your romance when so little work is put into making young people fall in love. There are fascinating circus-related tidbits that make me wish the movie was more Depression era circus drama than Depression era circus romance. It’s a handsome enough movie from a technical standpoint, and it has some points of interest and some interesting characters, but its shackled to such a weightless and naïve love story. This movie was described by many as an “old fashioned” kind of film, and generally that can be construed as a warning signal. When people dub something “old fashioned” it can tend to mean “boring except to older people.” It just so happens that my screening of the film was an open caption screening, which attracted dozens of our nation’s elderly and hearing impaired. I didn’t so much mind having grown up with subtitled foreign films. But one delightful accident of seeing this open captioned screening was that they captioned everything. Every sound, every offhand piece of dialogue that would ordinarily go unnoticed and undetected. So now I got to see, as subtitle form, such discoveries as Guy in Background saying, “Hey pick that up,” and Other Guy in Background responding, “Okay. Put it where?” It was more exciting than what was going on between Jacob and Marlena. Now let’s get that elephant drunk!
Nate’s Grade: C
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