Oculus

OCULUS (Mike Flanagan, 2013)

Eleven years after tragedy struck the Russell family in OCULUS, siblings Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites) reunite to obtain proof that a supernatural force upended their lives. 21-year-old Tim is newly discharged from the psychiatric facility where he’s been since the fateful night in 2002 when he killed their father (Rory Cochrane) in self-defense. He grudgingly indulges his older sister’s notion that a four-centuries-old mirror known as the Lasser Glass was responsible for their mom (Katee Sackhoff) having a psychological breakdown and their dad killing her.

Kaylie has tracked down the mirror and brings it to the old family home with the intention of killing it. She has arranged a dual camera recording set-up and seemingly fail-safe schedule to ensure tapes never run out, she and Time are nourished and hydrated, and someone on the outside checks regularly on her welfare. Kaylie’s even rigged an anchor to a timer and killswitch that will smash the glass if they are incapacitated.

Director and co-writer Mike Flanagan prizes sustaining a disturbing mood and succeeds for the most part. Small in scale, OCULUS can feel like a short film idea stretched beyond its limits, and in fact this story first took shape as a 32-minute short before being expanded by more than an hour for this incarnation. Overall, though, Flanagan builds the atmosphere through suggestion and pays off the tension releases frequently enough so that the film doesn’t drag too much.

OCULUS isn’t all about tone, though. Although the gross-out moments are few, they are memorable. Among the delightfully cringe-worthy part are using a staple remove to pry off a bandage while digging into a finger at the nail and taking a bite out of a light bulb as if it were an apple.

Freely switching between the past and the present, OCULUS tries to approximate a post-traumatic stress experience in which a high amount of uncertainty in memories exists. Toying with whether what we see is real or fantasy could get old quickly, but in this instance Flanagan disorients the viewer without feeling like he’s cheating for cheap scares.

Grade: B-

What If

WHAT IF (Michael Dowse, 2013)

In WHAT IF medical school dropout Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe) is still brooding over the break-up of his last relationship more than a year ago when he meets animator Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party thrown by his college roommate and her cousin Allan (Adam Driver). Wallace and Chantry hit it off immediately, but after accompanying her home and getting her number, he learns that she has a longtime boyfriend. Although Wallace says that he’s happy to be friends, this bit of news kills his desire to contact her again.

After running into each other alone after a movie they talk some more and decide that they can have a relationship without romance entering into the equation. The situation becomes more complicated when Ben (Rafe Spall), her boyfriend of five years, gets a job opportunity that requires him to move from Toronto to Dublin for six months minimum. While Ben is in Ireland, Wallace and Chantry build a closer friendship. Although nothing untoward happens between them to jeopardize what she has with Ben, Chantry’s loneliness and Wallace’s unspoken attraction to her complicate their interactions. Making things even messier, Chantry’s sister Dalia (Megan Park) has her eyes on Wallace.

WHAT IF bears some natural comparisons to WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, but the the issue here is less a question of if men and women can just be friends but how to be friends when romantic love is felt but must be suppressed. Wallace and Chantry are two fundamentally decent and compatible people who, in different circumstances, may have become a happy couple in no time flat. As it stands their timing is inopportune with Chantry committed to her boyfriend and Wallace adamant about not scheming to split them up. Relationships are challenging enough to maintain without contriving excuses to test them. WHAT IF generally resists such romantic comedy machinations, although when it succumbs, the developments and actions appear mostly true to the characters.

Whether Radcliffe and Kazan are spending time together on screen or hashing out their problems separately, they’re a joy to be around. Obviously the film has designs on uniting them in the end, but even if romance is not in the cards, their friendship has a nice, relaxed feel to it in spite of what either one may be dealing with internally. As far as that goes, director Michael Dowse also gets friends and siblings in WHAT IF to treat one another with ease, familiarity, and love. The performances speak of characters who know and care deeply for each other, and this goes a long way in selling their behaviors and decisions.

Kazan gets the best part in WHAT IF because her character has more to process. What Chantry feels evolves according to the conditions she encounters, and Kazan softly but assertively expresses the conflict and loss she feels being suspended in relationship limbo. By finding the happy middle between impossibly sensitive doormat and hormonally raging bro Radcliffe plays the regular guy with charisma. Elan Mastai’s screenplay, based on a play by T.J. Dawe and Michael Rinaldi, teases out how people can make things more difficult for themselves with a great deal of sympathy. Whether they act on it or not, Wallace and Chantry recognize that they’ve found the complete package in one another. WHAT IF demonstrates that a romantic comedy can have it all too. It’s a funny, moving, and smart film.

