Eyes Wide Open 2012
The Year’s 25 Greatest Movies (and 5 Worst)
by Chris Barsanti
Copyright 2013 Chris Barsanti
ISBN: 9781482366105
Cover design by Scott Russo
Note: Versions of the following chapters were previously published in PopMatters: “Cloud Atlas,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Holy Motors,” “Take This Waltz,” “On the Road,” “17 Girls,” “The Invisible War,” “Wuthering Heights,” “In ‘Clue,’ Communism is Just a Red Herring,” “The Princess Has a Sword: ‘Snow White and the Huntsman,’” ‘Everybody Was Right About ‘Heaven’s Gate,’” “What ‘True Romance’ Did For Tony Scott and Hollywood,” “This Is All There Is?,” and “The Harsh World—Films Facing Reality in 2012.” Versions of the following chapters previously appeared in Film Journal International: “Detropia,” “The Master,” “Cosmopolis,” “Anna Karenina,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “West of Memphis,” and “Oslo, August, 31st.”
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Contents
Introduction 1 The Top 25 Films of 2012 5 Honorable Mentions 84 The 5 Worst Films of 2012 90 Yet More Lists 108 DVD Reviews 111 Essays 125 Endnote 134
CHRIS BARSANTI
INTRODUCTION
Everybody Has an Audience
FROM THE POINT-OF-VIEW SHOTS in End of Watch to the overt theatricality of Anna Karenina, 2012 was a year for self-conscious spectacle at the movies. In The Hunger Games, the life-and-death struggle of its teen protagonists is all for the benefit of home television audiences. In Leos Carax’s eye-popping Holy Motors, the whole point of life appears to be watching. Or acting. Or both.
The irony here is that this was happening even as film as an art form slid even further off the cultural radar. What films did everybody want to see this year? Until the end-of-year award marathon, there was one: The Avengers. Whatever the film’s merits, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would spark long conversations. The only thing The Avengers inspired—outside of the circles of fanboys debating the merits of the Mark Ruffalo Hulk against earlier iterations—was talk about its Titanic-level box office (something north of a billion dollars, in case anybody’s paying attention). Sam Mendes’ Bond film Skyfall was a broad attention-getter, and while it definitely improved on the forgettable Pierce Brosnan entries and the nearly incomprehensible Quantum of Solace, it was still something of a disappointment. It is possible that Casino Royale just raised the bar too high.
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Was anybody even paying attention to the movies outside of cinephile circles? This is hard to determine in the fractured media landscape. Good films came and went, but the buzz (if any) focused almost entirely on the opening weekend. There are many factors here, from our YouTube society’s ever-decreasing attention span to the ever-increasing range of visual entertainment available and the recent increase in quality TV shows. Yes, TV as a medium has come a long way from the days when Hill Street Blues was a pinnacle of dramatic smarts. But a good part of what makes modern longform television dramas so compelling is less their intelligence than the room they have to spin a tale. Stories are allowed to unfold in hour-long clips at a pace that would leave movie theater audiences heading for the door. Shows from Boardwalk Empire to The Walking Dead are merely bringing back the old art of the serial, where instead of resetting to zero at the end of each episode, they hook audiences in with a cliffhanger designed to keep them hungering for the next big reveal. Viewers can return each week for more of the same familiar characters and storylines but are not likely to want to sit in a theater for ten hours on end (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings marathons aside). Movies are different: Excepting those sequels that pile up in the summer, each one is a risk, an all-new story. You plunk your money down and head into the theater not truly knowing what to expect. And unlike with TV, you are there for the duration. There is no turning the channel and, for most people at least, no
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leaving the room. It’s a gamble, and when you lose, it can be painful. Just ask most anybody who paid to see The Hobbit. But when you hit on a winner, the rewards can be transportive in a way that few TV shows can ever manage. Perhaps it’s the immersive aspect of it, the darkened chamber, the overwhelming screen and sound. Stumbling out of the theater after seeing a great film, one that left you so stunned you even sat through the credits, is an experience like little else. It’s a complete experience. 2012 didn’t offer too many complete experiences, particularly when compared to 2011. There were no epics for the ages along the lines of The Tree of Life, little in the way of cool-wired gonzo freakouts like Take Shelter, and few impossibly infuriating yet grand and unforgettable messes like Margaret. One positive development was the lack of a film from Lars von Trier. And Tom Cruise proved in Rock of Ages that, if nothing else, he would be awesome to do karaoke with. But there were at least a few arguable masterpieces, not to mention a clutch of vital music documentaries, and even a couple knockout adaptations of classic novels (Kerouac, Bronte) which didn’t fake relevance by using modernized settings or attitudes. There was also welcome evidence of a growing class of female directors (Kathryn Bigelow, Sarah Polley, Amy Berg, et al) with distinctive voices and new stories to tell—or old stories to tell in fresh ways. As usual, Hollywood managed to pull a few rabbits out of its hat at the end of the year. On the Road and Zero
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Dark Thirty were both stunners in completely different ways. Silver Linings Playbook showed that it’s still possible to create a halfway decent audience-pleasing romantic comedy (no matter that it was curiously marketed as some kind of edgy indie). Les Miserables did its level best to keep the film musical alive, despite all of Russell Crowe’s worst efforts. The mostly stultifying Lincoln was nearly saved by an awe-inspiring performance from Daniel Day-Lewis—so impressive, in fact, that audiences and critics almost didn’t remark on it; the obviousness of his mastery was so complete, there was almost nothing left to say. If there is a narrative to the films of 2012, it might be something like this: We are tired, frantic, frightened, under close watch, and running out of options (see my concluding essay “The Harsh World” for more on that last, very cheery topic). The future was a critical factor in films from Cosmopolis to Cloud Atlas and Looper, and it was never something to look forward to. The churning froth of disruptive violence that eddied through films from The Dark Knight Rises to End of Watch created a razor’s edge of jangling tension that is never completely resolved. The recurrent motifs of surveillance and artifice in this year’s films raised questions about who’s watching who, who knows they’re being watched, and are they playing a role? Fortunately, there were still enough of us out there in the dark enjoying watching everybody up on the screen, and still more than enough reasons to keep doing it.
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THE TOP 25 FILMS OF 2012
1 — Detropia
Directors: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s lavishly photographed, impassioned elegy for the decaying American city uses Detroit as its case study for the nation’s post-industrial, permanent recession future.
“WE ARE HERE AT A CRITICAL TIME!” shouts a tent-revival preacher somewhere in the gloom of a rapidly downsizing Detroit. His is one of the many frightened, brave, saddened, still-fighting voices that Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady include as a chorus of the forgotten in their tragedy-tinted but clear-eyed look at what happens when a city’s reason for being up and leaves.
The filmmakers capture a city going in reverse. In 1930, Detroit was the fastest-growing city in the world, and it’s shrunk by over 25 percent in the last decade alone. Unable to provide services to its many nearly empty blocks (arson and decay having laid waste to many weed-pricked neighborhoods), the city is demolishing some 10,000 homes. The mayor, trying to convince residents to relocate to denser areas, says with exasperation, “The city is broke. I don’t know how many
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times I have to say it.” Bus service is being slashed and streetlights turned off. There is talk of the city “going back to the prairie.” Sprawling manufacturing complexes the size of small towns lie quiet, the jobs long gone to Mexico or China. Meanwhile, as residents agonize about their lives dwindling away, performance artists creep into downtown to take advantage of cheap rents, and tourists clamber into the train station’s cavernous ruin to luxuriate in the photogenic decay. As in 2010’s amazing 12th and Delaware, Ewing and Grady hang back and let their subjects open up. A video blogger and coffee-shop worker agitates about closing schools, which she calls “shutting down futures.” The head of a union fights to keep things together as management demands impossible wage cuts; the crushed looks on his workers’ faces say everything about the devaluing of labor in the modern world. Most poignantly, the owner of a bar who once served auto workers wonders aloud what has come of it all, and whether there is any future but revolution. His frustration—vividly illustrated when he goes to the auto show, proud of the new American-built electric Chevy Volt, only to find the sales reps clueless and contemptuous of their cheaper Chinese competition—is shared by many residents. They look at their blasted surroundings and can’t understand how the currents of globalization swept their city away with such ease. Ewing and Grady haven’t created a polemic, though. Nor have they indulged in the ruin-porn aesthetic that wants to ogle the city’s decay while ignoring the people
6 CHRIS BARSANTI still trying to make a go of it. With its stream-of- consciousness rhythms and impressionistic camerawork, Detropia is a tone poem soaked in the blues. Figures drift through the dimmed city like specters in a graveyard, while the oversaturated reds and piercing music of a neighborhood bar act as a refuge against the boarded-up night outside. While anger flares up at times, most of the filmmakers’ subjects appear philosophical about what’s happening. They believe what they’ve lived through is just the tip of the iceberg, a harbinger for America. “What happened in Detroit,” one man ruminates, “it’s coming to you.”
2 — Zero Dark Thirty
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, James Gandolfini, Jennifer Ehle, Edgar Ramirez, Chris Pratt, Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, John Barrowman, Scott Adkins
With her alternately brutal and mathematically precise epic tale of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Kathryn Bigelow not only proves she’s one of the greatest directors working today but also suggests she might have created a new genre: the war procedural.
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THE SINGLE MOST HONEST MOMENT about the war on terror that’s yet been shown in a fictional film comes early in Kathryn Bigelow’s thoughtful, taut war story. American intelligence analysts are meeting in a conference room, circa 2008. A TV plays an interview with Barack Obama, in which he states loud and clear, “America does not torture.” Everybody watches for a second, then gets back to work. They know what they were told to do when interrogating suspects about Osama bin Laden, and they know that scapegoats will be served up in Washington soon enough. As lead interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke) tells his tightly-wound protégée Maya (Jessica Chastain), “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.” Zero Dark Thirty (from military slang for a very late hour) is an epic take on the Central Intelligence Agency’s hunt for the 9/11 mastermind. Working on a dusty Afghanistan forward operating base, Maya takes part in Dan’s fruitless and horrific torture of detainee Ammar (Reda Kateb). For all the controversy over these scenes, they are necessary to show as something that was central to the early part of the hunt, as though the team’s final breakthrough clearly comes not from waterboarding but skilled questioning. Maya later shifts to analyzing intelligence from the American embassy in Islamabad, but it’s nothing like a desk job, with Maya having her car riddled with AK-47 fire and losing several colleagues to a suicide bomber. As the casualties mount and the years tick by, the shell-
8 CHRIS BARSANTI shocked Maya’s worldview narrows down to a millimeter-wide gun slit that recognizes only her quarry. The film recounts, with almost too much care, the agonizingly particular step-by-step analysis of baffling and contradictory information. It just as convincingly relays the sickening sense of urgency, a fear that after all the bombings and rhetoric and fear and war, their target may slip away. “We are failing ... Bring me people to kill,” seethes Maya’s CIA superior George (Mark Strong). Later, after a few insights punch a hole in the wall of protection around bin Laden’s whereabouts, Maya is there as the SEAL team is debriefed. Playing the role of acerbic obsessive to a tee (Chastain has rarely been this on-point), Maya refuses to be awed by them, telling one that she didn’t want anything to do with “your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit.” The film itself has a disinclination to buy into the worshipful mania surrounding all things special forces. That being said, the assault on the Abbottabad compound that caps the film is a riveting and sharply framed sequence of near- perfection. Somehow, Bigelow threads the needle between illustrating the awe-inspiring machinelike coordination of the team without celebrating it. In other words, nobody will leave the theater shouting, “U! S! A!” Using Mark Boal’s closely researched screenplay to even greater effect than their last collaboration in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow creates a hybrid spy procedural and behind-enemy-lines war film. In one deft move, she
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inaugurates a new genre, delivers a comprehensive accounting of the bin Laden hunt that will be hard to top, and takes her place in the pantheon of great contemporary filmmakers. Before this film, Bigelow’s closest comparisons may have been high-toned pulp auteurs like James Cameron and Sam Raimi. Zero Dark Thirty takes her to a different level. Shot by Greig Fraser like a series of war-journalist snapshots gleaming with understated malice, the film is precise almost to a fault, with little of the pulse- pounding bravura of The Hurt Locker. This is not a bad thing, as much as it might frustrate some audiences. Bigelow is taking a cold look at a hot subject, and because of that her film will stand the test of time.
3 — The Master
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers, Rami Malek, Jesse Plemons, Kevin J. O’Connor, Christopher Evan Welch
This rich, evocative drama about a charismatic L. Ron Hubbard-esque writer and his quasi-barbaric sidekick lacks some of the thunderous panache of Paul Thomas Anderson’s earlier work, but it is shot like a dream and has acting pyrotechnics to spare.
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THE MASTER MAKES SOMETHING UTTERLY CLEAR: Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the era’s few American writer-directors afflicted with greatness. It is hard to think of another homegrown filmmaker who brings such psychologically astute scripting, nakedly revelatory performances, and a classically trained eye for framing so consistently to each of his films. After a few punchy neo-pulp mini-epics and 2007’s arrestingly experimental There Will Be Blood (a once-in-a-career kind of masterpiece), expectations for a new Anderson film can be excused for being unrealistically high. To that point, The Master does not match the level of Blood, but it is Anderson’s most approachable film in years, with his most vividly realized characters to date. There wasn’t anything else like it on screens this year. Billed as a story about an L. Ron Hubbard-like character amassing followers in cult-of-personality- friendly postwar California, Anderson’s film is really about his sidekick. We first see Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, barely keeping a lid on his character’s raging id) as a Navy seaman going mad on a Pacific island during the war. With chin cocked forward, lip curled and arms akimbo, he stalks around in a kind of fog, quelling his inner demons with lusty fantasies and hefty gulps of his deadly-to-mortals moonshine. After being diagnosed with a “nervous condition” (1940s-speak for PTSD), he heads stateside and becomes a boozing and brawling disaster as a civilian. At the bottom of a spiral in 1950, Freddie drunkenly crashes a wedding on a yacht. Waking up the next day,
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he meets the bride’s father, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). A puffed-up swell, Lancaster introduces himself in the classically grandiloquent and folksy manner of the born cult leader, or politician: “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all, I am a man. Just like you.” Ever the drifter, Freddie sees Lancaster and his subservient acolytes, including his submissive-on-the- outside wife Peggy (Amy Adams, more prickly than her sunny norm), as easy marks. But Freddie’s worldview is shaken when he submits to Lancaster’s blend of hypnosis, word games, and regression therapies. The more Freddie starts facing his past traumas (dark family history, a romance that ended badly), the more he bonds with Lancaster, who treats him alternately as an adoptive son, protégé, unevolved “animal” inferior, and supplier of potent homemade liquor. Their connection deepens schizophrenically: The more Freddie starts to suspect Lancaster might be a fraud, the more he savagely defends the boss. Belief doesn’t matter; belonging does. Anderson keeps the details of Lancaster’s theology fuzzy, though his talk of “processing” and past lives clearly echoes Scientology’s cocktail of fake science- fiction histories, “auditing,” and individuality-crushing tests of loyalty. He leaves the stage to Phoenix and Hoffman, who wield their characters’ egos and desires like master fencers. The film hinges on a couple scenes of bruising conversational combat that leave one agape at these actors’ command. Although set mostly in the
12 CHRIS BARSANTI margins, Adams delivers in a few key scenes that hint of darker things behind Peggy and Lancaster’s sunny marriage. Although the emotional conflict is more sharply rendered here than in Anderson’s previous films, it’s a quiet work for him, not striving for the aberrant, surrealist highs of Blood or Magnolia. The look and sound is impressive: Mihai Malaimare, Jr.’s 70mm cinematography has a luminous Terrence Malick sheen, while Jonny Greenwood’s score rackets and roils with atonal intensity. As usual, Anderson’s script leaves a few too many gaps in the story by the final third, but the mysterious dysfunction tying these two men together more than compensates. Hopefully it won’t take Anderson another five years to finish his next film. But if that is what he needs to produce something like The Master, a 2017 premiere will be just fine.
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4 — On the Road
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Alice Braga, Marie-Ginette Guay, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi
Walter Salles’ hypnotic riff on Kerouac’s American hymn to raw freedoms doesn’t just capture the texture of bohemian lives, but remembers that deep down, past all the beatnik coloration, this is a love story between two men.
IN ADAPTING JACK KEROUAC’S famously skittish novel On the Road, Walter Salles has conjured a movie that’s raging and serene, always looking over the horizon while grooving on the beauty of the here and now. This is no small feat. Salles does seem perfect for the job, having made The Motorcycle Diaries, the only other great road film of recent memory. There are infinite ways for a Kerouac film to go bust (see The Subterraneans, if you dare), and this one avoids nearly all of them. Maybe Salles leaves too much of the book’s kinetic language on the floor; this is a story about words almost as much as it is about movement, the road. But as these burning, dreaming, and frustrated wanderers blast across postwar America in search of what they don’t know, the smoky poetry of its wide vistas and clangorous urban buzz provides a true kick.
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Kerouac’s stand-in is Sal Paradise (Sam Riley, finding a nice variation on the doomed artist he inhabited as Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in 2007’s Control), a would-be author living in his mother’s apartment in Queens at the end of the 1940s. He pals around with his effusive and panic-stricken poet friend Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge), a not-at-all veiled portrait of Allen Ginsberg. Together they’re entranced by the volcanic presence of Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), a bottle rocket of a guy who blows in from Denver and is described by Sal’s raspy and mannered narration (which sounds affectedly be- bop-ish, but is actually a decent take on Kerouac’s public speaking voice) as having spent “a third of his time in the pool hall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library.” Dean—Kerouac’s handle for his real-life obsession, Neal Cassady—is already looking to get out of New York and back to San Francisco with one girl in tow, Marylou (Kristen Stewart, only slightly out of her comfort zone), and another girl to marry when he gets there, Camille (Kirsten Dunst). Sal hitchhikes West with his notebook, starting the film’s racketing volleys of cross-country travel and bleary-eyed Benzedrine nights. The sheltered and shy Sal (a Canadian who speaks a reedy French with his dour and disapproving mother, lurking powerfully in his subconscious) is wholly ready to latch on to a scrapper like Dean. Sal doesn’t care that Dean is all about the hustle (“He was conning me and I knew it, and he knew that I knew it”), he just wants to tag along. Dean drives like a bat out of hell, and in
15 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 lengthy road scenes, Salles does some of his best work, creating little visual poems out of the patter of rain on the windshield and the chatter inside. Still, Dean is an odd creature. Kerouac’s Dean was a motor-mouthed live wire who never used one word when 15 would do. Hedlund plays him in a lower key, with a deeper voice and more deliberative style, almost lethargic. But he remains magnetic, tearing up the highway, chain-smoking, and crashing naked through a variety of cold-water flats (sleeping with every woman they come across, even cajoling a semi-protesting Carlo into a three-way and doing his best to talk Sal into same). He’s the beautiful drifter whom Sal can’t quite admit he loves, though they grip and hug and peer deeply into each other’s eyes more than once. (Not for nothing do we see Dean reading Swann’s Way.) That Dean will eventually let everybody is down preordained. Besides Dean, only Old Bull Lee (Viggo Mortensen, nicely approximating William S. Burroughs’ razorblade cadences and air of aristocratic desolation) seems able to stand apart from the whirling storm. In a brief interlude during yet another long drive, Sal, Dean, and the gang pop into Bull’s secluded house in Louisiana, where their pistol-packing surrogate father dozes in a chair, syringe tracks red on one arm, unwashed young son dozing in the other. Unlike Carlo, Sal, and Dean, Bull is the writer who doesn’t talk about writing. While On the Road is a novel about trying to write a novel (or more accurately, trying to find a subject
16 CHRIS BARSANTI worthy of a novel), it’s also about how life gets in the way. The life that Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera capture here is one of random happenstance, young men throwing themselves loose into great American spaces. Sal wanders with purpose, hungry for experience to fuel his novel-to-be. He picks cotton with migrant workers, desperately hitches rides in a snowstorm, and lives hand-to-mouth and apartment to apartment in that loose and drifting way he never could in today’s more rigid America. He walks past a billboard for a housing development, promising a bland and regularized suburban future. He and Dean lose themselves in roaring reveries at jazz shows (this being the rare film that treats jazz like rock and roll, vivid and raw), banging open Benzedrine capsules and toasting the night. Though Salles’ film ignores too much of Kerouac’s verbosity and Dean’s manic speed, it also recognizes the novel’s energy and tragedy. Eventually the car will run out of gas, and everyone will turn in for the night, glowing with memory but a little sad and very alone.
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5 — End of Watch
Director: David Ayer
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Anna Kendrick, America Ferrera, Frank Grillo, Cody Horn, David Harbour
The crackling dialogue and first-person immediacy transform this buddy film about LAPD cops who get on the wrong side of the cartel into a memorable story about two friends who just want to do the right thing for a perpetually thankless city.
THE ELEVATOR-PITCH TAKE on End of Watch would go like this: Two hot-shot LAPD cops find themselves on the run when they make enemies with a Mexican drug cartel. Much gunplay and screeching of city-issued tires ensues. That all happens but it doesn’t scratch the surface of what makes David Ayer’s film tick and boom with such immediacy. This is a beat-cop story, the sort of thing that Hollywood has mostly moved away from. Modern films prefer to deal with lone-wolf detectives. TV crime shows are more interested in the minutiae of fantasy forensics and cozy camaraderie (your CSIs and NCISs), where every bit of data can be instantly culled from NSA-style databases and none of the officers on view have to worry about things as prosaic as overtime requests. Ayer, who wrote Training Day, has made a career out of burrowing inside the department’s opaque rituals,
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masculinity codes, and frequently perverse methods of dispensing justice. Unlike his Denzel Washington blockbuster and films like Dark Blue, though, the angle here isn’t corruption: it’s heroism. To give the film a more personal touch, Ayers crafts End of Watch almost like a found-footage horror film: most of the shots come either from the camcorder that wannabe filmmaker Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is running at all times, surveillance footage, or police cruiser dashboard cameras. It’s an initially unnerving approach that doesn’t always work. Some shots are done in a hand-held style though there is clearly not supposed to be anybody around to run the camera, but the immediacy works in the film’s favor. End of Watch opens on a chase, with Taylor and his partner Mike Zavala (Michael Pena) gunning their black- and-white down alleyways in hot pursuit of a car. As they jolt and roar along, Taylor’s voiceover lays out Ayer’s theme of the thin blue line:
I am the police and I’m here to arrest you. You’ve broken the law. I did not write the law. I may disagree with the law but I will enforce it. No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy, nothing you do will stop me from placing you in a steel cage with gray bars.
In another film, this would come off as some metal- hearted, badass Robocop routine, in which the cops are
19 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 little more than gunslingers with badges. But Ayers uses Taylor’s monologue as a statement of intent and plea for humanity and understanding. One could imagine it being recited by newly minted police recruits at the academy or soliloquized by rookie thespians. (“Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed. I think. I love. And yes, I can be killed.”) For all its nods to the quotidian realities of the job, the story packs more wildly dangerous criminals and shootouts into a matter of weeks than average cops probably see over their whole career. After a traffic stop yields a gold-plated AK-47 and piles of cash, Taylor and Zavala make the mistake of following their leads in a way that the department’s condescending detectives and some shadowy, paramilitary DEA agents don’t like. More importantly, they attract the attention of some motor-mouthed, trigger-happy gangbangers working on assignment for a Mexican cartel trying to get a foothold in Los Angeles. Gruesome safe-house discoveries and war-zone gun fights follow. As high-adrenaline as the plot is, though, End of Watch is a buddy cop flick that seems truly more engaged in the buddy end of things. Ayer takes ample time out from car chases and shootouts to just hang out with Taylor and Zavala as they do their rounds, gabbing and arguing in a wildly un-PC brother-like way. The emotional peak of the film has nothing to do with their work as officers, but comes instead at Taylor’s wedding to a woman (Anna Kendrick) of whom the long-settled- down Zavala highly approves. It’s a brief and beautiful
20 CHRIS BARSANTI interlude of dancing, drinking, and bonding, with Taylor and Zavala drunkenly pledging their love to each other as brothers in blue. This all should have been nearly unwatchable in its champagne-toast sentimentality, but by this point, Gyllenhaal and Pena (a solid character actor getting his overdue shot at a lead role) have spent enough time bantering and bickering and getting into the minutiae of each other’s lives that the moment feels true. You wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them got on the piano and started belting out a couple songs; and you wouldn’t mind, either. Plenty of films have used police as their heroes. Vanishingly few have tried to treat them like human beings in the way that End of Watch does, and with such affecting poignancy.
6 — Marley
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Gorgeously filmed and incomparably fascinating, this documentary on the man who introduced reggae to the world is a wondrously satisfying piece of work.
ONCE A GREAT MUSICIAN’S WORK has become like wallpaper, is it even possible still consider them a vital cultural force? The sheer omnipresence of the Rolling Stones was one of the factors that made Martin
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Scorsese’s concert film just so ... redundant. Consider Bob Marley. His likeness, name, and songs have been turned into not just a mini-industry, but an easy shorthand for multicultural open-mindedness. People who wouldn’t know ska from roots know “Could You Be Loved?” or “No Woman No Cry,” if not from the sound system at their corner cafe than from their college days, when three dorm rooms within earshot played those songs on a near-constant loop. It’s this kind of ubiquity that can make art seem beside the point, taken for granted. For that reason at least, Kevin Macdonald’s incredible documentary about the life and times of Marley is cause for celebration. The film wants to tell the story of the whole man, not just the dreadlocked image staring from thousands of posters and T-shirts. Somehow, it manages to do just that, with the full cooperation of the Marley family, who one might have thought would have expected to insist on a less warts- and-all approach. Marley first emphasizes not the man himself, but his Jamaican homeland. Macdonald sends his camera flying over the island’s lush, dark-green forests before getting into the rough-and-tumble mountain village of Nine Miles. Marley grew up in that desperately poor, scratched-out rattle of tin-roofed shacks that looks like it would collapse downhill in the first serious rain. The son of a black woman and a white, absent father, Marley seems to have had a lifelong need for identity and inclusion, which have inspired both his interest in the
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Rastafarian religion (which gets a dutiful, if tangled definition here) and in making powerful, soul-stirring music that emphasized a pan-Third World revolutionary solidarity. Marley moved as a teen to Kingston in the late 1950s. He put out his first hit single, “Judge Not,” in 1962. Not long after, he formed a band with two men, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, who became legends in their own right. Together with legendary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, they created a unique style of infectious reggae that no other artist in the genre has ever repeated. By the 1970s, the Wailers were touring internationally and Bob was powerful enough back in Jamaica that he served as crucial intermediary during a political fracas that almost devolved into revolution. After surviving an assassin’s bullet in 1976, he died from cancer in 1980 at the age of 36. An adept filmmaker who has spent too much time recently on indifferent fictional films like The Last King of Scotland, Macdonald demonstrates here his knack for crafting intensely personal narratives out of historical moments (which he also showed in the masterful 1999 documentary on the Munich Olympics, One Day in September). He sifts together enough electrifying concert footage (some never before seen) to show that Marley, a hypnotic stage presence, was a once-in-a-lifetime performer. The heartfelt lyrics combine Biblical fury and rebel fervor with prophetic love and empathy and transcend their simplistic nature to become world- spanning anthems of liberation. The film’s interviews
23 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 with Marley family members and friends attest to his curious and hard-to-define genius. Bunny Wailer and Marley’s effusive widow Rita make for particularly compelling voices. The rare scraps of interviews with Marley himself round out the portrait of a complicated and contradictory figure whose openness made him a towering figure in strife-torn post-colonial Jamaica. There’s little here that won’t engage and fascinate even those who couldn’t care less about reggae specifically or the history of music in general. For those that do, it’s a rare gift.
7 — Cosmopolis
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruchel, Kevin Durand, K’Naan, Emily Hampshire, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton
David Cronenberg’s deadpan take on the Don DeLillo novel about a rapacious Master of the Universe gliding in his soundproof limo through the rioting streets of New York is a serenely crazed view of the present from the master of queasy modernity.
AFTER GENRE WORK like the gangster film (Eastern Promises) and the period piece (A Dangerous Method) that threatened to turn him into a respectable filmmaker,
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David Cronenberg thankfully returns to the perverse, literary artistry of more contentious works like Crash with this abstract, pitch-black comedy. For all its artificial mannerisms, though, Cosmopolis isn’t one of the director’s more off-putting films; this is a sleek, seductive construction. This concoction of high-end theorizing on the state of the world, finance and the social sphere, deadpan satire, and the expected Cronenbergian jabs of rough sex and ultra-violence, is highly effective for audiences willing to go along (ahem) for the ride. Adapted by Cronenberg from Don DeLillo’s prescient 2003 novel, Cosmopolis is set in a fantastical New York that feels like the setting of a William Gibson novel—this might be the future, but it’s barely five minutes away. Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a short-fuse 28-year-old wizard of speculative, quantitative finance who has made his billions and now can’t wait to set his entire universe on fire. He drifts through the city in a white limo with a soundproofed command center that keeps him wired to his empire while sitting in traffic on the way to get a haircut. A Patrick Bateman type whose bubble of money saves him from having to hide his incipient psychosis, Packer refers to himself using the royal “we” (“We don’t care, we need a haircut”) and opines on “the interaction of capital and society” as though human affairs were some foreign concept. He dismisses the concerns of his menacing bodyguard/driver (Kevin Durand) about threats on his life with the equanimity of somebody
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readying himself for self-immolation. Meanwhile, anti- capitalist protestors riot and spray-paint the limo, hurling dead rats and proclaiming, “There is a specter haunting the world. The specter of capitalism.” As the limo drifts along in cloistered quiet, Packer entertains a series of visitors for theoretical jousting. These dense downloads of information would bring most films to a halt. But the plot is little more than stasis with a rumbling undercurrent of impending chaos, so there is little to slow down. Also, the performers—from woozy theorist Samantha Morton to feline prostitute Juliette Binoche (who goes from servicing Packer sexually to offering him a tip on a Rothko painting newly up for sale)—are mostly spectacular. Occasionally, Packer hops out to exchange words with a cool blonde (Sarah Gadon) who turns out to be his new wife and isn’t happy that he “reeks of sexual discharge.” Pattinson plays Packer as a wearied savage, a rapacious predator who both wants everything and can’t wait to tear it down. He’s the embodiment of a kind of modern capitalism, surfing waves of invisible money in his cocoon of invulnerability. Terrified of mortality like so many of the ultra-rich, he brings a doctor to his limo for a daily checkup (which sets up one of the film’s better and more grotesque jokes). The conceit is a starched and literary one, with stitched-together soliloquies, Packer’s Godot-like journey to the haircut that’s of course not just a haircut, and also his pride over having “Prousted” his limo. (He had it lined with cork, just under the armor, for
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soundproofing; Marcel Proust apparently did the same to quiet his writing study, though the film leaves that detail unexplained.) The claustrophobia of it all actually works to Cronenberg’s advantage, highlighting the knife-like performances and emphasizing the dry comedy. Cosmpolis loses energy later when the action departs more from the tightened black box of the limo. But Cronenberg maintains his tone of ironic prophecy, showing a world spinning towards chaos through a furiously accelerating present.
8 — Polisse
Director: Maiwenn
Cast: Karin Viard, Joeystarr, Marina Fois, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Maiwenn, Karole Rocher, Emmanuelle Bercot, Frederic Pierrot, Arnaud Henriet, Naidra Ayadi, Jeremie Elkhaim, Ricardo Scamarcio, Sandrine Kiberlain
A varied, and highly capable cast help juice this harrowing, electrifying drama about a unit of raw-nerved Parisian police officers whose sole duty is to protect children in danger.
THE BIG, TOUGH POLICE OFFICER whose scarred, antagonistic exterior shields a soul of pure, burnished righteousness is almost as lazy a cliche as the street walker with the heart of gold. Nevertheless, the
27 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 knockabout cops who tear through this film like a squadron of grumpy angels convincingly show there might be some truth to the old stereotype. Polisse is a sprawling drama whose dashed-out plotlets are based on the files of the Parisian Child Protection Unit. Its story bounds from one case to another, with moments of high-impact drama leavened by spates of bureaucratic bickering and the in-fighting that comes with working too long together. The characters are a motley bunch, with few of the soft- hearted types that one would expect to be drawn to that kind of work. Each time the phone rings, a child is in danger, and they burn rubber through the crowded streets of Paris. Once at the scene, it inevitably becomes clear why thick skins are required—for the characters and viewers. The cases are varied, each capable of producing parental nightmares. There is sex trafficking, child kidnapping, a junkie mother who absent-mindedly drops her baby, and a pedophile who uses his interrogation as an opportunity to brag. With most calls, no matter how horrific at first glance, the cops in the CPU still rigorously interview each person involved, on the lookout for false accusations. With that kind of human misery taking up their day shifts, the CPU works hard to forget at night, dancing and drinking and arguing and flirting and generally taking it all too far. Director/co-writer Maiwenn (an actress who made a coquettish splash in mid-1990s smash-em-up Luc Besson extravaganzas like The Fifth
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Element) brings rough-cut flair to these riotous ensemble scenes, highlighting the raw humor almost as much as the misanthropy that often underlies it. For all the seeming improvisation going on, the acting is top-notch across the board. Marina Fois stands out as the volatile and bleakly depressed Iris, who takes out her frustrations on the child abusers she comes across. Also notable is French rapper Joeystarr as Fred, a gruff bolt of fury who can nevertheless be the life of any party. Some have compared Polisse to The Wire, probably because of their large casts, socioeconomic detail, and distaste for cop-flick conventions. But Maiwenn is not one for David Simon’s reportorial desire to canvas the whole of the story in short, precise strokes that later snap together. Her film is messier, with narrative threads left loose and an occasional need for tighter editing. This is particularly apparent in the storyline about a wide-eyed photographer (played by the director) who embeds herself with the CPU, inevitably shacking up with one of them. This was probably intended as a framing device to give structure to the film, but the raw, unique, chaotic, and unfiltered power of what’s on screen makes such an addition unnecessary.
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9 — Cloud Atlas
Directors: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, James D’Arcy, Xun Zhou, Keith David, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant
David Mitchell’s beloved novel is turned into an epoch-spanning cinematic extravaganza that explodes in crescendo after crescendo; this film leaves no gambit untried.
EAGER TO ENTERTAIN and suffused with nervous energy, Cloud Atlas spans continents and half a millennium of human history. Generally faithful to David Mitchell’s novel, Cloud Atlas is the most daring, thrilling, satisfying, swiftly churning engine of big-screen adventure to come along in some time. It even works in a halfway decent Soylent Green joke, and oh yes, Hugh Grant plays a bloodthirsty cannibal. Buried beneath the hyperactive interweaving of six storylines, the film’s organizing principle seems to be a squishy-hippie-ish belief in the interconnectedness of all things and the ironclad bindings of karma. This possibility emerges at the start, via a mumbled introduction by a tribal shaman played by Tom Hanks: “All voices are tied up into one.” While offering caustic digs at Carlos Castaneda and past-life New Ageiness, Cloud Atlas nevertheless carries a scent of patchouli.
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This interconnectedness, however illusory, helps create structure among the many plots and extra-textual references assembled by filmmakers Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, which can feel like a getaway car dodging oncoming traffic. Starting on a Pacific island plantation in 1849, the film follows a wealthy businessman’s son (Jim Sturgess), who has an attack of conscience about the slave trade. It slips into romantic melodrama in 1936, where a young con artist (Ben Whishaw) works as assistant to a faded composer (Jim Broadbent) and becomes trapped in a web of his own conniving. In 1973, an investigative reporter (Halle Berry) finds herself in deadly trouble when she pursues a story on a Bay Area nuclear power plant. In 2012, a down-at-mouth publisher (Broadbent again) gets a taste of success and suffers for it. The future settings include some Blade Runner-like thrills in 2144, when a “fabricant” (Doona Bae) escapes her slave-like “employment” and becomes an unwitting tool of revolt, and a post-apocalyptic 24th-century tale about an indigenous tribesman (Hanks, whose sing-song pidgin sounds like a nod to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker) struggling to survive. Mostly, the stories are linked by clues and hints. A tattoo or birthmark on one character’s shoulder looks exactly like one from another’s back. Everyone keeps hearing the same piece of chamber music (composed by Tykwer) echoing over the years. Two stories seem especially connected, thrumming with a sense of
31 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 romantic longing and disenchantment and linked by a series of letters written in 1936 and discovered in 1973. Hugo Weaving keeps showing up to ruin everybody’s fun, whether as a slave master, corporate assassin, or trickster, wreaking as much mental havoc as Gollum’s badly behaved alter-ego. The other actors also play different characters, frequently switching genders and races, moving from starring roles to blink-and-you- miss-them cameos and back again. Though this casting trick can be distracting (especially with our attention drawn to heavy and obvious prosthetics), it introduces vexing karmic possibilities, as we see assorted individuals change or stay the same across time. Some shift from villainous to heroic, others keep their original orientation (Susan Sarandon is a fount of wisdom in any age). As these stories come together and part, Cloud Atlas returns to themes of revolution and oppression, themes hinted at in Tykwer’s other films (Run Lola Run and The International) and expressed explicitly—sometimes bluntly—in the Wachowskis’ work, particularly the Matrix movies and V for Vendetta. (Even Bound might be read as a demand for acceptance by alienated individuals.) Cloud Atlas makes its politics plain, bounding from issues as big as abolition and racism to comparatively smaller (but still daunting) concerns, like the senior citizen forced against his will into a nursing home. The common factor in all these threads is a fight for freedom, a battle both abstract and utterly concrete. This
32 CHRIS BARSANTI grand theme, which pits impersonal structures of control against the frailties of individual dignity, grants the filmmakers plenty of excuses to showcase big, fast action scenes, chases, and battles. Cloud Atlas’ vividly kinetic sensibility emerges through the movie’s shuffling of the storylines instead of playing them out in full one after the other, as Mitchell does in the novel. In this way, the Wachowskis and Tykwer are remarkably able to maintain tension over their film’s roughly three-hour running time. As a result, Cloud Atlas explodes in crescendo after crescendo. This brings the film close to dramatic exhaustion at several points. It also allows for a slightly overdone coda, one that doesn’t exist in the book but does provide conclusive punctuation for a film largely composed of high-flying dependent clauses. The Wachowskis and Tykwer have to end this thing somewhere. But we’re left with the feeling that after the credits roll, the film is still spinning off simultaneously into the future and the past in some alternate universe, continually detonating with terror and glee.
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10 — Looper
Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels, Pierce Gagno, Qing Xu
Rian Johnson’s twisty time-travel thriller, in which gangsters in the far future send victims back to the near future for disposal, is droll science fiction of a kind too rarely seen in the theaters.