Grade: A-

Begin Again

BEGIN AGAIN (John Carney, 2013)

When BEGIN AGAIN premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, it was called CAN A SONG SAVE YOUR LIFE? The melodramatic title has been changed to something more ordinary, yet writer-director John Carney still presses viewers to consider the question even if it is no longer the film’s name. The implied answer to the film’s previous title is yes, absolutely yes. While BEGIN AGAIN may come off as naïve and Pollyana-ish regarding the realities of the business side of music, its enthusiasm for the power of a song is hard to deny.

As in Carney’s film ONCE, the two main characters are brought together through music. Gretta (Keira Knightley) and Dan (Mark Ruffalo) are at low points in their lives when their paths cross. She’s fresh off leaving her longtime boyfriend and songwriting partner Dave (Adam Levine), whose first taste of success leads him to cheat on her. Dan is not coping well with the year-long separation from Miriam (Catherine Keener), his wife of eighteen years, and their teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld). Adding to his troubles, he gets fired from the independent record label he co-founded. Both are at a New York City club’s open mic night when Gretta’s friend Steve (James Corden) pesters her into taking the stage to play one of her songs. While the crowd doesn’t seem especially won over, Dan believes that he hears something special.

Thinking she may be his ticket to getting his job back, Dan approaches Gretta expecting to impress her with his position in the industry. At first she rejects his offer to mold her into another artist in the hit-making machine, but after a night of reflection Gretta decides that she has nothing to lose by auditioning for Dan’s former partner Saul (Mos Def). Although Saul declines to sign her, Dan is undeterred and proposes using a laptop to self-record an album with Gretta performing outside at locations around the city. Gretta values authenticity in music, so the idea of working on a passion project in this manner is irresistible.

BEGIN AGAIN understands the role music can play in daily life. It expresses one’s aggravations and happiness and can be a refuge from a bad day or the mundanity of driving a car for hours. Dan talks about how banal moments become pregnant with meaning when music scores them. The film backs him up when Dan and Gretta stroll through Times Square listening to Frank Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady” through a splitter connected to a phone. This ordinary walk through the big city looks and sounds like the most magical thing to do ever. BEGIN AGAIN is foremost about the joy of music, but it makes for a beautiful love letter to New York too. With all apologies to THEY CAME TOGETHER, the city is a character and a charming one at that for Knightley in her simple but cute wardrobe and a fashionably scruffy Ruffalo to explore.

The tuneful songs by Gregg Alexander stick in the ear without seeming so accomplished as to exceed the capability of an undiscovered talent. BEGIN AGAIN’s perception of the industry, even in its weakened state, is less credible. Sure, it’s amusing to note how smarmy label executives can be and how misguided their ideas are for retaining paying customers. Levine makes for a funny sellout whose waywardness can be measured by the amount of facial hair he grows. Maybe Dan’s dismissal of the demos, which more or less sound like today’s pop hits, is meant to show he’s out of touch, although it seems like rockist cheap shots at highly engineered and fussed over songs. Even with Gretta’s standard singer-songwriter fare being jazzed up through its means of production, her music hardly seems like the kind of thing to send shockwaves through the charts or the business. Her assertion that people want authenticity sounds misguided, especially when examining the current bestsellers, and her resistance to a contract and publicity, as if she’s Jandek, defines protesting too much for someone working in the system. BEGIN AGAIN has insiders believing they are outsiders, so it’s better served by celebrating music than critiquing the industry.

Knightley and Ruffalo have a nice, relaxed chemistry suggestive of romantic undercurrents, although Carney doesn’t push the matter too intensely. Their attraction is based more in sharing an emotionally vulnerable time in their lives than physical magnetism. Their potential salvations are meant to come through the songs, not each other, and BEGIN AGAIN hums with the excitement of creative collaboration and the exuberant mystery born out of music and lyrics.