THE LAST COUPLE DECADES have brought us plenty of filmic dystopias; there are times when it seems that’s the only possible outcome that science-fiction can conceive. There often isn’t much thought in these scenarios beyond providing a helpful template for rules-free chaos and gunplay. However, with his swift actioner Looper, Rian Johnson shows that the dystopia can be about something besides murk, mire, and mayhem (the Dredd model). He also utilizes the Bruce Willis squint to both devastatingly funny and tragic results; no minor achievement. As canny a director as he is a writer, Johnson cuts to the marrow of his story with little fuss, though not without allowing himself a few grace notes along the way. It’s the year 2040, and the crumbling urban landscape isn’t on a seaboard, it’s plopped down like a malignant growth in the American heartland. In Johnson’s imagining, Kansas City has not only turned
34 CHRIS BARSANTI into a ghetto-encrusted skyscraper metropolis baking under the smoggy heartland sky, but is also the future murder capital of the country. By the 2070s, time travel has been discovered but outlawed. It is only used by gangsters, who send people they want disappeared back into the past. The disappeared blink into existence in 2040 on the edge of a Kansas corn field, hooded and hogtied, where a waiting hired gun, or “looper,” shoots them dead and tosses the body into an incinerator. No corpse, no crime. The looper of Johnson’s story, Joe (Joseph Gordon- Levitt), is in the middle of a killer’s crisis when the story catches up to him. Sure, he enjoys that he can afford to go clubbing all night, buy the trim retro suits his type affects, liberally dose himself with hallucinogenic eye drops, and still be able to stash part of his pay (gold bars, cash currency having apparently collapsed) for some unspecified future. But the life is getting monotonous. Then there’s the problem of that assignment where he’s sent to the edge of the cornfield to kill himself, from the future (Willis). It’s bad enough that Older Joe watches Younger Joe with the quizzical weariness of a dad who’s tired of having to discipline his teenage son and is considering just letting him screw up and figure it out for himself. What really gets Younger Joe about this situation appears to be his worry that this is what he’ll turn into. Older Joe is like his ghost of gangster’s future, the living and breathing proof that he won’t actually get anywhere
35 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 different, and that all those French lessons will be for naught. It gets worse after Older Joe clonks Younger Joe on the head and takes off. As nothing more than a very low rung on a tall ladder of organized crime whose one real imperative is to not let the future-victims get away, Younger Joe’s life is potentially being very seriously curtailed by his older self. How will he stop himself? That’s the only question that really matters in this film that manages the clever trick of being both busy and highly simple. There’s a couple women amid all the men and both are tough as nails in that hardboiled way. Piper Perabo plays the damaged exotic dancer and Emily Blunt the shotgun-toting single mom whose lonely farmhouse provides the setting for the final confrontation (Stephen King-esque last-act wrinkles provide some of the film’s only missed notes). Few innocents remain in Johnson’s grimy future, where government has essentially packed up and gone home and the only sign of progress are the solar panels kludged onto just about every visible surface (one of the film’s many smart ways of inserting futuristic kinks into the story without drawing attention to them). Even in his short career (this is his third feature), Johnson has proven to be a filmmaker always packing two sleeves full of aces; he needs them all here to handle the knotty philosophical entanglements of Joe’s dilemma. Johnson doesn’t engage the conundrums eddying through the film’s gung-ho and gag-prone
36 CHRIS BARSANTI plot—Does changing the present change the future? Are the two Joes in fact different people? Do we change over time?—in a head-on fashion, though. Like in his debut, Brick, Johnson brings a spiky sensibility to his story and dialogue that has little patience for the kind of bull session if-thenning that time-travel stories can create. When the Joes sit down in a diner (guns drawn under the table, of course) to hash things out, Older Joe cuts the quizzical Younger off, grumping, “We’d be here all day making diagrams with straws.” Instead of playing with alternate universe nonsense, Johnson leaves a raft of details unexplained in a manner that leaves viewers just as confused as the characters would be. The film doesn’t pretend that people in the future are any smarter about technology than people are today. (Go ahead, ask somebody on the street how their cellphone really works.) What Johnson does is somewhat more daring: inserting a brilliant montage wherein we see Joe’s future (one of them, anyway) as he slowly ages and changes before being looped back to his younger self as though he had never gone anywhere. It’s a memorable sequence that says something about what we can and, more importantly, can’t change in life. That Johnson doesn’t let this Mobius-strip plotting interfere with blood-pumping action scenes where Willis blazes away at throngs of enemy gunmen, stubby submachine in each hand and lips pursed like it was the 1990s all over again, is something close to miraculous.
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11 — Searching for Sugar Man
Director: Malik Bendjelloul
In this warm-hearted, ever-surprising documentary, a filmmaker goes looking for a cult singer-songwriter from the 1970s, only to find out that the truth is stranger than the urban legends he’d believed.
IT’S A STORY THAT just doesn’t make sense. In the late 1960s, singer/songwriter Sixto Rodriguez could be found haunting bars in Detroit. He was a shy performer, so much so that he would sometimes face away from whoever was watching. But such idiosyncrasies didn’t matter. His resonant, melodic voice and gritty lyrics of loss and decay that shifted from harmonic rhymes to beat poetry made for a heady combination. He was a star in the making. As recounted in Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary, a producer heard Rodriguez in one of those Detroit bars and thought the same thing. A contract was signed, Rodriguez went into the studio and the album Cold Fact was released in 1970. Coming from Reality came out a year later. The songs are dense with symbolism and hooks, with production that gives them a deep wall-of- sound background. Hearing these songs for the first time produces a strange sensation in the listener. They hit the sweet spot between the jangly poetry of Bob Dylan and haunting pop orchestrations of Donovan.
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You are left wondering: How have I not been hearing these songs on classic radio for years? That’s because, as Bendjelloul explains, both Rodriguez albums were unmitigated failures. They disappeared without a trace, and not long after, so did he. Over a quarter century later, Bendjelloul enters the story as a fan of Rodriguez’s music. Although America couldn’t have cared less about those two albums, somehow they made their way to South Africa. There, Rodriguez became a star in absentia, with songs like “Searching for Sugar Man” (a great, bouncy tune about a drug dealer) entering the country’s rock vernacular to the same extent that Bruce Springsteen or Lou Reed did in America. Nobody ever heard him play live because as far as they knew, he was dead. The death stories were many and macabre. He overdosed. He was shot. He burned himself alive on stage. Only, when Bendjelloul—a genial guide who comes off like the rare, chatty guy at the local record shop was actually interested in helping people find music they like—decides to investigate the legends of Rodriguez’s death, he finds that none are true. After detective work that involves a deep reading of song lyrics for clues (making this the music-nerd film of the year), he discoveries that Rodriguez is still in Detroit, living hand- to-mouth, and clueless to Bendjelloul’s claims that in South Africa he’s “bigger than Elvis.” Searching for Sugar Man carefully parses out its mysteries with a keen sense of “can you believe this?” drama. It has the added advantage of a captivating star.
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Once Rodriguez himself makes an appearance, his lack of fame almost begins to make sense. A quiet figure with apparently few earthly needs, he is shown (sometimes in animated segments that stitch together some of the interviews) trudging the city streets like a monk of music, equally happy to play for five people, five thousand, or none. Too many music documentaries end up over-selling their subject. Then, once the artist is confronted by the camera, they seem to shrink in stature. (There are exceptions, see Beware of Mr. Baker in “Honorable Mentions,” below.) But with Rodriguez, Bendjelloul has lucked into the rare artist who comes off as having few ambitions and nothing but pleasant surprise for discovering his many thousands of fans. Although Bendjelloul made his documentary on the thinnest of shoe strings (he shot much of it on his iPhone using a $1 Super 8 app), you wouldn’t know it from the result. From the snow-swept Detroit streets to the sun- blanched fields of South Africa, this is a richly- photographed film whose visuals are nearly as powerful as the mysterious odyssey they depict.
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12 — Take This Waltz
Director: Sarah Polley
Cast: Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
Sarah Polley’s passion-drunk film about a summertime flirtation is a daze of lust, pain and regret.
SOMEWHERE INSIDE THE full-tilt lovesick blur that is Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz is the kernel of a wildly uninteresting story: Woman in cozy relationship sans fireworks becomes attracted to new fella, with whom she has fireworks galore, but a dubious future. What to do: stay with husband or fly off with fling? Play the good wife or bad mistress? There’s a spinning galaxy of clichés for writer/director Polley to choose from here, but somehow she skips past them (well, almost) and delivers a shimmering and raw ode to the ferocity of desire and the heartbreak that so often follows. Polley’s window into her story about the near impossibility of happiness is Margot, a twitchy, lonely- eyed young woman played by Michelle Williams as another of her doomed outsider romantics. A pamphlet writer for the Canadian tourism board, Margot lives on the kind of shaded, curvy, and characterful tree-lined Toronto street that recent college graduates dream of. Her husband Lou (Seth Rogen) is as grounded as she is nervous. He’s a steady presence who plays the same practical joke on her every morning and is diligently
41 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 working through every variation on chicken for a cookbook he’s writing. Margot’s problems start in the film’s deftly written opening scenes, where she flirts on a plane with the handsome Daniel (Luke Kirby). Sharing a cab from the airport, they discover that his apartment is across the street from her and Lou’s place. She reacts to this news much like a recovering addict would be upon discovering that a dealer had just moved in downstairs and was offering discounts to neighbors. Soon, Margot is a distracted mess, unable to stop staring out the window and making excuses to not-so- accidentally run into Daniel. The minor irritations that come with married life quickly take on outsized importance to her. As Margot freezes out Lou, she and Daniel become increasingly brazen in their flirtation, culminating in a session of X-rated conversation at a bar that leaves her dizzied and drunk with desire. Although Polley takes the lightning-zap intensity of Daniel and Margot’s attraction very seriously, there is also the understanding that it could all just be a fling. Buttressing the theme of addiction is Lou’s sister Geraldine (Sarah Silverman), an alcoholic currently in recovery. Although she only crops up in a few scenes, Geraldine functions as a warning system for Margot, making it clear what the price will be if she runs off with Daniel and it turns out to not be love. The role could have been painfully cliched had Silverman not played it with such raw simplicity. Placing a shock-comic like Silverman in such a pivotal role was a risk for Polley, as
42 CHRIS BARSANTI was her casting of Rogen as a straightforward, non- comedic character, but both chances pay off immensely. Polley, who used all monochromatic vistas in the quietly masterful Away from Her, has here scorched the screen with the overexposed and rich colors of a fuzzed- out summer sunset. The air looks thick with lazy dust motes and there’s a slight perspiration sheen on everybody’s skin. Fans buzz in the background, heightening the sense of lazy sensuality. There’s even a critical moment of soaring beauty and crushing reality (scored, in an impossibly non-ridiculous fashion, with “Video Killed the Radio Star”) at an amusement park ride which underlines Margot’s feeling of being on vacation from her life. Even with all this warm texturing, Polley never goes for overripe Tennessee Williams-style posturing. For all the dangerous passion coursing in its veins, it’s a mellow film. Take This Waltz works its story like a grownup version of some young adult novel about a lonely protagonist whose life changed forever after one magical summer. The problem for Margot is that she’s an adult and her adolescent passion has the potential to destroy more than it creates.
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13 — The Central Park Five
Directors: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon
This necessary and lacerating film tears open the shameful case of railroading that put five black and Latino teenagers in prison for a brutal 1989 Central Park rape and the disgraceful quiet that followed.
THE SCENT OF THE CHASE is always headiest at the start of the hunt. Afterwards, people may not remember so clearly what they were all hopped up about, particularly if the hunt led the chasers down the wrong path. It’s that sensation of a faded high and the discontented aftermath which pervades the studious, dramatic, critically important documentary The Central Park Five. Even those who weren’t living in or near New York in 1989 will likely remember at least some murmurs of this story. In April, a white female jogger was found just off a pathway in Central Park, raped and beaten almost to death. That same night, there had been reports of young black kids “wilding” and attacking people in the park. A police sweep quickly netted five black and Latino teenagers: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise. After hours of tough questioning that violated just about every principle of fair interrogation, the police extracted their confessions. Thereafter, no matter how many pieces of evidence rose up to prove the five’s innocence, or how nonexistent was the evidence connecting them to
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the crime, their fate was set. The Central Park Five were convicted and sentenced to six to 13 years in prison. It wasn’t until Matias Reyes admitted to the rape in 2002 that their convictions were thrown out. Somehow, each of the five (four appear on camera, McCray, trying to start a new life in a different city, is only heard) come off as less bitter than sad about their ordeal. Before getting to the crime, filmmakers Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns (who wrote the book which provides the basis for the film), and her husband David McMahon set the stage in the New York of the late 1980s. Archival news footage shows a city rife with crime and riven by racial animosity. All of this was stoked to a roiling boil by a news media that feasted on each new atrocity, especially when there was a racial angle. In the Central Park Five case, tabloids and local news anchors quickly ran with the idea that the white female victim had been brutalized by these five minority teens. They were convicted by public opinion almost before they signed their names to the confessions the police dictated to them. More gruesome details were reported each day, whether true or not, all of them feeding the racist narrative that the city’s white population was besieged by violent minority mobs. The Central Park Five was the first of 2012’s two great films about forced confessions and miscarried justice (West of Memphis hit theaters near the end of the year; see below) and is the leaner and more biting of the two. It is crisply cut together, and prosecutorial in building its case, minus the gauzy fuzz that tends to accrete around
45 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 some of Ken Burns’ more magisterial PBS documentaries. There are moments, though, when a hint of rage begins to slip through the film’s measured tone. Through the news clippings and snippets of video, the blood lust of the city’s media and financial elite is palpable; it’s easy to see the hard glint of the lynch mob in their eyes. (Astoundingly, then-Mayor Ed Koch is shown speaking with disgust at the notion that the five teens should be considered innocent until proven guilty.) When an interviewee notes that around the same time period as the Central Park jogger assault, a black woman was raped and thrown off the top of a building in Brooklyn, it doesn’t need to be pointed out that no similar media outrage followed. Ultimately, reporting of the Central Park Five’s innocence registered as barely a whisper compared to the roar of those baying for their blood. The film is a damning reminder of how lynch mobs never regroup and acknowledge their mistaken rush to judgment. With their mix of well-calibrated testimony, serene photography (especially those long, moody trawling shots through the park at night), and sharp-eyed social commentary, the filmmakers have crafted something that is both denunciatory screed and riveting legal thriller. It’s a trick that few documentaries can manage.
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14 — Holy Motors
Director: Leos Carax
Cast: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson, Michel Piccoli, Leos Carax
Leos Carax’s meta-meta-movie has a keen humor and flickering strangeness that keeps its surreal bouncing pinball of a story from flying off into space.
ARE FILMS LIFE or is a life a film? Although there are few more tedious questions an artist night ask, Léos Carax’s newest film (his first in 13 years) asks it in a nervy way. Holy Motors may be proposing that the line between life and cinema has dissolved to the point of being academic. It may also be saying life has become such a staged production that it might as well be a film. Or maybe not. Whether or not it has a theme, Holy Motors is less story than immersive experience. We’re invited to jump into the white stretch limo that Carax sends rolling through the streets of Paris with an actor and provocateur played by Denis Levant, and to hang on for what follows. After a wordless introductory scene in a cinema filled with sleeping patrons, we see Levant in his first guise, exiting a blocky modern house in the shape of a ship. “Monsieur Oscar” walks past a squadron of bodyguards, says goodbye to the wife and kids, and climbs into the back of his limo. Coiffed and tailored, he
47 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 is every inch the Master of the Universe, grumbling on his phone to a fellow high-net-worth individual about civil unrest directed at the likes of them: “Bodyguards are no longer enough. We’ve got to get guns, too.” Instead of being the year’s second film about a man drifting through the modern world’s tumult in an insulated vehicle (Cosmopolis being the first), Holy Motors uses the car as dressing room: Levant enters and exits repeatedly, each time wearing a new outfit and prepared for a new, unexplained “appointment.” Equipped with enough makeup, costumes, and accoutrements to service a regional theater company, Levant flips through a binder for instructions and makes himself up accordingly. At one point, Levant turns himself into a hunched, troll-like creature with gnarled fingernails and a filthy green suit. He charges through a beautiful cemetery, eating flowers out of vases and sending people running, before coming across a fashion photo shoot. It would be unfair to explain any of what happens next, but a stone-faced Eva Mendes is involved and somebody loses a finger. It’s unclear who is employing Levant (if anybody), who provides his instructions, or why he’s doing any of this. The appointments seem beyond the pale of purposeful employment and yet somebody must be paying for the driver, Celine (Edith Scob). Levant alternates from broadly clownish antics to quiet Method study and delicate, Chaplin-esque fussiness. These shifts keep us guessing and off-balance, as do occasional violent surprises and a pervasively
48 CHRIS BARSANTI malevolent sense of mystery. Carax appears less enamored of the shock of the grotesque than he is of revealing the artificial and self-consciously staged nature of what’s going on. For one appointment, Levant is dressed in a tracksuit and carrying a knife, looking like a no-name heavy in any modern Euro-crime flick. For another, he puts on a motion-capture suit and reports to a factory-like building filled with others dressed in the same bulb-studded black leotards; here he performs a solo dance that could be spliced into any number of martial arts films. A deathbed appointment is padded with faux-meaningful dialogue (“If you’ve been hated, you’ve also been adored”) that’s at once too familiar and completely schizoid. If Carax is playing with the notion of film as life, we can’t help but see as well that the conjunction doesn’t make for any particularly memorable insights. Fortunately, his film is thick with bravura moments, from a downbeat torch song delivered in a derelict building to Levant leading a spontaneously expanding band in a rousing accordion number inside a cathedral. Holy Motors can feel desperate at times, as if frantically mining a tired culture for new ideas. Pondering the possibilities of beauty, one character asks, “What if there’s no more beholder?” Ah yes, the beholder: this is what films are about: a relationship with viewers, troubled and deep. Whatever Levant might put on, wherever that limo might take him, he both finds and conjures comedy, curiosity and a healthy dose of
49 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 despair. Viewers are in for a waking dream, wild and surreal.
15 — Anna Karenina
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Johnson, Kelly Macdonald, Matthew Macfadyen, Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Alicia Vikander, Olivia Williams
A frenetic and daringly stagy adaptation from the director of Atonement unleashes the passions of Tolstoy’s novel with delicious abandon.
ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE in this highly self-aware yet free-flowing take on Tolstoy’s great novel of doomed romance and the thorny collision of ideals with the world of fallible humans. Joe Wright’s exciting approach will divide audiences, but those who go along for the ride will thrill as it blows their hair back. Instead of moving from one stately mansion to the next, Wright sets most of his scenes inside the same grand but decrepit theatre, with obvious backdrops and stage props, adding music and elaborate choreography to further stylize the action. It can be read as a statement on the highly artificial world of the Russian aristocracy, circa 1874 or a device heightening the novel’s already potent melodrama. It’s also a blast to watch.
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Tom Stoppard’s stripped-down screenplay (his first in over ten years) emphasizes on the half of the story with the most naked passions. Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley, playing a high-strung racing horse again to great effect) is happily married to dull but good-natured government official Alexei Karenin (Jude Law). Together they have a son and are at the center of glittering St. Petersburg society (Moscow being so … provincial). Anna seems to float outside the world of petty jealousies and intrigues, until the day that love, in the form of devilishly rakish cavalry officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, from Savages), thwaps her between the eyes. Unable to do the calculus of how much she will lose if her betrayal is discovered, Anna throws herself into an affair with Vronsky. Ironically, when the story begins, Anna is counseling her sister-in-law Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) to forgive her brother Oblonsky’s (Matthew Macfadyen) cheating ways. Running on parallel tracks is the more ruminative story, about Oblonsky’s dear friend Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), a straight-laced, moralistic landowner searching for a soul mate. Stoppard uses Levin’s romantic ponderings and discussions with the earthier Oblonsky to raise the question of which character has the truer relationship. Alexei is a classically clueless cuckold, but there is a sweetness to his stiff-necked persona when he defends Anna (at a time when all of St. Petersburg has espied her philandering) by declaiming, “My wife is beyond reproach. She is, after all, my wife.” Whereas, the peace in Oblonsky and Dolly’s marriage is
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based on her ignoring what she can. And the love that Levin sees doesn’t seem attainable by mortals. Anna Karenina doesn’t take its philosophizing sitting down, though. Stoppard, used to marrying weighty topics with lower humor, of necessity cleaves off great slabs of plot while still delivering the singing, stomping energy of Tolstoy’s galloping prose. Wright directs with a crackling zip, whipping his performers into something like a circus routine, complete with musicians in pancake makeup wandering through scenes and magical-realist flourishes (a room of bureaucrats stamp forms in mechanistic unison, Levin walks through a theatre door into a snow-covered country field miles away). Giving the proceedings a vaudeville stamp is the marvelous Macfadyen, who invests his loony performance with all the mustache-twinkling delight of Kevin Kline in his clownish prime. Knightley has a more difficult time with the starring role. Although she throws herself into Anna with characteristic enthusiasm, all aquiver with desire and rancid with self-loathing, there are times in the film’s final stretches when she can’t deliver the required sensation of a woman literally going mad because of love. Ultimately it’s a worthy performance that goes a long way toward anchoring the film’s many divergent stories and characters. Anna’s single-minded fury is of a piece with Wright’s relentlessly impassioned and gorgeous vision (baroque dresses, sun-splashed fields and snowy nights). Their combined passions crack the Faberge sheen of the period film. A triumph.
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16 — 17 Girls
Directors: Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Cast: Louise Grinberg, Juliette Darche, Roxanne Duran, Esther Garrel, Yara Pilartz, Solene Rigot, Noemie Lvovsky, Florence Thomassin, Carlo Brandt, Frederic Noaille, Arthur Verret
This beautiful, wild-spirited French take on a true story about an American high school where over a dozen girls entered into a “pregnancy pact” vividly shows the wild impracticality of their utopian dreams, yet also understands their romantic appeal.
IT’S RARELY A GOOD SIGN when a film claims to be “inspired by true events.” Too often that means topical material presented with either handwringing over- seriousness or vapory truthiness. In the case of Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s effervescent film about a pregnancy pact among a group of high school girls, the true-life inspiration is merely a jumping-off point, one that quickly yields a compelling story. The basis for the Coulins’ film is a 2008 incident in which nearly 20 high school girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts decided to get pregnant together. The filmmakers switched out the setting for their own home—the somewhat dreary French seaside town of Lorient—and crafted a narrative that swirls around a group of high school girls as disaffected and vulnerable as their American counterparts.
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Like any good story about an epidemic, 17 Girls starts with an unremarkable incident. High school student Camille (Louise Grinberg, one of the troublemakers in Laurent Cantet’s The Class) finds herself in a family way. But instead of hiding in embarrassment or trying to ignore her swelling belly, she flaunts it. Because Camille is the queen bee, her pregnancy starts looking attractive to her buzzing followers. Within months, bellies begin swelling all over town, and the girls are making plans for what they’re going to do after their babies are born. Not included in their agenda: avoiding smoking or drinking while pregnant, or considering the complications that come with being a single teen mother. There are plenty of films about counter-productive teen rebellion, the delinquent who kicks against any limitations even though she knows she has more to lose than those in authority. Like those films, this one suggests the girls are akin to prisoners setting their cell aflame, knowing that the end result will just be more restriction and punishment. With a few pans over bleak streets and empty skies, 17 Girls makes clear how life in this dead-end town seems like a prison to each girl, whether it’s Camille, who misses her absent mother, or lonely wallflower Florence (Roxane Duran). At first, the girls’ decisions seem like a stunt. But then it becomes obvious that some have bigger goals in mind, talking about living together and raising their children communally. It’s a utopian fantasy almost sublime in its absurdity, but wholly believable: there’s little difference between this kind of dreaming and the everyday sort of
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we’ll-be-friends-forever oaths and loyalty tests indulged in by teens, both in films and life. The waking-dream atmosphere of 17 Girls is located somewhere between the razor-wire tension of a Joyce Carol Oates story and the gauzy meanderings of a Sofia Coppola film. This can make for a raw mixture, with the floaty camerawork and pungent soundtrack suggesting the girls are immersed in innocently disobedient game- playing. Instead of providing direction, the adults around the girls come off as baffled clowns. Parents berate the school principal (Carlo Brandt) for not handling the situation, as though they can absolve themselves of any responsibility. This satiric approach to the adults’ incompetence has the advantage of putting the viewer more solidly inside the girls’ perspective, where everything is now, now, now, and the future seems limitless. But the filmmakers highlight the problems already visible in the girls’ seeming united front: Clementine (Yara Pilartz) pays a boy to impregnate her; some pregnancies don’t go smoothly; and jealousies and rivalries begin to breed in this hothouse environment. Besotted by the dream of families without parents or rules, the girls in 17 Girls might drive without licenses and drink like there’s no tomorrow, but they are still innocents. The wonder of this remarkable film is that it retains an innocence of its own, even while alluding to darkness on the horizon.
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17 — How to Survive a Plague
Director: David France
This epic, heart-pounding story of the activists who forced a country to simultaneously battle the AIDS epidemic and its prejudices is a primer on how to change history.
LARRY KRAMER, playwright and professional scold, isn’t one for half-measures. He is, after all, responsible in part for founding ACT UP. Still, it comes as a cold slap when, during David France’s epochal documentary on the early days of the AIDS crisis, Kramer is shown at a meeting of activists whose bickering has sucked the air out of the room. “We are in the middle of a plague!” Kramer bellows, eyes flashing behind his glasses like those of a wrathful preacher beholding an instantly silenced crowd. “A plague! And you act like this....” Kramer’s slashing and burning fury echoes through the film’s history of those activists who weren’t interested in dying quietly, despised and ignored, from a devastating and mysterious disease. France is a journalist who covered the beginnings of AIDS activism in the early 1980s, when the disease first began to take its brutal, mysterious toll on the gay community. His story of that movement is an inspiring one, and it means to be—true tales of courageous protestors fighting the good fight and winning are never easy to come by. It’s the story of how a marginalized minority first found itself in the crosshairs of a terrifying
56 CHRIS BARSANTI new disease, and then realized that if they didn’t organize their own defense, nobody would. How to Survive a Plague starts in earnest in 1987, when some 20,000 had already died from AIDS. (The film keeps a grim tally of the dead throughout, as a reminder of the urgency spurring everybody on.) Frustrated by the lack of a concerted effort to fight the disease and the bigotry that kept gay men from reporting their symptoms (there were even calls to have AIDS patients tattooed), a knot of activists started ACT UP to break through the wall of shame. With their stark SILENCE = DEATH logo and attention-grabbing demonstrations, they quickly shifted the tenor of the battle. As France shows, once ACT UP came on the scene, the gay community was less willing to suffer in quiet. Although headlines were garnered by memorable actions like the boisterous action that disrupted mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989, the hard work of fighting the disease isn’t so easily dramatized. France spends a good amount of time on the front lines of the protests, but he is even more engaged in following ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee, made up of non- medical people who turned themselves into experts. Meanwhile, everybody has too many dead or dying friends. The strain shows. While ACT UP’s shock troops were on the street and in the news demanding an end to discrimination, the T&D Committee (which later split off to form the Treatment Action Group) did the painstaking work of lobbying drug firms, politicians, and medical groups to
57 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 create a coordinated campaign to find a cure and end the plague. Given how socially acceptable virulent homophobia still was then, it’s difficult sometimes to tell whether the virus or fellow citizens are the more dedicated enemy. France’s film is enriched not just by his having been immersed in the subject since nearly its start and by having such a great cast of heroic characters to work with, but by the invaluable trove of footage that he has to work with. The grainy camcorder video records little- seen meetings where life-saving breakthroughs are announced and strategies plotted that will change the course of the epidemic. Popular history has generally forgotten this fight, but millions would benefit from it nonetheless.
18 — Argo
Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Victor Garber, Tate Donavan, Clea DuVall, Scoot McNairy, Rory Cochrane, Christopher Denham, Kyle Chandler, Chris Messina, Zeljko Ivanek, Titus Welliver
The declassified story of how the CIA snuck six American hostages out of Iran in 1980 makes for a ripping and only moderately fictionalized espionage thriller.
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WHEN ARGO HIT THEATERS in October, it was as though critics and moviegoers had been wandering in the desert and were offered a tall glass of cool lemonade. It had been a rough summer, with things like The Expendables 2 and Taken 2 clogging up space at the multiplex. More interesting fare was playing, but on an extremely limited basis. (It can be tiring to trumpet tiny indie films week after week if they’re only playing on one or two screens and most people then can’t get to them.) By the time Ben Affleck’s spy story came around, everybody was ready for a movie all the grown-ups could see without feeling ashamed of themselves afterwards. Chris Terrio’s zinger of a script is based on a 2007 Wired magazine article about a CIA mission to rescue six Americans who had escaped the 1979 takeover of the Tehran embassy by Islamist radicals. While the attention of the world was on the Americans held hostage, the six escapees hid out in the Canadian embassy, waiting to see how and if their government was going to get them out. The plan the CIA came up with was the longest of long shots, what one character calls “the best bad idea we have.” Had the mission failed, it would have gone on the list of embarrassing CIA stunts, right next to that plan to make Castro’s beard fall out. In this case, the idea was to sneak an agent into Iran posing as a Canadian film producer, pretend the six Americans were part of his crew scouting locations, and get them out of the country before anybody noticed that more people were leaving Iran than entered.
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Although director Affleck stars, he wisely hands the job of making his film really work to pros who can hit home runs under much worse conditions. He did much the same in The Town, clearly knowing that Jeremy Renner was going to steal the film right out from under him. Affleck plays Tony Mendez, the real-life CIA officer who hatched the plan. Handling comic-relief duties on the fake film side are Alan Arkin and John Goodman as, respectively, a producer and make-up artist whom Mendez brings on board to give his fake film the appearance of authenticity. Affleck lets Arkin and Goodman loose to ham it up as their characters swan around Hollywood pretending to make a sci-fi epic called Argo (complete with gloriously camp posters and storyboards that look like they were done by the Flash Gordon team) that just so happens to need big exotic settings that Iran would be perfect for. Back at Langley, the role of Mendez’s tearing-his- hair-out superior goes to a superb Bryan Cranston, whose knotted forehead and brittle sarcasm say more about the tolls of bureaucratic office warfare than pages of embittered dialogue. A tenser, naturalistic band of actors (including standouts Rory Cochrane and Clea DuVall) plays the chain-smoking embassy workers. This was a smart choice, as Affleck and Terrio tighten the screws most relentlessly in the embassy scenes, building up to the final, white-knuckle dash to the airport. There is a refreshingly analog grit to Argo that comes from more than the period set design, bushy haircuts, and the film stock’s faded and smoky tint. Part of the
60 CHRIS BARSANTI sensation derives from the near complete lack of gunplay; something that would be anathema to most anybody even thinking of making a spy film today. But there is also the mood of unspoken patriotism that runs through many of the scenes. Many of the people Mendez ropes into his operation are private citizens with no connection to the CIA. They simply want to do the right thing, and help keep their countrymen alive. Looking back from even a small distance, Argo is perhaps not as impressive as the first buzz of excitement indicated. But it’s not hard to understand why the film was so eagerly received, given a cinematic landscape that features films targeted either at the lowest common denominator or that ever-narrower slice of dedicated cinephiles. Played with broad humor and goose-pimple thrills against an ever-relevant backdrop of Middle East turmoil and religious fanaticism, with a can-you-believe- this? story, Affleck’s film would be the right ticket in just about any season.
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19 — Wuthering Heights
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: James Howson, Kaya Scodelario, Solomon Glave, Shannon Beer, Nichola Burley
A brutal, savagely romantic take on Emily Bronte’s gothic novel shows that Heathcliff and Catherine’s idea of love has more to do with punishment and revenge than compassion.
FOLLOWING THE ANNOUNCEMENT that Andrea Arnold was adapting Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, it was an easy guess that it would be no ordinary costume drama. Arnold’s previous features, the bracing Red Road (2006) and unforgettable Fish Tank (2009), both mined a seam of bleak UK council estate angst via raw performances. Her new film is similarly tough. Arnold has not “modernized” the original text or packed it with appeals to the tween set, a la Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations or Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet. Instead, she deploys her signature dramatic style, casting some unknown and scintillating actors, giving the film a sandpaperish honesty that is true to Bronte’s messy source novel. The element of Arnold’s film that received the most attention was her casting a black actor (newcomer James Howson) as Heathcliff. The choice actually hews closer to Bronte’s vision of the character than early film adaptations that put Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes in the role. Granted, those decisions were not nearly as
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inappropriate as Olivier playing the title role in Othello, since Bronte never clearly identifies Heathcliff’s race or ethnic background. He appears out of nowhere, as the orphan boy found by Mr. Earnshaw in Liverpool and brought back to the farm on the moors. The novel describes him thus:
Mr. Heathcliff… is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman, that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure—and rather morose. Possibly, some people might suspect him of a degree of under-bred pride…
Even in that depiction, Bronte frames her hero in the most mysterious and exotic manner possible; to her, Heathcliff is an unlettered savage in whom any semblance of civilized behavior is shocking. He’s an incarnation of the wild, set free on the rough landscape of fog and moors to provide an unattainable ideal for the similarly independent Catherine. After years of beatings and sleeping in the barn with the animals, Heathcliff runs off. He returns years later unexpectedly either to claim the hand of or exact revenge upon Catherine (Kaya Scodelario). It’s hard to tell which, as love and hate are never distinct for them. He’s sullen and vicious, with a log-sized chip on his shoulder, while she’s spoiled and thoughtless.
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Arnold’s flinty, uncompromising film starts in the quiet of a muddy farm. After an instructive opening scene in which the adult Heathcliff pummels himself bloody against a wall carved with the name “Catherine,” the first hour is a dark tunnel of clammy confusion that will turn many viewers off. This gloomy approach is taken mainly from the young Heathcliff’s (Solomon Glave) baffled, infuriated point of view (unlike Bronte, who showed him at a distance via the novel’s disapproving narrator). Heightening the claustrophobia and chaos, Arnold never delineates the relationships between the family and the help. Heathcliff’s only relief comes from running out in the wild with the young Catherine (Shannon Beer), who’s bratty, but also the only one to treat him like a human being. Even this childishly romantic friendship twists cold when he pins her against a rocky outcropping; the film goes quiet as we wait to see which way this will turn. The film’s later sections lighten up the screen with scattered melodrama and brighter compositions. Cutaways to the blooming countryside repeatedly provide a counterpoint to Heathcliff and Catherine’s toxic relationship. At times we could be watching a landscape film where the humans are merely other animals, trapped by their habits and appetites. As the fraught couple reconnects and proceeds to make every bad decision possible, Howson and Scodelario’s performances reach a doomy pitch that matches the film’s growing gothic horror.
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Their long, youthful rambles in the wilderness provide the film’s only moments of peace, but Heathcliff and Catherine seem tainted by the memory of being forced together but still separated (sister and adopted brother, white and black, mistress and servant). The masochistic urge that keeps them apart also binds them together. When Catherine sees the wounds on Heathcliff’s back from some mysterious master or parent, she doesn’t treat them or kiss them, she licks them, as though it gives her sustenance in this overwhelming landscape that swallows people whole.
20 — Sound of My Voice
Director: Zal Batmanglij
Cast: Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicius, Brit Marling, Richard Wharton
Two filmmakers infiltrate the cult surrounding a beautiful, mysterious woman who claims to a time traveler from the future in this smart, impeccably crafted sci-fi mystery.
THE YEAR’S MOST ASTOUNDING feature directing debut, Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice succeeds on so many levels that its too-quick conclusion, which would have ruined other films, is only a minor irritation here. From the intense commitment of each performer to the spider’s web-taut writing and plotting, this is a science-
65 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 fiction thriller whose mystery is so deeply buried it’s not even clear whether the film is science fiction at all. When the film starts, we join young couple Peter (Christopher Denman) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) in mid- caper. Peter wants to be a documentary filmmaker, and he’s found a great subject. Somewhere deep in the Valley, there is a woman named Maggie who says she has traveled back from the year 2054 with dire warnings about the future. She has been gathering converts for a cult shrouded in layers of mystery and obfuscation. Peter wants to infiltrate the cult and surreptitiously film its secrets from the inside. The camera is in his glasses and, showing a significant level of dedication to film journalism, he has swallowed the receiver. When the film starts, Peter and Lorna are being taken to meet Maggie. Instead of the expected dizzy band of New Age-y southern Californians, Peter and Lorna are greeted by an operation whose creepy subterfuge would impress the old-timers at Langley. Blindfolded and dressed in white hospital robes, the couple are driven from one generic suburban ranch home denuded of personal decorations (the question of what happened to the original owners is one of the dark questions that hangs in the air, unanswered) and deposited in another. Blindfolds off, sitting in a blandly impersonal basement with a circle of other white-robed supplicants, they finally meet Maggie. Having imagined that they wound find a band of delusional loons, Peter and Lorna find themselves unprepared for what comes next. As Maggie, Brit
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Marling is an unnerving presence. Her languid beauty, tousled blond locks, and sleepy yet magnetic voice give the impression of some latter-day Laurel Canyon folkie chanteuse. You almost expect her to pull out a guitar and lead her cult in a sing-a-long. But the sadistic ease with which she is able to target each person’s most vulnerable spot and verbally twist them into a spineless, weak-kneed follower comes from a darker area; the Manson side of this California dream. Peter is initially dismissive of Maggie’s claims of time travel and her weakened state; like some malevolent alien, she subsists on hydroponic food and transfusions of blood from her followers. But Lorna, an ex-party girl who has just started getting her life together, is more vulnerable to the familial attractions that drag lost souls into cults. Once Maggie goes to work on the buttoned- up Peter, using a full arsenal of psychological and emotional ploys, he not only begins to lose some of his earlier skepticism, but starts breaking down emotionally. Sound of My Voice clocks in at a tidy, confident 85 minutes. Batmanglij doesn’t waste a second. Each scene hums with mystery and tension, a product of both the drum-tight screenplay (which Batmanglij co-wrote with Marling) and the unnervingly ominous soundtrack. The ending might come too soon and with too little explanation (most viewers will be caught agape, wanting just five minutes more minutes of exposition), but better that Batmanglij leaves us wanting more instead of not knowing when to quit.
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21 — The Invisible War
Director: Kirby Dick
The epidemic of rape in the American military, and the apparent lack of interest in preventing and prosecuting it, are exposed in this excoriating film.