Grade: B

Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure)

VENUS IN FUR (Roman Polanski, 2013)

It is a dark and stormy night in VENUS IN FUR when Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) arrives at the theater to audition for Thomas (Mathieu Amalric). After a long day of seeing actresses, none of whom have the maturity he thinks the role demands, Thomas is not inclined to let a latecomer who’s not even on the call list take up his time. Nevertheless Vanda insists until he finally agrees to allow her to read for the part. Although he intends to stop her audition after three pages, she demonstrates a grasp of the character that tantalizes him to keep the tryout going.

Like the David Ives play on which the film is based, Thomas has adapted Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s VENUS IN FURS for his production. The term masochism is derived from the Austrian writer and his novel about finding pleasure through degradation. While a clear demarcation exists when Vanda and Thomas are playing the characters and speaking about themselves, the dynamic between them takes on the qualities of the material they’re acting. As the writer and director Thomas is seemingly in charge but finds himself agreeing to being dominated by the unpredictable actress.

The play within the film toys with the questions of if a work reflects an artist’s desires, particularly those that are sublimated, or if everything can simply be ascribed to creative license. Thomas defends dubious ideas and representations in his writing as faithfulness to the source material, but are those qualities what attracted him to it in the first place? Director Roman Polanski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ives, complicates matters further by casting and costuming Thomas with a striking resemblance to himself and having his wife play Vanda. In addition the debate about power dynamics between men and women and the strong and the submissive extends through Polanski’s body of work and colors perceptions of his past legal problems. Thus VENUS IN FUR transforms from a theoretical argument about how much of an artist is in his art to an intimate and self-critical examination. Thomas strives to make the text ambiguous, but in the end veiling his fantasies and frustrations through fiction serves as an acceptable way of hiding them in broad daylight. Interpretation is left to the individual.

VENUS IN FUR opens with a Steadicam shot entering the theater as though Vanda is a succubus barging into Thomas’s snug retreat to torment and delight him. There’s nothing supernatural in how she controls the mood and the lighting, yet her domination of the scenario is handled as though she possesses such abilities to affect mental and physical states according to her will. The film perches on the knife’s edge separating foreboding and the erotic through verbal intercourse. Vanda and Thomas do not touch often, yet it’s unnecessary as VENUS IN FUR conveys a tactile and fetishistic relationship with words and objects.

Seigner has great fun in her versatile performance, appearing first as a brash, gum-smacking dimwit who morphs into a perceptive interpreter capable of being a compliant underling and terrifying challenger. Vanda tells Thomas that as the director it’s his job to torture actors, yet the creative combustion comes as their relationship becomes one rooted in mutable and mutual rule. Either’s submission means nothing without consent.

Grade: B

Joe

JOE (David Gordon Green, 2013)

David Gordon Green’s JOE is the flip side of his previous film PRINCE AVALANCHE. Both Texas-set films are concerned with what defines a man. Where the latter pokes fun at the comic duo who venture into the wilderness to work and live off the land to connect with their masculinity, JOE sees it as a refuge that helps to keep the darker and destructive impulses in the male animal at bay.

Each morning Joe (Nicolas Cage) goes to the local grocery to pick up a crew to do a day’s hot, hard work. Equipped with hatchets that inject poison, Joe and his men are killing useless trees so the owner’s property can be cleared for stronger pines to be planted in their place. One day 15-year-old Gary (Tye Sheridan) appears in the field seeking a job for him and his dad. Noting the boy’s eagerness and background of manual labor, Joe takes him on not knowing that he’ll become more than an employee.

Gary’s family has drifted into town and taken up residence in a condemned house. His father Wade (Gary Poulter) is an abusive drunk who would rather steal the money his son earns than make an honest living himself. When Wade costs him and Gary their jobs, the boy turns to Joe for a second chance. Joe has sympathy for Gary, who he sees is desperate to escape the man who beats him. While he’s had his own run-ins with the law and troublemakers around town, Joe determines that it’s worth assisting Gary even if it may lead to a confrontation with Wade down the line.

Joe mentions that restraint is what is keeping him alive and out of jail. Cage lets the intensity seep out of his eyes as his character with a fuzzy past strives not to react as he’s inclined when feeling provoked. Cage plays Joe as if he’s engaged in a constant state of mental calculation to regulate the anger and violence he’s liable to lash out with. Although he doesn’t want to stand out, his thick beard functions as a signifier that he’s not to be messed with. He drives a battered, old GMC pick-up that he has no desire to trade in, probably because a new truck would attract more attention. Joe’s workers wear packs that make them resemble Ghostbusters, but he has no such equipment to help him fend off the demons that torment him daily.

Joe bemoans that there’s no longer any frontier, suggesting that he believes at one time a man like him could pick up and go to the untamed places where he might not be a danger to himself and others. For as much as he fears what he is capable of doing, others are drawn to him like strays to a welcoming home. Joe doesn’t intend to be a father figure, yet as he does in his work, he clears what is weak and expendable so that Gary may grow stronger where he is. While there’s a fatalistic sense about Joe’s actions, finding a purpose is where he seems most satisfied.

Green is more interested in mood than plot, so JOE isn’t as effective as a thriller as a more conventionally directed film might be. He maintains the tension through Cage’s performance and a soundtrack that responds according to his temperament. Green likes to soak up the atmosphere, prioritizing listening to guys shooting the breeze. It’s in these moments that he captures the spirits of the men better than direct depiction. Although the film meanders, everything is carefully in its place. The opening and closing scenes rhyme to emphasize the journey Gary has taken through knowing Joe. Because of his lack of discrimination in roles and penchant for playing unhinged characters, Cage can be viewed as something as a joke these days, but in JOE he shows that he can be more than a collection of tics and oddities if given the proper showcase.

Grade: B-

Night Moves

NIGHT MOVES (Kelly Reichardt, 2013)

Living in secrecy seems like a tall, if not impossible, task these days. One can take steps to reduce fear and suspicion of the National Security Agency monitoring web activity and phone calls, but the people one interacts with will always be potential loose ends regardless of how much trust is placed in them. The three environmentalists plotting to blow up the Green Peter Dam in NIGHT MOVES keep low profiles and cover their tracks, yet throughout the planning each remains leery that one among them will burn them.

Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) is a sensitive sort who will stop to pick up a fallen bird’s nest and move a deer struck by a car off the side of the road. He lives in a yurt on the co-op Oregon farm where he works. To passersby this quiet, slightly built young man looks about as unthreatening as possible, but his exterior belies a radical’s intensity and dangerousness. Dena (Dakota Fanning) comes from a wealthy Connecticut family whose lifestyle she’s disavowed to support the cause. She lights up with the passion of the newly converted. Dena gladly puts up her funds to gain greater participation in Josh’s eco-terrorist activities. In this case that means providing ten thousand dollars in cash to purchase the boat named Night Moves that they intend to load with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and detonate by the concrete dam. Josh’s friend Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) lives off the grid, more or less, in a trailer in the countryside, but his reliability is up for debate when it seems he’s not as unknown in the area as thought.

Director and co-writer Kelly Reichardt wrings tension from the rampant paranoia among the trio leading up to their political act and the ratcheting up of suspense as they respond to its aftermath. Innocent questions and unknown cars pulling up to the workplace become worrisome. Headlights in the rearview mirror gain accusatory significance. Even a job application leaves a trace. Josh becomes more withdrawn and skittish to the friends and colleagues who don’t know what he’s been involved in. Neither the physical world nor one’s mind provide totally safe hiding places. NIGHT MOVES gives the sense that communicating with others is ultimately undesirable. In the film’s rare humorous spots, these environmental true believers dismiss the foolishness of those they encounter while trying to go unnoticed.

Despite their unconscionable deed, we feel somehow complicit with Josh, Dena, and Harmon by virtue of watching and following them. Reichardt identifies that abetment in the heart-stopping moment after they’re trying to leave the scene and the first turn of the key fails to start their truck. The viewer’s reaction suggests a wish for them not to be caught regardless of how we judge their actions. By getting that response Reichardt and co-writer Jonathan Raymond peer into how one can be seduced into extremism through gradual exposure when otherwise such behavior would seem out of the question to most rational people.

Eisenberg is terrifying because of the mental energy he shows Josh must expend to hold it together while denying normal human emotions. He must always be on guard and wear a mask, although he permits a small smile to himself after hearing the bomb explode in the distance. The character’s beliefs are unsettling, but the manner in which he justifies and compartmentalizes what he does in opposition with an otherwise gentle nature reveals a monster let loose from its cage. Josh fixates on making a statement than achieving results. As NIGHT MOVES shows, once that decision is arrived at, that’s a frightening state of existence.