THE INVISIBLE WAR is one of those few films one sees in a year that deserve the label “important.” Kirby Dick’s previous work has trended more toward the slick and clever (Outrage, This Film Is Not Yet Rated), but this time, instead of zeroing in on one particularly salient and of- the-moment topic, he goes broad with the subject of women in the modern American military. His drawing- back-the-curtain documentary graphically illustrates not just the shocking levels of sexual violence many female service-members endure, but the equally disturbing lack of recourses they have in the aftermath. The statistics are terrifying. Twenty percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted. Moreover, eighty percent of sexual assaults in the military go unreported according to the Department of Defense. Forty percent of female homeless veterans have been raped. One percent of male service members in the past year were sexually assaulted. The Invisible War brings these figures to life with gripping stories and remarkable storytellers. Women describe being drugged and assaulted; raped by multiple assailants; raped with loaded .45s held to their
68 CHRIS BARSANTI heads; raped by their commanding officers; screaming while nobody comes to their aid; raped and punished for daring to report it. Their stories—along with others provided by advocates and lawyers, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers—lead to the film’s conclusion about the military justice system, damning and difficult to deny. Not only has every branch of the American military failed miserably to adjust to the fact that thousands of women are entering its once all-male bases, but the reaction to the epidemic of barbarity has been a mixture of soul-numbing bureaucratese and vengeful, self- protective violence. More than one woman says that the worst part of the ordeal wasn’t the assault itself, but the closed loop of denial and ugly retaliation that followed. Many recent films have excoriated the Pentagon for its laissez-faire attitude towards its soldiers’ welfare. (The heart-rending Semper Fi: Always Faithful is one of the better examples.) Rarely, though, has there been an exposé like this, with its ranks of beleaguered soldiers trying to make sense of their PTSD-shattered lives and seeing little hope for the future. It is one thing for a soldier to be attacked by an enemy on a battlefield, quite another to be attacked by a man or men they once considered brothers.
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22 — Oslo, August 31st
Director: Joachim Trier
Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Malin Crepin, Aksel M. Thanke, Hans Olav Brenner, Ingrid Olava, Oystein Roger
An overpowering, emotionally epic day-in-the- life drama about a recovering addict who doesn’t know where his life is going.
THE SEGMENT THAT OPENS Oslo, August 31st doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the film, but it doesn’t matter for a second. Director and co-writer Joachim Trier plays decades-old grainy color footage of Oslo, layering the soundtrack with people’s recollections of the Norwegian city. There’s a rich vein of melancholy that expertly sets the mood for what’s to follow, not to mention a little foreshadowing: The last shot of this montage is a camera affixed to the side of an imploded building, rushing sideways to the ground as the charges ignite. The film’s protagonist, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), is a time bomb ready to blow. There are many scenes when the viewer winces, waiting for darker urges to erupt from his greyhound-jittery frame and mournful eyes. Things are roiling inside him that no amount of therapy or friendly advice seems likely to reach. In his first scene, Anders hurtles across a busy road and plunges into a forest where he comes to a lake. After the briefest contemplation of the placid waters, he places
70 CHRIS BARSANTI rocks in his jacket pockets and carries a large stone out into the deep. It’s a suicide plan doomed to failure that provides a pretty good idea of his state of mind: self- destructive and not much given to considering consequences. Anders is living in a rehab facility, and is given a day pass to head into town for a job interview—which he dreads like a vampire would daylight. Like some addict’s Stations of the Cross, each of Anders’ stops provides another reason why he is in treatment. At first, visiting the home of an academic buddy he used to carouse with, Anders seems merely quiet and prone to sadness. But by the end of that visit, it becomes clear that Anders is stuck in a deep dark pit of benumbed grief where he can’t seem to enjoy a single thing about life: “I’m 34…I have nothing.” In the job interview, Anders’ obvious smarts flicker to the fore briefly, before he does his best to squash them. This is joyless self-annihilation as a way of life, a fact that Trier makes more painful in a marvelous and deft scene where Anders sits in a café watching life go on about him. The moment is beautiful, but the sight and sound of people living with joyful purpose crushes him. As Trier’s Stations wear on for Anders, the damaging history of his addictions is revealed, with the demons of dependency starting to claw at his mind. Somehow, though, Trier and his star make this a resolutely non- sulky film. As in his superb debut Reprise, Trier is an ace with the ebb and flow of people socializing, chatting.
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Oslo, August 31st has a less arch tone, though, and a powerful clarity of purpose. With this tragedy of a character who yearns for life but never knows what to do when it’s handed to him on a silver platter, Trier fashions a quietly stunning masterpiece—all of life, in a single day.
23 — Amour
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, William Simell
Sudden decrepitude leaves an elderly Parisian couple shell-shocked and grasping for answers in this chilling, claustrophobic study of the limits of love.
WHEN MICHAEL HANEKE was last heard from, it was with The White Ribbon, his 2009 period spooker about a small German village where the children might be on a murderous rampage. It took a dim view of humanity, to put it mildly, and was of a piece for the director, whose clinical and ironic style is frequently shaded with misanthropy. When it became known that his newest film was about a loving elderly couple facing the trials of aging, a few heads were turned. Amour is a unique and remarkable drama that unblinkingly confronts the horrifying realities of
72 CHRIS BARSANTI mortality, but without the chuckling maliciousness for which Haneke is known. The film almost never leaves the tasteful Paris apartment home of an old married couple, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Onetime music teachers now in their eighties, they live a quiet but intellectually vital retirement that many would envy. Haneke (who also wrote the screenplay) doesn’t present any flashbacks or biographical reminiscences. These aren’t necessary. Thanks to Riva and Trintignant’s effortless genius, after spending thirty seconds with these two, we know they have shared a rich and rewarding life for decades and imagine facing their final days together. Tragedy strikes quietly, when Anne begins to go blank at odd times. She stops recognizing Georges, and then her motor skills start to go. Anne returns from the hospital in a wheelchair, seemingly not so different. But Riva (so brilliantly flighty over a half-century ago in Hiroshima, mon amour) brings such a precise evanescence to the role, that with very little outward change she can show how spiritually depleted Anne has become. As she is increasingly confined to the bedroom, it seems that the single light in Georges’ life has flickered out almost overnight. Anne’s decrepitude punches holes in the carefully knit fabric of her personality, which registers to George almost as an affront. She begs not to be returned to the hospital and he readily acquiesces; his life becomes taking care of the final stages of hers. Haneke stands back with the camera and refuses to cut away from the
73 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 indignities the graceful couple now must endure. George simply helping walk her to a chair becomes a kind of shuffling slow dance, miserable for them both. When the nurses roll Anne around on the bed to clean her, the look of shame on her face is terrifying in its helplessness. Amidst this, all George can do is the work of caring—and Haneke shows with great attention to detail how much work is involved. George becomes like a penitent, glumly waiting for the next stage of Anne’s downward spiral. When she snaps out, “There’s no reason to go on living,” he cannot argue. Alongside Amour’s painstaking depiction of the realities of George and Anne’s narrowed lives, Haneke has seeded some nagging gremlins of doubt about what we are missing. The first scene is an unexpected one: Emergency workers smash in the door of the apartment and find Anne’s bed empty, covered with a halo of roses. Everything else comes in flashback, and little of it is reassuring. The only other character of much substance here is the couple’s daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert). Eva is so chilly with fear that she can barely respond with any compassion to her mother’s condition. Her reactions are the polar opposite of George’s quiet determination, but the root of their panic is likely the same: What now? For his part, George is so consumed with grief over what is happening and what is to come that he can hardly react to his daughter’s presence. Trintignant plays him with a sad sourness, verging on malice. It’s possible to see a flickering of anger in George’s grief,
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echoing what Anne tells him early in the film, “You’re a monster, sometimes. But very kind.” Even once Haneke unveils his shock conclusion (breathtaking in its speed), it’s not entirely clear what secrets he’s withholding. “It’s beautiful,” Anne says at one point. “Life. Long life.” It’s hard to imagine George saying or thinking the same in this film that follows encroaching mortality with such unblinking rigor. Filmed with quiet exactitude and subtle wintry colors, Amour goes right to the bitter end of everything; it’s not a journey everybody would like to take.
24 — West of Memphis
Director: Amy Berg
Amy Berg’s devastating documentary on the unjustly accused West Memphis Three and the massive, “crowd-sourced” battle for their freedom is both cool-headed and rabble-rousing; it sets a new standard for true-crime film investigations.
WITHOUT JOE BERLINGER and Bruce Sinofsky’s trilogy of Paradise Lost documentaries, most of the world would never have heard of the West Memphis Three. But Amy Berg’s impactful film might stand as the true document of the case and its hair-raising implications for justice in America. The story that started this case was horrific; another tragedy followed soon after. In 1993, the bodies of three
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young boys were found in a ditch in West Memphis, Tennessee. Initial reports indicated they had been sexually abused and mutilated. The police turned their investigation (primed by victims’ families and an enraged community looking for a target) on three other boys, not much older than the victims. Teenagers Jesse Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols were charged with killing the three boys in a satanic ritual. The prosecution’s paper-thin case was based on little more than a coerced confession and the fact that Echols and Baldwin were heavy metal fans. After some possibly planted evidence and laughably inexpert testimony on cults, the three were found guilty. Echols was sentenced to death (the most charismatic, he was considered the ringleader); the quieter Baldwin and Misskelley received life imprisonment. Over a well-paced and information-dense two-and-a- half hours, Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil) first delivers a quick dissertation on the murders and trial before delving into the heart of the film: the almost two- decade-long investigation to prove the innocence of the boys who came to be known as the West Memphis Three. The trio’s story took time to catch fire, but was finally sparked by the first Paradise Lost (shot as an “America Undercover” episode for HBO but given limited theatrical release in 1996). Eventually it became clear that no matter how glaringly thin the state’s case against the WM3 was, their names could never be cleared without a great marshaling of manpower and resources.
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Lorri Davis, who met and married Echols while he was on death row, coordinated efforts with celebrity backers like Henry Rollins, Patti Smith, Natalie Maines, and Eddie Vedder. The appeal of the story to rebellious musicians is clear (Rollins points out that a railroaded smartass teen outcast like Echols “could have been me”). More surprising is the introduction of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (also producers on Berg’s film), who secretly provided the necessary financing and organizational dedication to the investigation. What follows is like a “CSI” episode in reverse, where a team of civilian experts—including legendary ex-FBI serial-killer profiler John Douglas—uses a mix of advanced DNA analysis and investigative scut work to definitively take the prosecution’s case apart. In a more potentially controversial move, they and the film also build a strong case around a different person of interest: a victim’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs, who was astonishingly never investigated the first time around. The film’s style at times too closely resembles that of a network-TV true-crime news magazine (Erin Moriarty of “48 Hours” even shows up briefly), with plenty of filler footage of trains whistling through lonely fields. It also focuses too strongly on a sole villain (Hobbs) and protagonist (Echols, as Baldwin and Misskelley’s stories are barely covered), but there is little sensationalism. Echols points out that those who assumed another victim’s stepfather, John Mark Byers, was suspicious because he came off in the first two Paradise Lost films as
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a crazed religious fanatic, were guilty of the same prejudicial profiling that landed him on death row. Given the density of information and large cast of characters, Berg has delivered an impressive feat of real- life storytelling that never oversimplifies the issues. Although the film does include the release last year of the WM3—showing that on occasion justice can triumph, at least for those able to marshal the resources—it doesn’t pretend that their struggle is even close to over. As of this writing, Echols, Baldwin, and Miskelley are free, but the real murderer is still at large.
25 — The Dark Knight Rises
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Matthew Modine
Christopher Nolan’s overlong but grand final Batman film shows the inhabitants of Gotham finally wrestling with issues of the real world, namely: money, class, and power.
THE SCENT OF MONEY is everywhere in The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s alternately wrenching and lugubrious capstone to his Batman trilogy. Those who don’t have it, want it. Those who have it seem both weighted down and perplexed by it. That the film gives
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even a glancing nod to conflict between the haves and have-nots was enough to ignite a small op-ed brushfire over whether the film was an Occupy-style indictment of capitalism or a pro-One Percent manifesto. (It’s neither.) This emphasis on money is appropriate, given the amounts of revenue that Warner Bros. and its various partners have raked in from this franchise. But it’s also a curious focus for a superhero film, a genre that usually operates in a universe where issues of filthy lucre are either ignored entirely or explained away by the hero’s being self-financed. It’s a sharp turnabout from The Dark Knight’s most striking image, that of the Joker tumbling merrily down a mountain of looted cash before he sets it aflame. In Rises, Bruce Wayne, flesh-and-blood billionaire with issues, is more the subject than Batman. The caped crusader is an abstract symbol of fear-filled justice, while Bruce Wayne needs money. Those space-age vehicles Batman drives and flies around Gotham are available only as long as Wayne Enterprises is a going concern. When the brutally anarchic Bane (Tom Hardy) launches an assault on Gotham, his first big target is the stock market. This is the real financial hub of the modern city, not the laundered cash that the Joker robbed and burnt so carelessly. The markets are the invisible spine of the city’s businesses and everyone’s retirement accounts; as one security guard outside points out, “It’s our money.” Bane’s WrestleMania moves and mystical indestructibility prove problematic for Batman, while his
79 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 feigned sense of social justice bring the heat on Gotham’s ruling class—not to mention Wayne Enterprises and, by extension, Batman’s bank account. His calls for revolution are just terrorist window- dressing for deeper and darker aims, but that doesn’t stop the city’s downtrodden from trashing the homes of the rich and dragging them into jury-rigged courtrooms for some Jacobin justice. This isn’t so much a comic-book call for upheaval in the style of V for Vendetta (the Alan Moore vision, at least) as it is a reflection of how these things tend to happen in reality: Class inequality is exploited by those interested solely in power, resulting in short-lived spasms of violence and looting that ultimately leaves the mob back where they started. The truest embodiment of the city’s conscience can be found in one of Batman’s other nemeses: that old purring standby Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman (Anne Hathaway, fickle and petulant as any feline). Batman has always had the city’s interests in mind, though the Nolan films have heavily weighted the scales towards Wayne’s vigilante interests being driven by personal vengeance/self-destruction more than any true civic duty. He’s been exorcising his demons, not the city’s. But when Selina first comes into frame, it’s as a servant working a charity bash at Wayne Manor. When Wayne (bearded and caned and exhausted-seeming, eight years out of the cape and looking all the deader for it) realizes she’s a burglar who’s just swiped his mother’s pearls, he barely seems to care. He’s intrigued instead of enraged,
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because he can afford to be; it’s the nonchalance of privilege that galls her. Like Frank Miller’s Selina from the Batman: Year One graphic novel—a truer inspiration for the Nolan films than Miller’s original Dark Knight Returns quartet— Nolan’s take puts her on the wrong side of town from Wayne Manor. Although seen only briefly, Selina’s apartment is a darkened hole filled with trinkets from her grifts, the street outside a scuzzy reminder of the crumbling and crime-ridden Gotham that doesn’t otherwise appear in the Nolan films. In the first two films, crime in Gotham is mostly the work of psychotic individuals and corrupt politicians, not the everyday burglaries and assaults that people in neighborhoods like Selina’s deal with. Like Wayne with his caped alter ego, Selina for many reasons: to make a living, to escape, to have fun putting one over on people, and to take more from the city’s upper classes than the scraps they would normally allow to fall from the table. The long-simmering resentment that Selina has built up for Gotham’s gilded classes gets a hearing during her dance with Wayne at a masked charity ball:
There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
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There’s a joke there in Selina’s reference to Wayne and his “friends”; this is not a man with friends, only allies. Also, the trilogy has made quite clear the fact that Wayne feels an outsider in his own circle; a sharp exchange at that same benefit has Wayne snarkily referring to all the money wasted at such events to put on a lavish spread. But Selina’s warning is still one of those ice-water moments which Nolan and his brother/co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan scatter throughout this overly baroque film; they help snap it into place. Though the second half of the story is about Wayne getting his comeuppance from Bane, all that sadistic breaking-down doesn’t carry a fraction of the weight of Selina’s reminder of just how much daylight there is between the two of them, between their classes. That distance is highlighted in another of the screenplay’s more bracing moments (one of the few where Nolan turns down the over-amped sound design and lets his actors just talk). Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the real star of the film) is a patrol officer whom Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) has his eye on. By talking about his childhood as an orphan in a Wayne- funded institution, Blake reminds his one-time benefactor of how alike they are under the skin (“Not a lot of people know what it feels like to be angry in your bones”) but also of the gulf that separates them. Later, Wayne realizes that in his exile from crime-fighting he’s let some of the details fall by the side, in particular the funding of the orphanage in which Blake grew up. It’s
82 CHRIS BARSANTI the sort of careless aristocratic oversight that would make Selina’s claws itch. The Dark Knight Rises is obviously no editorial grounded in reality: the epic improbability of the great, stirring third-act street battle between the Gotham PD and Bane’s henchmen should make that clear. Nolan isn’t staking out a side in any political debate, unless it’s taking a side to point out that the more oppressed a city’s underclass feels, the more easily it could be swayed by a malevolent demagogue. His film takes money out of the comic-book realm of cops and robbers (i.e., currency as a mere McGuffin to be stolen and retrieved), and makes it a thing that matters; most especially to those who don’t have it and crave the freedom they believe it can impart.
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HONORABLE MENTIONS
Beware of Mr. Baker
Ginger Baker was a brilliant jazz drummer whose polyrhythmic beats and hammer-of-the-gods solos formed the spine of bands like Cream and invented the idea of the rock drummer. Baker jammed with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and was proclaimed an equal by the likes of jazz great Max Roach. He was also a wild-eyed drug fiend with a gift for burning every bridge in sight. In Jay Bulger’s phenomenally entertaining documentary, everyone from Eric Clapton to Johnny Rotten opines on Baker’s musical genius and near-evil personality. “The Devil takes care of his own,” says one ex-wife. After Baker (living at the time of filming in a South African compound whose gate had a sign reading “Beware Mr. Baker”) smashes Bulger’s nose with his cane, the director himself would likely agree.
The Cabin in the Woods
In this spit-take funny, autopsy-like satire of horror-film mythology, J.J. Abrams alum Drew Goddard makes up for his involvement with Lost by directing (and co- writing with Joss Whedon) this knowing gag about a prototypical band of buffed and hormonal college kids who go for a weekend to a prototypical isolated cabin.
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Murderous mayhem ensues, but with an inside-out twist—why does the film keep cutting away to a high- tech control room where Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins are bickering?—that’s as superbly executed as it is devastatingly funny.
The Deep Blue Sea
Rachel Weisz was deservedly raved about for her work in this gloriously melodramatic Terence Davies adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play about a judge’s wife in 1950s London who dives into a torrid affair with a handsome RAF officer (Tom Hiddleston). Even beyond Weisz’s explosive performance, this is a sumptuously moody, rainy, and romantic (read self-destructive, not candlelit-dinner) love story in which happily-ever-after doesn’t seem to be an option.
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
“The first thing to do, my love, is arrange to be born in Paris.” That’s the life advice legendary fashion editrix Diana Vreeland gives her biographer George Plimpton in this sparkling, joyful biographical documentary. “After that, everything flows quite naturally.” If that line speaks to you, then everything else about this spry look at Vreeland’s manic, beauty-seeking life will sing out loud and clear.
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Django Unchained
Too bad Quentin Tarantino loses the thread at the end, otherwise this spaghetti western / slave vengeance mashup about a slave (Jamie Foxx) who teams up with a bounty hunter (the great Christoph Waltz, deserving any and all praise) to rescue his wife from the clutches of a sadistic plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) would have been a blast. Still highly watchable, but mostly because of Waltz’s brilliant comic timing and Samuel L. Jackson’s subversive turn as a house slave determined to keep the other slaves in their place.
Haywire / Magic Mike
Showing he’s not just today’s most prolific and consistently interesting major American filmmaker, but also the most unpredictable, Steven Soderbergh knocked out two films this year that succeeded on completely different terms. Haywire might have been just a straightforward revenge film about a double-crossed mercenary (surprisingly credible MMA star Gina Carano), but Soderbergh surrounds her with a strong cast (Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas) and films everything with such swift, bone- cracking élan that the predictable story seems fresh and invigorating. As for Magic Mike, a goofy male adult dancer story co-written by star Channing Tatum that layers the Horatio Alger myth with Florida tackiness, any film that nearly surpasses Dazed and Confused for the
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all-time greatest Matthew McConaughey character— dominating the screen here as Tatum’s leathery-skinned, wild-eyed mentor—is worth your time and money.
The Imposter
The year’s (and maybe the decade’s) winner of the stranger-than-fiction prize is the incredible story of Frederic Bourdin, the French serial con artist who successfully pretended to be a Texas family’s missing son; even though he was many years older and with no physical resemblance. Director Bart Layton cleverly packages his documentary as a mix of real-life interviews and staged reenactments whose glossy cinematography and potent soundtrack enhance the drama and mystery without cheapening it.
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
Although Taxi to the Dark Side director Alex Gibney overdoes it on the ominous religious iconography in his fury-inducing documentary about pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church, it’s not hard to understand the impulse. The story he centers on, of the possibly hundreds of boys who were abused by a priest at a Wisconsin school for the deaf, is so sickening as to justify the horror-film mood. What takes Gibney’s film to the next level, though, is not just the empathetic way
87 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 he lets the victims tell their stories, but how he follows the scandal to its logical endpoint, the Vatican, and reveals the deafening silence that has greeted those searching there for justice or even compassion.
Only the Young
With its aimless youths, abandoned mini-golf course, wide open skies, and deadland exurban settings, you would think this pop documentary about a couple of born-again Christian punk skateboarders and the girl they both (kinda) like in a small California town would be afflicted with all kinds of teenage wasteland ennui. But Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet’s short, sweet, lovely film has more of an Amy Heckerling/Cameron Crowe vibe. It’s a big-hearted and melancholic ode to the drifting romance of youth.
Promised Land
In Gus Van Sant’s comic drama about the economic and emotional pressures that a dormant economy and the false promise of easy money (in this case, signing leases for natural gas wells) put on a small town, Frances McDormand and Matt Damon play salespeople who've become almost sincere about the con games they play with rural people’s fears. Damon co-wrote the finely nuanced screenplay with his co-star John Krasinksi (The Office), who plays an environmental activist out to stop Damon and McDormand.
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Sleepwalk with Me
Standup comic Mike Birbiglia’s debut film is based on his moving, hilarious one-man show about his life- threatening sleep disorder. The film looks great and expands on the source material to provide a glimpse at the life of a would-be comedian trying to build a career for himself when he’s not even sure how to construct a vaguely adult life. A canny and heartwarming comedy that rarely sells the audience short.
Wreck-It-Ralph
Although Pixar’s name is nowhere on this superbly satisfying Disney animated film about a villain (voiced with winsome vulnerability by the great John C. Reilly) from an out-of-date video game who goes on a quest through an arcade’s worth of other games for heroic fulfillment, their patented mix of cleverly conceived high-concept story and lump-in-the-throat sentiment is all over it. (More so, in fact, than Pixar’s beautiful but dramatically inert Celtic-archer-princess adventure Brave, released earlier in the year.)
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THE 5 WORST FILMS OF 2012
1 — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Ken Stott, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Graham McTavish, James Nesbitt, Stephen Hunter, Dean O'Gorman, Aidan Hunter
The grinding, disappointing first installment of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth trilogy has a couple things going for it (Martin Freeman as Bilbo, particularly) but much more against it (sludgy screenplay, far too many orcs, a cheap look that belies the massive budget).
YEARS FROM NOW, when Peter Jackson is winding up The Silmarillion 5: The Fall of Gondolin, audiences may look back fondly on a simpler time when it was believed that one film per book was a smart ratio. Given that even a piffle of a novel like Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay can apparently be sprawled out over two films (starting in 2014), if somebody were to tackle the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time in these days of blockbuster bloat, it would end up as an eight-film series. Of course, filmmakers adapting books that don’t feature orcs,
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vampires, or zombie apocalypses (like Tom Stoppard and Joe Wright with Anna Karenina), still have to figure out how to whack all of a work of classic literature down to just one film. For Jackson’s take on The Hobbit, his freedom to sprawl the narrative over three films also gives him license to indulge in the same tricks and tics that gummed up the works so direly in Return of the King. Meaning: a whole server-farm’s worth of animated orcs to keep goosing the action along whenever it threatens to flag, and a script too often shorn of the source material’s grandeur and playfulness. The unfortunate thing is that Tolkien’s book didn’t need any goosing. He knocked out that brisk, rollicking read as a bedtime tale to read to his children; only later did it become the genesis of his Middle-earth mythos. It starts in much the same way as Fellowship of the Ring, with a hobbit being asked by a mysterious wizard to leave his comfortable home for a dangerous eastward adventure to help rid the world of a great evil. But instead of enjoying the unique aspects of a book that was chattier and more fanciful than the trilogy, Jackson and his screenwriting team (Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and the film’s one-time director Guillermo del Toro) are clearly trying to thread the trilogies together so that ultimately all six films will be seen as one body of work. The greatest differences between the two may end up being of a technical nature, with the Hobbit films having been shot in a new 48 frames per second format (more on that later).
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The most exasperating part of The Hobbit’s failure is that Jackson couldn’t have been more right casting Martin Freeman as the young Bilbo Baggins. With his daffy nature, blinking-eye nervousness, pointed wit, and ability to pivot instantly from comedy to vulnerable emoting, Freeman perfectly grounds the story’s swirling adventurousness. After two brief expository scenes (shades of Return of the King’s inability to end), one of which includes Frodo (Elijah Wood, whose dewy-eyed earnestness is not missed) and the older Bilbo (Ian Holm), Freeman takes over. It’s a very simple treat just to watch his back-and-forth with Gandalf (Ian McKellan), with whom he acts like a fussy British shopkeeper trying to brush off a pesky salesman. By appealing to his childhood sense of adventure, Gandalf ropes Bilbo into joining a ragtag band of dwarves marching east to liberate their lost mountain kingdom from the clutches of the dragon Smaug. But only after they’ve plundered Bilbo’s pantry. From this point on, the film becomes less of a lark than a galloping series of nonstop chases. The few standout scenes come straight from Tolkien’s puckish love of word play; particularly the life-or-death game of riddles Bilbo has to play with Gollum (Andy Serkis). The scenes Jackson has added do little but clutter up the story. A detail from Tolkien’s appendices in which Gandalf has a side meeting with other members of the White Council fills in backstory for the Lord of the Rings but is dramatically inert, save for one illustrative note, in which Gandalf acts like a caught-in-the-act schoolboy
92 CHRIS BARSANTI under the stern gaze of his master, Saruman (Christopher Lee). Another long running plot thread introduces an orc warlord, who rated only one brief mention in Tolkien’s novel, in order to give the leader of the dwarf contingent, Thorin (Richard Armitage), a nemesis and also somebody to chase the heroes. An argument could be made that Jackson needed to add this new orc into the mix to speed along the book’s plot, which was more interested in playful dialogue and the textures of this fascinating world. But would the plot have needed any added speed if Jackson had simply kept it to one film, even one approaching three hours in length? As it stands, the first film concludes with the characters barely able to see the Lonely Mountain, and hours to go before the story will come to its end. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Not content with the spectacular New Zealand vistas that bring an otherworldly gleam to almost every outdoor scene or his crack CGI animators, Jackson introduces a new gimmick here: shooting at 48 fps instead of the traditional 24. It won’t look much different for anybody seeing it in a theater equipped with 48 fps 3-D tech. While this adds a tone of richness and vibrancy to the film’s already eye- popping colors, particularly when seen in 3-D, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. The other result of shooting at 48 fps is that many scenes appear sped-up. The herky-jerk movements and tonal flatness to many of the heavily CGI scenes—particularly a nearly endless battle sequence deep underneath the Misty Mountains—give
93 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 much of the film the same dulling texture as an animated story segment in a video game. There’s no way around it: because of the new shooting method, the film’s close-up scenes often look cheap and chintzy, when it is aiming to be grand and overpowering. Bilbo’s first reaction to Gandalf’s entreaty is to spurn the whole idea of adventures: “Nasty things … make you late for dinner.” He’s right, of course, but in the end he won’t care, because for all the pain and agony and even heartache that will afflict him by the end of The Hobbit, he will also have wonders and discovered strengths beyond his reckoning. With its bloated running time, overabundance of orcs, and frequently rinky-dink look, Jackson’s film isn’t ultimately the kind of adventure worth delaying dinner for.
2 — 2016: Obama’s America
Directors: Dinesh D’Souza, John Sullivan
Watching Dinesh D’Souza’s slickly produced but thinly argued anti-Obama screed is like being stuck for too long in a room with that one lefty friend who starts frothing at the mouth when hearing the name “George W. Bush.”
“Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right, and America be downsized.” —Dinesh D’Souza
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THE POLISHED AND FALLACIOUS documentary 2016: Obama’s America presents two opposing worldviews. One is based in the “American dream,” where free markets, individual choice, and unchallenged military might create an “empire of ideas.” The other is the “collectivist,” Communist model of top-down planning, beloved by the radical “anti-colonialist” left. Without getting into an argument about socialism versus capitalism—and the film ignores nations that blend the two—it is safe to say that 2016 vastly oversimplifies the contrast to make its argument. That argument favors the “American Dream,” as we might guess, given that the film is co-directed by Dinesh D’Souza and based on his bestseller The Roots of Obama’s Rage. The documentary makes the case that Barack Obama is a man obsessed with fulfilling the “dream” of his dead father, a staunch anti-colonialist, so much so that he is actively working to degrade America as a world power. While this goal has been camouflaged thus far, the film contends, were Obama to be reelected, his true radicalism would be unleashed. To illustrate this threat, the film features a picture of Ben Franklin, set aflame. 2016’s tactic of calling its target un-American is a ratcheting up of the approach used during the 2000s, when many books and films argued that Bush administration policies clashed with American values like accountable democracy and freedom of the press. But, apart from individuals with unhealthy fixations on
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Bush or Cheney, few were saying that the purpose of that administration was the destruction of America. D’Souza’s film (co-directed by John Sullivan, who produced Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Ben Stein’s pro-creationist documentary from 2008) takes up the new mode, via talking points lifted from his scurrilous 2010 Forbes article “How Obama Thinks.” After giving a short autobiographical introduction of himself as an Indian immigrant who attended Dartmouth before joining the Reagan administration, D’Souza first posits that he and Obama have a lot in common: mixed-race heritage, Ivy League education, same birth year (the film avoids the birther controversy, simply stating that Obama was born in Hawaii). He then expresses confusion about how Obama in his first term has “act[ed] inexplicably,” before listing his alleged offenses, such as gutting defense, raising the deficit, and cozying up to enemies abroad. From here, D’Souza literally takes a page from Obama’s book (one of the film’s more effective tactics), noting the president’s interest in his absentee father, a Kenyan economist enamored of the anti-colonialism espoused by many African intellectuals of the time. The film takes this interest as evidence that the son has absorbed the same thinking. D’Souza flies around the world interviewing people with tangential connections to Obama. His two biggest gets are an old friend of Barack Obama, Sr., who says that father and son hold the same political views, and the president’s half- brother, George Obama, who thinks African
96 CHRIS BARSANTI colonization was not such a bad thing and only met Barack Jr. once when he was a child. It’s hardly a slam- dunk. A richer vein of study might have come from the film’s investigation of Obama’s legendary pragmatism and pursuit of whatever-works solutions, which seems suspicious to D’Souza. A lengthy interview with scholar Shelby Steele provides one of the more fascinating segments, with Steele unpacking the psychology of how Obama negotiated being black in modern America and claiming he was always angling for bargain and compromise. It’s an interesting, if controversial, argument that seems to come from Steele’s 2007 book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. But it utterly fails to prove D’Souza’s contention that Obama is trying to tear down America. If anything, Steele’s position that Obama is a constant “bargainer” contradicts D’Souza’s paranoid belief in Obama’s “doctrinaire extremism.” To support this case, D’Souza digs into the Fox News playbook circa 2008, running down the list of the president’s radical “friends” (Bill Ayers, Edward Said). D’Souza also reminds us of the rabid fulminations of Obama’s old pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But when D’Souza starts claiming that Obama—whose broader use of the drone program has expanded on the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist strategies—somehow approves of those drone-targeted jihadis as anti- colonialist “freedom fighters,” the film abandons all logic.
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This is a shift from the start of 2016, when D’Souza presents himself as a likeably nerdy iconoclast trying to parse the roots of his conservatism and the president’s liberalism. (One of his snarkier asides—calling liberal academia’s obsession with the tragedies of colonialism “oppression studies, if you will”—suggests a wit that too rarely surfaces elsewhere in the film.) But his Reagan-forged Cold War ethos of winner-take-all geopolitics, strangely unintellectual indifference to proving his points, and blithe assumptions of a pro- Obama media bias, quickly moves the film into the realm of paranoia. It’s at least a sharp-looking polemic, with lush cinematography and a keen editing rhythm that give the impression of seriousness the film sorely lacks.
Note: 2016 earned well over $30 million at the box office in 2012, making it the second most-successful documentary of all time. Ironically, another hyperventilating screed from the opposite political viewpoint, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, is still at the top of that list.
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3 — The Intouchables
Directors: Olivier Nakache, Eric Toledano
Cast: François Cluzet, Omar Sy, Anne Le Ny, Audrey Fleurot, Clothilde Mollet, Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Cyril Mendy
This hit French comedy-drama about a black ex- con hired to look after a wealthy white quadriplegic tries to make audiences feel good for all the wrong reasons.
IF YOU FEEL CONFUSED during The Intouchables, that may be because you have the sensation of being in the wrong film. Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s film is ostensibly about a wealthy white Parisian quadriplegic being nursed by an untrained black man from the projects. This outline draws on some rather egregious race clichés, as well as sports film conventions, in which scrappy underdogs with more heart than skill band together to show up that team from the rich school. While this movie offers no sports, no big game, and very little structure, it has elements of this formula, through protagonists who repeatedly shock those who underestimate them and tricky plot elements glossed over by a rousing musical montage. It feels like the film should end in a tie-breaking three-point shot as the clock ticks down to 00:00. It didn’t have to be this way. The plot of The Intouchables is a grabber, all the more so for being based on a true story. Jittery and bombastic Driss (Omar Sy,
99 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 who won the 2012 Best Actor César Award for his performance) shows up in the Versailles-like mansion of quadriplegic Philippe (François Cluzet) to interview for a caregiver position. After an exchange with Philippe and his assistant Magalie (Audrey Fleurot) that’s more argument than interview, Driss makes clear he’s just there so they can sign a sheet saying he tried to find a job, which will enable him to get government benefits. He’s asked back the next day and, despite having absolutely no training and a miserable attitude, he’s hired. What makes this a story worth telling is Philippe’s interest in Driss. Although never said outright, it’s obvious he wants a friend, not a nurse. Driss’ initial incompetence and lack of compassion come as a relief to Philippe, who can only move his wheelchair by adjusting a control with his mouth and is sick of being pitied. For his part, Driss, who has done prison time for robbery and has just been kicked out of his hardworking mother’s overcrowded apartment, is desperately in need of focus. The friendship that develops is richly evoked through a cheery rapport and rough badinage that speaks to both actors’ considerable skills. But The Intouchables gets into trouble right away, hampered by herky-jerk plotting and scripting-by- numbers. Planting Driss like some alien from Paris’s run-down banlieues inside the tight-knit community of Philippe’s mansion suggests a fish-out-of-water story. The few glimpses we see of his life outside the mansion only mark him as “other”: working to redirect his gang-
100 CHRIS BARSANTI bound younger brother or trying to please his frustrated mother. A subplot involving the widowed Philippe’s bratty teenage daughter (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) introduces a few laughs before being summarily discarded. Driss’ attempts to woo Magalie are just another joke and cliché: the self-assured black man (here, Senegalese) pursuing the snooty and frowning white woman, who acts as a foil for her suitor’s bottomless vivacity. When she first sees him in a suit, she’s assigned a punch line: “You look like Obama.” Whether or not the film understands the offensively laughable comparison between Driss and Obama (whom he does not remotely resemble), this moment underlines that Nakache and Toledano’s film has much to answer for with regard to its race politics. For starters, it buries the charismatic Sy under a pile of stereotypes. Contrasted with the stiff-necked whites in Philippe’s mansion, Driss is all id, grinning and yelling and cursing and even (sigh) showing them how to dance. He introduces Philippe to weed, can’t stand Philippe’s beloved opera (after all, “Music is something you can dance to”), and doesn’t even seem able to read. In return for all his rootsy energy, Driss is introduced to the finer things in life, as though he were a colonial subject to be civilized. In a word, The Intouchables is the latest incarnation of that cinematic standby, the Magical Negro. Even for the few minutes we see Driss apart from Philippe, he’s distracted from his own life by his employer’s needs, a sign of Driss’ worthy devotion. Ultimately, Driss is only
101 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 here to serve as a life-affirming fount of raucous energy to cure Philippe’s ennui and find him a girlfriend. The least the film could have done was allow him a scintilla of dignity in the process.
4 — Rock of Ages
Director: Adam Shankman
Cast: Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Paul Giamatti, Russell Brand, Mary J. Blige, Malin Akerman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise
The Off-Broadway hair-metal jukebox musical is turned into a depressingly uninspired karaoke skit that not even a Shakespeare-quipping Russell Brand and a fiercely dedicated Tom Cruise can save.
THE DANGERS OF the jukebox musical are well established, evident in the shows that opened and closed on Broadway in less time than it took to read this sentence. Of course, the runaway success of a couple of those shows (Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys) ensure that people will keep trying to jam songs from the likes of Johnny Cash, Elvis, and the Beach Boys into show after show. Rock of Ages, the weirdly unkillable hair-metal mash- up that’s been playing Off-Broadway for years, ducks the biggest weakness in the jukebox model by ditching
102 CHRIS BARSANTI the one-artist idea. Instead, the tourist-baiting stage show offers a package of 1980s hits sure to tug at the memories of nostalgic Gen Xers. It’s a big hooey of a romance set against the backdrop of some rock-hating PMRC-style prudes doing battle with a Whisky-a-Go- Go-like rock club. As long as you can crank Poison’s Greatest Hits up to 11, just about anything can work for eight shows a week, it seems. That’s not the case when it comes to Adam Shankman’s film version. More karaoke playlist than anything else, it offers glimpses of the casting genius that characterized Shankman’s Hairspray. But the charismatic pros here seem constrained rather than unleashed. Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin are the picture of bewigged ludicrousness as Lonny and Dennis, who run the Bourbon Room, a Sunset Strip den of iniquity that has attracted the ire of the mayor’s bluestocking wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Brand and Baldwin vamp in their “rock and roll” togs like it’s all good fun while Zeta-Jones snarls her way through her scenes, a villain in a pressed Talbots pantsuit. Among Patricia’s targets is Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise), the frontman for a band that looks like Guns n’ Roses in their Appetite for Destruction heyday. When first glimpsed in his cavern of a dressing room, Jaxx rises in a slow uncoiling motion from a nest of silk sheets and naked groupies’ limbs, all tattooed torso (most notable piece of art: two handguns angled at his crotch) and bugged-out stare, the next incarnation of the Lizard King. Cruise conveys Jaxx’s dazed and confused fugue
103 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 with an otherworldly determination that gives the film its only near-glimmer of authenticity. His singing voice is a couple notches below his performance, but certainly good enough for this assortment of Def Leppard and Bon Jovi covers. Jaxx throws an immense shadow across the film. Everyone either lusts after him (his furniture- demolishing sex scenes with a Rolling Stone reporter played by Malin Ackerman provide some of the film’s few genuine laughs) or pines for his attention. But it’s not enough. That feeling is reinforced every time the two leads whisper onto screen. The pallid Julianne Hough plays Sherrie, the prototypical small-town girl who comes to Hollywood to become a star, but first falls in love with a bartender named Drew (Diego Boneta). Within half a day of their meeting, they’re in a we’re-in- love montage scored by Poison, only to break up a few hours later and thankfully disappear from view before reuniting for a power ballad or two. The preposterousness of this romance is not in itself a problem: musical theater would be doomed if it were. But the lack of chemistry ensures that the film crashes to a stop whenever they share the screen. Even more troubling, the film is painfully oblivious to the provenance of its music. It’s one thing to have the cast burst into song whenever the opportunity for a car commercial-approved rock anthem presents itself: there’s nothing wrong with people singing Warrant for no particular reason. But it’s quite another thing to have a character like Drew be an aspiring musician who is
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pouring all of his soul into writing a song that’s actually Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s not his song, so how can the audience be expected to care whether he finishes and performs it? It would be nice to think that Shankman and his team were laughing to themselves as they threw this greatest- hits playlist of a film together. After all, they do give us Russell Brand quoting Hamlet at a particularly scummy crowd, “You foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” Maybe Rock of Ages gets this joke, even if it doesn’t seem so.
5 — The Five-Year Engagement
Director: Nicholas Stoller
Cast: Jason Segal, Emily Blunt, Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Rhys Ifans
Jason Segal’s grindingly long romantic comedy suffers from the smug belief that affable stars can compensate for a lazy lack of purpose.
A FEW YEARS FROM NOW, The Five-Year Engagement might be remembered—or better, forgotten—as a blip on the radar screens of cowriter and star Jason Segal and producer Judd Apatow’s careers. That’s the best case. In the worst case, if, for instance, they go on to make more movies like this one, together or apart, The Five-Year Engagement might look like the beginning of the end.
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Segal plays Tom, another iteration of his gangly, overenthusiastic, too-broadly-smiling goon character, here a sous chef at a popular San Francisco restaurant. Emily Blunt plays Violet, a psychology student who dreams of securing a teaching slot at Berkeley. At the film’s start, Tom is pulling off one of those elaborate proposals with lit candles, friends enlisted to assist, and memories evoked of their meet-cute. The engagement is announced at a preternaturally beautiful wine country inn, and all seems perfect. Then the hammer comes down: Violet gets a teaching job, but it’s at the University of Michigan. So Tom hangs up his apron and tags along to the Midwest, starting the long dark night of his culinary soul. Prior to this, The Five-Year Engagement is happy to bumble along in a halfheartedly genial fashion. But by sending Tom and Violet off to a generically imagined Michigan to tear their relationship apart, the film takes on quite a bit more than it can bear. Bright and gauzy yuppie bantering in soothingly pretty Restoration Hardware-approved settings is the proper speed for this story. But once the couple is metaphorically buried in the Midwest, Tom loses his zest. Unhappily working at a sandwich shop, he grows a beard, starts hunting (you know, because it’s Michigan), and stacks up resentments against Violet—who is either just implausibly incurious or an extraordinarily bad psychologist. This is all well before Tom realizes that Violet’s department head, Winton (Rhys Ifans, working almost as hard to save this
106 CHRIS BARSANTI movie as he did in Notting Hill), is angling to replace him in her affections. A lot goes on during the film’s death march sojourn in Michigan, little of it funny. The screenplay—by Segal and director Nicholas Stoller—wants to show how detours from a life plan can metastasize into greater miseries. It also tries to throw in a few jokes, so viewers can forget that what they’re watching is so miserable (a good deal of the film follows Tom slowly losing his mind from depression). Efforts to alleviate the gloom include a crossbow bolt in the leg, a toe amputated because of frostbite, some grotesque Asian stereotypes, and an almost-sex scene involving potato salad and hot sauce from so deep in left field that it could leave David Lynch wondering what the hell was going on. The Five-Year Engagement constitutes a tremendous drop from the Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which not only riffed smartly off Segal’s overwrought intensity, but honestly mined its heartbreak for both laughs and tears without compromising either. Here, Stoller nearly ruins the script’s precious few jokes by repeatedly cutting too late and relying on laughing reaction shots. What initially comes off as amiable turns quickly to smug and self- satisfied: see, isn’t this funny? The answer is no. A thousand times, no.
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YET MORE LISTS
Best Director
David Ayer — End of Watch Kathryn Bigelow — Zero Dark Thirty Leos Carax — Holy Motors David Cronenberg — Cosmopolis Walter Salles — On the Road
Best Actress
Amy Adams — The Master Helene Bergsholm — Turn Me On, Dammit! Marion Cotillard — Rust and Bone Jennifer Lawrence — Silver Linings Playbook Rachel Weisz — The Deep Blue Sea
Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis — Lincoln Philip Seymour Hoffman — The Master Denis Levant — Holy Motors Matthias Schoenaerts — Rust and Bone Jean-Louis Trintignant — Amour
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Best Supporting Actress
Marina Fois — Polisse Frances McDormand — Promised Land Sarah Silverman — Take This Waltz Tilda Swinton — Moonrise Kingdom Rebel Wilson — Pitch Perfect
Best Supporting Actor
Matthew Macfadyen — Anna Karenina Matthew McConaughey — Bernie Scoot McNairy — Killing Them Softly Viggo Mortensen — On the Road Christoph Waltz — Django Unchained
Best Screenplay
Cloud Atlas Compliance Looper Sound of My Voice Zero Dark Thirty
Best Soundtrack
Marley The Master Moonrise Kingdom On the Road
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Searching for Sugar Man
Best Cinematography
Anna Karenina The Deep Blue Sea Killing Them Softly Wuthering Heights Zero Dark Thirty
Most Overrated
The Avengers The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Life of Pi Lincoln Moonrise Kingdom Prometheus This is 40
Most Overlooked
360 Bernie Chicken with Plums Sound of My Voice The Well-Digger’s Daughter
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DVD REVIEWS
The Princess Has a Sword: Snow White and the Huntsman
Director: Rupert Sanders Cast: Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Sam Claflin, Sam Spruell, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones
Sparkling visuals and wondrous fantasy-world imagineering can’t save this brawny, underwritten fairy tale from turning into just another clanging-sword battle film.
FAIRY TALES DON’T NEED to make sense. In fact, they usually work better when reason is forgotten altogether and pure elemental forces rule the story. If this were the case in Rupert Sanders’ visually smashing “reimagining” Snow White and the Huntsman, it might have had some of the thrust and drama it wants to possess. But as it stands, the film is left critically unmoored between the dark fantasy world of magic and fairies and the corporeal world of castles and armies. There is little room left for the romantic element critical to this story, or even emotion. The bones of the Snow White story remain visible, but not prominently. A kingdom in some unspecified
111 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 but vaguely medieval land is all sunshine and flowers. That is, until the widowed king battles an army of Cylon-looking soldiers who shatter into black glass shards when struck. Afterwards, he finds their beautiful blonde prisoner and takes her back to his castle. One bedroom seduction and knifing later, and she reveals herself to be Ravenna (Charlize Theron), a malevolent queen who has conquered kingdom after kingdom in her quest for eternal life. She lets her army in through the front gate, the kingdom falls, and the princess “with lips red as blood, hair as black as a raven’s wing” (Kristen Stewart, a limp presence behind her raccoon- eyed pout) is chucked into a prison tower. Even after this lunky wad of prologue, the story still takes time to click into gear. Years later, Ravenna is having an increasingly hard time keeping herself as young and beautiful as ever. Played by Theron as one of her patented semi-robotic ice queens with blazing eyes (not dissimilar from the one she played in this summer’s Prometheus), Ravenna is a vampiric spirit, literally sucking the life from any young girl she can find. The kingdom is similarly ravaged, the blooming fields having transformed into blackened ash. Completing the decadent scene is Ravenna’s white-blonde brother Finn (Sam Spruell), whose frantic need to serve her whims is played up for all its wincingly incestuous subtext. Only after Ravenna’s mirror—a shimmering disk that extrudes a liquid gold shrouded and faceless figure to speak to her as fawning seer and courtier—tells her that Snow White will be her undoing does she seem to
112 CHRIS BARSANTI remember the princess locked away in the castle. Response? Kill the girl, of course. When Snow White escapes, a furious Ravenna bellows, “I WANT HER HEART”, and dispatches the Huntsman (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth) to track Snow White down for said cardiac harvesting. Like the original Snow White tale, although romance is ultimately involved, the film is truly more concerned with the fight between beautiful young Snow White and the slowly withering old hag Ravenna. (The gender politics are none too subtle here, with Ravenna’s monstrousness keyed to her sensuality.) The Huntsman, a drunk who only took the Snow White job so Ravenna could use her dark arts to raise his dead wife back to life, supposedly falls for the princess while on the run, but there’s little evidence of that on screen. Just as the Huntsman is besotted with Snow White (who appears distractingly younger than he), along comes the grown-up version of William (Sam Claflin), her childhood sweetheart who now seems barely able to muster up any romantic interest in her. Both men’s motivations are as difficult to discern as why such a blood-thirsty despot as Ravenna kept Snow White alive all those years and why she hasn’t crushed the rebelling army led by William’s father, the duke. This wan love triangle between the pale princess and her suitors (one refined, one beastly) plays out against a chase so standard-issue that the characters actually escape into a place called The Dark Forest. There is some disappointment once it becomes clear that characters
113 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 will not run into the Dread Pirate Roberts, Princess Buttercup, ROUSs, or indeed anybody from The Princess Bride. The lack of narrative thrills enhanced by the muffled performances and hammy screenplay is remedied somewhat by the filmmaker’s keen eye for luminous scenery and inventive CGI work with the fairies, monsters, and soaring Gothic chambers that at least bring an element of wonder to the film. The lustrous visuals also bring welcome distraction from the strange sight of seeing actors like Toby Jones and Bob Hoskins digitally shrunk to play Snow White’s dwarves. (The less said about that, the better.) There’s nowhere any of this can end but a big battle. So of course, Snow White must eventually transform herself into a wispy Joan of Arc figure in gleaming armor and lead her army. Never mind that she’s spent most of her life cooped up in a dank dark cell speaking to nobody; back in the world a matter of days and here she is whipping the troops up like Henry V. Not much of anything in Snow White and the Huntsman makes sense, either as fairy tale or human drama. This is possibly why the commentary and making-of documentary on the DVD / Blu-ray set don’t have much to discuss besides platitudes about the director and explications of how one particular shot was attained. What else is there to say?
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In Clue, Communism is Just a Red Herring
Director: Jonathan Lynn
Cast: Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jane Wiedlin
The 1985 movie of the murder-mystery board game is just an excuse for this band of comic actors to play around with a locked-room sex farce that’s also a light satire on witch hunts.
“Husbands should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable.” —Mrs. White
BURIED DEEP IN AN EMAIL CHAIN being slung like Spider- man’s web from producer’s office to various screenwriters to yet other producers in Hollywood right now may reside infinite variations on this question: How do we remake the movie of the board-game Clue? That whole alien invasion angle didn’t work quite so well in Battleship, so perhaps going too far afield isn’t the best idea; though admittedly, that was a more limited game premise to build a film around, like trying to craft human drama out of Stratego. It’s extremely likely that nowhere in this abstracted moviemaking committee has anybody suggested, “Hey, how about making it into a sex farce that’s also an allegory for the McCarthy era?”
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That’s not just because it was already done but because such an idea would never fly. Except it did, in 1985. Somehow. The lamentably extras-free Blu-ray release of Clue: The Movie doesn’t include anything about the film’s genesis, so it’s difficult to know how producers must have taken the original pitch. Those who were skeptical were likely proven “right”, as the film wasn’t what anybody would call a hit. Likely somebody piped up and wondered why, in the dead middle of the Reagan ‘80s, were they putting out a movie based on a family board game which kept referencing the House Un-American Activities Committee in negative fashion? But somehow, such negative voices were silenced, and one of the decade’s more curious comedies was allowed to move ahead. The scenario cooked up by director Jonathan Lynn (later responsible for lowest-common-denominator infamies like The Whole Nine Yards) with co-writer John Landis (coming off a strong pop-horror stretch with Thriller and An American Werewolf in London) seems at first perfectly sensible for a locked-room murder mystery like Clue. On a dark and stormy night, several people arrive one by one at your prototypical gloomy and remote manor home. Not long after their arrival, there will be a murder, which they’ll have to solve before the police show up. Although everybody shows up with codenames from the game (Col. Mustard, and so on), their secrets are quickly bared by the arrival of their “guest”: a slimy blackmailer named Mr. Boddy (get it?) who is played by
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Fear singer Lee Ving as a hybrid of Robert De Niro and some Damon Runyon character. One Boddy is killed off in the few seconds after somebody turns out the lights, the guests start to panic and accuse, and more bodies start turning up. Leaving the untangling of the actual murders to the end—the bodies start piling up fairly quickly—the filmmakers spend most of the film’s beginning playing off the characters’ eccentricities and teasing out the real reasons they’ve been brought to the house. This entails a fair amount of double entendre that’s so broad it would make a vaudevillian cringe. It’s all about as deep as a Playboy cartoon circa 1959: the men (Christopher Lloyd, Martin Mull, Michael McKean) are buffoonish and leering, while the women (Eileen Brennan, Lesley Ann Warren, Madeline Kahn) are either sluttish or shrewish, and a bosomy maid (Colleen Camp) tips about in a Halloween-worthy get-up (lacy frills and all) to ensure that the men have plenty to bug their eyes out at. But in between the poor jokes robustly delivered, there creeps a light satire on the nature of McCarthyism and witch hunts. All of the characters have something to hide, but the mood of the time and the fact that everyone is politically connected delivers that extra edge of panic (homicidal, on occasion) which keeps the film rollicking toward farce. When panicked paranoia isn’t enough to keep the film moving, Lynn throws curveballs, like the singing telegram girl (Jane Wiedlin) who barely gets three words out before being shot dead or the sight of two crowds of people pulling on opposite sides of the
117 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 same door (one shouting “Let us in, let us in!”, the other, “Let us out! Let us out!”). Playing the butler Wadsworth, Tim Curry is alternately deadpan and clownish; he’s the arched- eyebrow center that keeps the whole enterprise together as much as possible (“I’m a butler, sir. I butle”). As crackerjack as the rest of the cast is—Kahn in particular, with her brittle and manic songbird voice—Curry is the standout here, orchestrating the mayhem with aplomb. He’s as gimmicky as the house’s honeycomb of secret passages or the multiple endings (each revealed a different murderer; at the time theaters ran different ones in the hopes of getting people back multiple times, while all three run together at the end of the Blu-ray disk). Wadsworth is also the only character who seems above casting aspersions; while the other guests are busy denying their secrets or gasping audibly when hearing about somebody who was a socialist, he’s simply trying to keep a lid on things.
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Everybody Was Right About Heaven’s Gate
Director: Michael Cimino Cast: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotton, Jeff Bridges
There is no more complexity to Michael Cimino’s 1980 epic than there is to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
IN HIS INTERVIEW on the Criterion Collection release of the 1980 Michael Cimino film Heaven’s Gate, a craggy Kris Kristofferson makes a strong appeal for the roundly maligned Western as a potent work of political cinema. As a leftie who had gone to Nicaragua and El Salvador to see first-hand the devastation still being wrought by American imperialism, Kristofferson sticks up for Cimino’s indictment of Manifest Destiny and robber baron greed at the end of the 19th century. Of course, he did star in the thing. But still, this is the iconoclast’s take, and an unpopular one after more than two decades of popular film history telling us that not only was Heaven’s Gate one of the greatest disasters in film history (it took in less than ten percent of the $40 million budget at the box office) but that it single-handedly ended the free-wheeling era of American filmmaking. Kristofferson’s view is echoed in an essay in the accompanying booklet (gorgeously put-together, it must be said) by film programmer Giulia D’Agnolo, who
119 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 notes approvingly the film’s cynical take on American expansionism:
Strangely enough, when the film came out, few critics commented on its take on the historical facts. Some accused Cimino of foggy Marxism, but most preferred to forget the film’s subject, concentrating their attacks instead on its cost (roughly $40 million) and its dramatic structure, or lack thereof.
D’Agnolo goes on to position Cimino’s film against a couple of its more successful contemporaries: The Empire Strikes Back, released just a few months earlier, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which hits screens the following year. She’s right in noting the “Manichean spirit” and “comic-book” nature of those films, against which Heaven’s Gate looks like a “beautiful anachronism” out of touch with the good-is-good and bad-is-bad Reagan era. Cimino’s mumbly dialogue and soft-focus cinematography owes more to the previous decade’s auterist works of floaty disconnection than the jazzed-up movie-serial blockbusters that audiences were delighted to have on tap. However, it’s wrong to suggest, as D’Agnolo and others have, that Heaven’s Gate is any kind of overlooked and misunderstood epic. Just because Cimino buys into a reflexively cynical worldview that served as the template for the kinds of films studios would no longer bankroll after his epic failure doesn’t,
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after all, mean his film achieves any kind of depth. There is arguably no more true complexity of thought to Cimino’s script than there is to Lawrence Kasdan’s for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The body counts are roughly the same and the villains just as one-note. The great differences are that Cimino’s heroes are much thinner on the ground and he doesn’t bother with much of a story. If this makes for a masterpiece, there are any number of student films that might be worth taking a look at. The script is a baggy mess loosely inspired by the Johnson County War of 1892. As in reality, masses of mercenaries in the pay of a cattleowners’ association flood into a Wyoming frontier town looking to restore order. They plan to do this by executing a list of 125 “thieves and anarchists”, all with the apparent blessing of state and national politicians. On one side is Sheriff James Averill (Kristofferson), facing down the invading army of gunmen led by Frank Canton (an effectively oily Sam Waterston). But even this story takes forever to emerge from the film’s murk. The greatest sin Cimino commits here is not actually playing fast and loose with the facts. (Although far from a docudrama, his film hews closer to the rather shocking actual events than many Hollywood films would.) What he doesn’t manage to do is carve any semblance of engaging drama or spectacle out of it. Handed a story that seems to embody the amoral bloodthirstiness and political cynicism that typified America’s Westward expansion, Cimino spends little time examining the roots of the conflict or its larger context.
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First, he buries the opening in a long and ultimately pointless sequence set at Harvard in 1870, where friends Averill and Billy Irvine (a cock-of-the-walk John Hurt) are graduating. There’s something grand and thrilling about these scenes at first, with all those sons of the landed gentry pouring through the school’s grand stone hallways (Oxford, actually, but who’s checking?). Bafflement begins after a convoluted speech by Irvine whose insouciance has students roaring and faculty grimacing but makes little or no sense. Confusion mounts when, later in the film, Irvine is only spotted occasionally in the shadow of Canton, calling into question why his friendship with Averill is made so notable early on. Then Cimino cuts to 20 years later out West. As in The Deer Hunter, he’s fascinated by the tribal ways of Eastern European immigrants, here seen flooding by the hundreds into a small Montana town. There’s something grand in Cimino’s overkill, with his trainloads of newcomers pouring down the fresh-built streets in improbable numbers. It’s like the Lower East Side on the Prairie. Although it never singles out any of them as actual characters (one of many factors that keeps viewers at arm’s length) the film will keep coming back to these immigrants, particularly in a gorgeously shot dance sequence in a gigantic roller skating rink that seems to be there only to mirror a dance scene from the Harvard sequence and show off David Mansfield’s thrumming and ribald period score. (T. Bone Burnett can be seen jamming on the dance stand.)
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If Cimino had been able to sustain that level of zeal throughout, with his impossibly beautiful bright green and blue mountainous vistas and sepia-smoked interiors (shot with particular care by Vilmos Zsigmond) and rapturous dances and celebrations, he might have had some kind of cracked masterpiece on the order of Coppola’s similarly crazed and unfocused Apocalypse Now. Like Coppola, he also ends his film in a flurry of violence, though Cimino’s final battle—assumedly meant to be an ironic comment on Custer’s Last Stand— is so illogically chopped together that it inspires head- scratching instead of gasps of awe. Cimino is smart enough to let artists like Mansfield and Zsigmond loose to create sonic and visual vistas of aching poetry, but is unable to do the same himself. As the film’s hero, Averill is utterly inadequate. Cimino is content to let him wander frowningly through the immigrant crowds and have the occasional dalliance with Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), the hooker with a heart of gold who’s also having a thing with one of Canton’s enforcers, Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken, feral yet spacey). But, as she puts it to Averill, “I never cheated on you. I always made Nate pay,” so perhaps calling it a love triangle is a bit much. Champion’s arc is just about as confused as Averill’s, as the two tragically dither in the face of seemingly inevitable annihilation. The same could be said about the creatively dithering and fussy Cimino, who doesn’t seem able or willing to generate credible interactions between his characters, so obsessed he is with ensuring
123 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 that, say, the type of nails used to knock his town together were period accurate. The Criterion DVD and Blu-ray release includes the 219-minute original release version of Heaven’s Gate. After a battery of vicious reviews, United Artists released it again in a 149-minute cut that also failed to generate much interest. Its failure could easily be blamed on critics or audiences who just didn’t understand its dark critique of the American mythos. But to say that not only pretends that what’s on screen is more competent than it is, but also ignores the fact that anti-Westerns from The Wild Bunch (1969) to McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)—the latter of which Cimino borrows much of his aesthetic from—were undercutting the heroic myth of American westward expansion for years.
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ESSAYS
What True Romance Did for Tony Scott and Hollywood
Note: Director Tony Scott committed suicide on August 19, 2012. This essay was originally published on August 23, 2012.
WHEN NEWS BROKE this week of Tony Scott’s suicide, he was usually identified as the director of Top Gun and several Denzel Washington films, not to mention brother / creative partner of the more critically respected Ridley Scott. More in-depth pieces mentioned Scott’s love of vehicles, speed, and editing rhythms that made a mockery of narrative cohesion. He left a body of work checkered with utter disasters and cock-eyed brilliance—a resume that would be envied by many arguably more talented directors. He whipsawed from Eurotrash vampire erotica dressed up as a high-end perfume ad (The Hunger) to glistening pectoral jingoism (Top Gun) to crackpot Southland surrealism (Domino) to overhyped action comedy (Beverly Hills Cop II) to frenzied computer-age surveillance paranoia (Enemy of the State). Scott’s films featured wickedly large and talented casts, a love of the smoky backdrop and billowing
125 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 curtains, and—for all the cocaine-jittery editing and camerawork—fairly simple A-B-C screenplays shorn of all but the most basic, blood-pumping dialogue. Most lines were best said through gritted teeth while pressing the accelerator. One of Scott’s films that somewhat broke free of this template was 1993’s True Romance. Scripted by Quentin Tarantino and his old buddy Roger Avary, it was snapped up by a major studio in the fecund afterglow following the 1992 detonation that was Reservoir Dogs. It featured Clarence (Christian Slater), an Elvis- worshipping comic-book geek who goes on the run with the proverbial golden-hearted hooker Alabama (Patricia Arquette) after killing her pimp (Gary Oldman). Everything ends up in a feather-strewn, John Woo-esque shootout with mobsters, movie producers, and the FBI. With its glossy cinematography and crowded cast of stars who wanted in on the next big thing, this was a turning point for Scott and Tarantino specifically, and Hollywood in general. For Scott, True Romance’s half-gritty and half-tongue- in-cheek attitude was a sign that he could produce a narrative more complex than the dunderheaded pap he’d been grinding out (The Last Boy Scout, Days of Thunder). For Tarantino, getting this screenplay produced by the likes of Scott showed he could be a major player, not just an indie darling. (According to Scott, after reading this script and Reservoir Dogs he wanted to direct them both; a then-nobody but impressively savvy Tarantino said, “You can only do
126 CHRIS BARSANTI one.”) What Hollywood received was an injection of fresh blood, a grindhouse mashup that was a slap in the face to all the “safe, geriatric, coffee-table dog shit” which is Clarence’s term for “quality filmmaking.” (Lest we forget, the Academy Awards were still in the Merchant Ivory business at the time.) Of course, it tanked at the box office and found a second life later on VHS and DVD, as these things do. Most audiences didn’t know what to do with Clarence’s sugar-hopped genre obsessions and how they bled into the running-from-the-Mob narrative. Elvis (Val Kilmer) himself pops by occasionally to get Clarence’s spine up. Ultraviolent Sonny Chiba and John Woo footage is spliced in like flashes from Clarence’s fevered mind, where plays out all his vengeful adolescent fantasies. Over all of this is grafted the dark fairy-tale mood of Badlands, both Alabama’s dozy Sissy Spacek narration and the chiming of “Tubular Bells”. In other words, exactly the sort of thing that you would expect word- wise and smart-ass movie-mad video-store clerks like Tarantino and Avary to come up with. It was an ambitious mix, and one that Tarantino as a director wouldn’t himself have been able to pull off so successfully at the time. Scott uses plenty of his trademark visual clichés (all those blowing curtains) but also brings a darker, more luminous aspect to his camerawork that gives everything a curious and bloody beauty. He is also able to marshal cunning performances from each of his actors, even Bronson Pinchot in a should-be thankless role as a producer’s gofer. As in
127 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 much of Tarantino’s early writing, the joy is in the small asides, the politically incorrect dialogue curlicues that spin off from the main action but provide the story’s real juice. In one deservedly legendary exchange about the ethnic ancestry of Sicilians, Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken expertly filet each other line by line until the tension practically sings. (You would have to wait until the opening scenes of Inglorious Basterds to see another Tarantino conversation so taut with expectation and threat.) The assuredness Scott brings to every scene in this cameo-littered film shows how good he could be with the right script, and how far Tarantino still had to go as a filmmaker. With 1994’s Pulp Fiction and 1997’s Jackie Brown, Tarantino proved he could write crackling dialogue and craft smart and knowing genre pieces. But as a director it would take him until 2003’s vibrantly- shot Kill Bill: Vol. 1, to prove himself a true filmmaker, and not just a writer who also directed. For his part, Scott moved on to more interesting material. Though films like Spy Game and Man on Fire did not come close to what he accomplished with True Romance, they had far more flair than his previous work and were many degrees more inventive than what his fellow blockbuster directors were doing through the 1990s and 2000s. Scott’s style also prefigured, with admittedly less depth of field, both the frantic chaos of post-9/11 storytelling from directors like Paul Greengrass and the froth of punchy pulp violence and self-referential humor
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that today seems almost de rigueur (sometimes, oppressively so). In True Romance, Scott came close to achieving that sublimely subversive mainstream pulp concoction which Tarantino took another decade to perfect.
This is All There Is?:
The Avengers, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and the Boredom of Lessened Expectations
MAY 4, 2012 IS A DATE that deserves to go down in entertainment history as the culmination of one of the greatest marketing offensives of all time. Starting in the summer of 2008, when Marvel Studios released the first Iron Man, audiences have been treated to a succession of supercharged superhero flicks like Iron Man and Thor. For all their respective merits and defects, those films can now be seen as little more than the initial building- blocks for the box office smasheroo that was to follow. By the time The Avengers was released in the United States on May 4, with its market-tested heroes and cash in the bank—opening a week and a half early in foreign markets, it had practically already earned back its gargantuan production budget well before America’s now-ritualistic midnight fanboy screenings—it was a preordained success. That the film would be a hit with
129 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 audiences was almost as assured as Disney’s other big spring release, John Carter, being doomed to failure. There’s more than a little genius to this. Remember, this is an age when most totems of big Hollywood filmmaking have become less than trustworthy. We’re not quite at the level of panic that afflicted the studios in the Easy Rider-era when all their old genres and stars so suddenly stopped working, but the lack of certainty in the industry now feels endemic. The Avengers films are something else. Even the installments seen as less successful, like The Incredible Hulk (the Edward Norton one) and Captain America, each took in well over a quarter-billion dollars worldwide. For Marvel and Disney to first spent years engineering an entire series of hit films with a broad diversity of stars and characters and directors (Kenneth Branagh to Jon Favreau) and then bring all those personalities together in a titanic conclusion that can play as well in Karachi as it does in Indianapolis, is astonishing. There is the film itself to consider, however, and “astonishing” is not the descriptor one would use. To see what is missing from the equation in The Avengers, it might be instructive to consider another sure-fire success that also opened in American theaters on May 4. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel has nothing in common with The Avengers, except in one critical area: a nearly complete lack of creative risk-taking. Although The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel doesn’t have the advantage of support from an entertainment- complex juggernaut, not to mention already existing
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characters to build from, its story and people feel just as market-researched as those found in the 3D-equipped theater next door. At its helm is director John Madden, who has shown in films like Shakespeare in Love and Mrs. Brown that he can easily put together pleasing middle- brow dramas for the mainstream arthouse set. Packing the screen is a wealth of graying British acting talent, any one of whom could ably carry a film on their own. The story, in which some British pensioners think they’ve found a bargain retirement palace in India only to discover it’s far more decrepit than they’d thought, is smartly calibrated to give each performer just enough drama for a mini-epiphany. (The script reportedly went through almost 30 drafts.) A racist Maggie Smith discovers the error of her ways, a quiet Tom Wilkinson finds out that a childhood secret is not at all what he’d thought, and a put-upon Bill Nighy realizes what everybody else knows: his wife is a detestable person. And so on. Nothing too earth-shattering, mind you, just enough to allow each actor to show off their range. Pretty photography, too. It’s all very smoothly done but without a hint of surprise or revelation. The same can be said for The Avengers. The plot is the usual kind of comic guff about getting possession of a superpowerful glowing cube which could spell the end of the world. (Again.) To stop said apocalypse, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury gathers the heroes of the earlier installments into a ragtag band of hyper-sensitive misfits (including a couple non- superheroes like Jeremy Renner and Scarlett Johansson
131 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 who don’t seem to deserve their own films). They bicker amusingly, thanks to director / writer Joss Whedon (whose trademark wit is present only in occasional sparks during this lumbering enterprise), and then spend a lot of time in midtown Manhattan battling … something. At no point is the world-ending threat truly explicated. Sure, we know Thor’s evil little adopted brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston, stealing the film almost as easily as he did Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea) wants to enslave the human race because he felt slighted as a child. Also, because some unnamed masked villain in a crudely inserted background scene threatens Loki to do as he says. Then, when the glowing supercube opens up a portal into another universe, squadrons of baddies who look like the aliens mowed down in a first-person shooter video game, pour out and make a mess of the city. As this all grinds on, Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark riffs with some nicely sarcastic dialogue, and Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner finds a spark of honest tragedy beneath the Hulk’s green rage. But when the smashing is done and evil vanquished (sort of, but not enough to keep a sequel from happening), is anything memorable? Nothing ever seems truly at stake, since putting the Avengers together like some superhero squad of Navy SEALs doesn’t leave much chance that they’ll lose, after all. Aside from the death of one particularly loveable character, little of it sticks.
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There isn’t much to hang on to in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, either. Its little dramas unfold in predictable ways, as cozy as one of the costume dramas with which many of its stars are intimately familiar. Though it doesn’t indulge in expected Orientalist exoticism—Dev Patel’s hyperbolic entrepreneur being a refreshing change from the cutesy-wise Indian stereotypes such films normally traffic in—there is also little in the way of true risk, adventure, or discovery, which should be illegal in a film about retirees marooned in a foreign land. These films know their audiences, perhaps too well. You could recommend The Avengers to your thirteen- year-old nephew who loved Transformers and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to your aunt since you know she watches Downton Abbey; they will both be happy. It is difficult to imagine, though, either being truly thrilled or transported by or wanting to discuss the film afterward. What is there to argue about, really? Both films are already great financial successes, The Avengers’ ever-mounting record grosses are reported by a strangely-enraptured entertainment press and even a comparatively small operation like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel had already raked in over $70 million before opening in America. But as art or entertainment they feel like little more than placeholders, target- marketed product that deliver exactly what they’re supposed to, and not an iota more. These are risky times, after all.
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ENDNOTE
The Harsh World:
Films Facing Reality in 2012
FOR ALL THE TALK ABOUT the darkening mood in America, the aftershocks of a nihilistic election season, an economic malaise hanging around like a bad cold, and an ever-more divided electorate, most of the top films at the box office in 2012 did not remotely touch on any of these matters. The year’s more intriguing films raised grim possibilities. Here, the social contract is weakened to the point of invisibility, economic concerns trump human ones, and diminished opportunities are the norm. These films explore such issues with particular edge and verve, even when, like Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land, the setting is nearly pastoral. Matt Damon and Frances McDormand play Steve and Sue, a pair of cocky advance team salespeople for a giant natural gas concern. Their job is to sweep into town, act like they belong there, and remind everyone there of precisely how limited his or her future looks. They then offer a lottery ticket’s chances at a slice of the potential earnings from drilling for gas on their land. What Sue and Steve are doing has a long history, recalling how the US government first pushed Native
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Americans off their land. The gas company counts on its victims being so ignorant and desperate that they won’t notice either the bad deal it’s offering or the potentially hideous environmental price tag attached. The point is underlined when one of the townspeople wonders out loud why, if hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is so safe and awesome, they aren’t doing it in Manhattan? Steve is too chagrined to state the truth: Because that’s where the money and the power are. Another take on how power works is provided by Compliance, 2012’s great bloodless horror film. A queasy bell jar of a story about the powerless, it is served up with an undercurrent of financial anxiety. Sandra, the fast-food restaurant manager played with incomparably infuriating passivity by the great Ann Dowd, is in the midst of another day full of meager rewards when she gets a phone call from the police. She hears that one of her workers, boilerplate blonde teenager Becky (Dreama Walker), has been spotted stealing from a customer. Sandra is asked to take Becky into the back room and question her. The rest of the film unfolds like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Sandra takes command after command from the voice on the phone, subjecting Becky to further and further humiliations. All of this is conducted under sallow fluorescent lighting, reflecting Sandra and Becky’s ugly discomfort: I’ll get in trouble if I disobey. Though Becky is initially rebellious, she keeps going along with each of Sandra’s increasingly bizarre
135 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 demands. Sandra herself is too eager to show how well she can do what is expected of her. There is a reason fascism flourishes in uncertain times. When people aren’t sure where the next paycheck is coming from, or if there will even be a next paycheck, moral concerns can be neglected. If the world outside their bleak eatery wasn’t one of decimated industries and safety nets, Sandra and Becky’s ritualized dance of acquiescence might not hold quite so much resonance. The first film version of Suzanne Collins’ post- apocalyptic Hunger Games books is also about the effects of poverty and hopelessness. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to take her little sister’s place in a Roman Coliseum-like death match put on by a tyrannical government. The film offers hints of an Avengers-like humanism, with some of the contestants inclined to generosity and even altruism. But they are the exceptions. In the main, people in this universe have the look of those who have seen the abyss and will do anything to avoid it, or, if wealthy and privileged, to preserve their distance from it. The film’s old sci-fi standby of a concept is worth repeating, as today’s televised sadism, faith in militarism, and class divisions are only expanding. Another sort of dilemma grounds Looper. Here a time travel crisis is initiated when Joe, an assassin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who’s paid to eliminate people shipped to him from the future is assigned to kill his older self (Bruce Willis). The story feels uncomfortably familiar. Certainly, the tech is imaginary, but the hyper-
136 CHRIS BARSANTI capitalistic hero lives in a society less civilized than libertarian, a community where everybody has to take the law into their own hands, leaving little room for peace or the common good. The very idea of a larger civilization appears to have collapsed under the related weights of gangsterism and vagrancy. In one throwaway scene, a drifter grabs an unattended bag and runs off; the bag’s owner calmly picks up a shotgun and cuts him down. Even if the man’s action speaks to a particularly Tea Party/NRA dystopic worldview, there’s a logic to it: How else to get the bag back if there are no police to call? The world of Looper feels like the end result of too many trend lines, a hollowed-out America where the only jobs left are those that involve taking from others. The year’s most brutal indictment of this system comes in Killing Them Softly. Andrew Dominick’s chilly, vaguely over-satisfied crime film is based on George V. Higgins’ profane novel of life and talk (and talk, and talk) amongst the underworld demimonde. Some hack crooks knock off a card game for what they think is easy money. Word gets back to the organization in charge of the game and Jackie (Brad Pitt), a hitman with a soft touch, is dispatched to relieve a few people of their lives. It’s a small nugget of a story, one that Higgins used as an excuse for his windy conversational exchanges that show that the crooks—for all their macho posturing and pie-in-the-sky dreaming—are utterly powerless. The film is transplanted from the book’s Boston area setting to an unidentified nowhere that looks an awful lot like New Orleans. Amid the devastation, nobody
137 EYES WIDE OPEN 2012 seems to have a job and everybody looks exhausted. The crooks do anything for money, including kidnapping dogs, and the local mob bosses remain off screen, passing down their cruel but strangely vague directives via their well-dressed flunkie (Richard Jenkins). The film’s steady march towards execution plays out against the sturm and drang of the 2008 US presidential election. A skittery title sequence jumbles shots of a trash-strewn tunnel with audio of Obama’s soaring rhetoric—a road to nowhere. Asked whether he has room for friendships or loyalties, Jackie can only scoff, “Don’t make me laugh.” He nearly snarls the film’s last line, briefly agitated rather than smoothly professional, as he’s been to this point. Now, he lays it out: “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own.” Does Jackie give voice to an uncomfortable truth? Or is it just easy bar-room cynicism, a theme imported into a rather shapeless crime narrative to give it weight? There’s an argument to be made both ways. You could posit that Jackie’s point is nothing new, that of course all people are on their own, and always have been, in every society. But with so much of the national conversation focused on what, if any, responsibility a government has towards its people—whether to heal them or protect them from being massacred by their fellow citizens—it’s hard to ignore the anxiety that Jackie articulates. It’s worth noting that the only movie of 2012 that makes a strong case for America being a cohesive social body with moral purpose binding it together is Lincoln. For those keeping track, that film is set 147 years ago.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Barsanti is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, New York Film Critics Online, and the Online Film Critics Society. His opinions (negative, positive, indeterminate, indiscriminate, and frequently foolhardy) have been published in PopMatters, Film Journal International, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble Review, Kirkus Reviews, The Millions, Playboy, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, Virginia Quarterly Review, filmcritic.com, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to the Movies You Need to Know (Adams Media). You can find more writings, bloggings, and other material at his highly official website: http://chrisbarsanti.net.
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