Grade: A-

Locke

LOCKE (Steven Wright, 2013)

While the future of the planet often hangs in the balance in action and superhero movies, LOCKE puts one man’s world in jeopardy and is no less tense because of the more intimate scale. Writer-director Steven Knight sets the film almost entirely inside a BMW that Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is driving to London for a reason that gradually gets revealed. On the eve of a major job the construction foreman takes off knowing full well that his actions will lead to his firing. Conscientious to a fault, he still plans to talk a co-worker through the steps needed to prepare for the big pour the next morning. Locke also uses the car’s in-dash system to stay in communication with his family and the anxious woman he’s going to see.

Information is scarce at first in LOCKE, so all markers in the situation are fraught with possibilities. Locke is ill and gets choked up telling one of his sons that he loves him. Might he have been poisoned and has just an hour or two to live? Considering the importance of what he’s abandoning, is someone twisting his arm? The answers turn out to be more ordinary than films like this lead us to anticipate. Locke had a one night stand with his lonely 43-year-old assistant Bethan (Olivia Colman) during an out-of-town assignment. She is now in the hospital to give birth to his child two months early and has no one else to turn to, which is why he’s racing to see her and potentially ruining a fifteen-year-old marriage that has produced two sons. Still furious at his own father’s absence and poor example, Locke is compelled to be at the birth and provide the baby with his name.

With its single, confined setting and Hardy’s face the only one seen on screen, LOCKE runs the risk of being a gimmicky exercise in working with creative limitations. Wright’s decision to have Locke speak with his father as if he’s a ghost along for the ride is a theatrical flourish that doesn’t hit the mark, but otherwise he manages the smallness to the film’s advantage. The car is Locke’s master control room from where everyone he needs to reach is a button away. It’s also an oasis shielding him from the consequences of his choices until he’s off the expressway.

There are only so many camera set-ups available inside and outside the automobile, but Hardy holds attention by making his character hard to read despite having access to his private thoughts and feelings. Locke assesses and acts on his predicament in purely rational terms and sticks to noble and reckless choices. Ironically, this has the effect of making him more unpredictable. His journey remains suspenseful because Locke thinks everything can be solved by following the proper procedures. From phone call to phone call the camera lingers on the only visually present actor as Locke methodically attends to matters at home, the workplace, and the hospital. Hardy’s calmness suggests everything will be all right, yet this faith in doing what he perceives as the right thing, even if it ruins his marriage and career, is contrary to everything else he believes. As a builder he knows that if a foundation fails, everything on it crumbles too. Nevertheless, he’s willing to take that chance with his life. His process is riveting to watch.

Grade: B-

Blue Ruin

BLUE RUIN (Jeremy Saulnier, 2013)

In Francois Truffaut’s book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, the masterful suspense director says, in reference to a murder in TORN CURTAIN, “In every picture somebody gets killed and it goes very quickly. They are stabbed or shot, and the killer never even stops to look and see whether the victim is really dead or not. And I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a very long time to kill a man.” BLUE RUIN takes the messy and arduous nature of murder and studies it over the course of a film than just one scene.

Scraggly-bearded Dwight (Macon Blair) is living out of his rusty Pontiac Bonneville on a Delaware beach when a police officer brings him into the station. He’s not in trouble. Rather, she wants him to know that Wade Cleland, the man who was convicted of murdering his parents in 1993, is being released. Dwight buys a map of Virginia with the intent of tracking down and killing him.

Although he succeeds in stabbing Wade to death, Dwight waits for news coverage of it but doesn’t come across any. Having fulfilled his mission and cleaned up his ragged appearance, Dwight visits his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) to let her know what he’s done. At this point he realizes that he left behind evidence that could allow Wade’s kin to come looking for him, her, and her two daughters. The absence of media reports indicates that the Clelands mean to handle the matter themselves.

Dwight is not an experienced killer, nor is he someone who seems to want to take lives except in accordance with Old Testament code. Director, writer, and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier uses the protagonist’s predicament as a rumination on the corrosive effects of seeking revenge. The deaths Dwight is directly and indirectly responsible for complicate his life instead of relieving him of the rage and sorrow he’s carried for two decades. With his hangdog eyes and slight frame, Blair doesn’t look like the stone-cold assassin Dwight convinces himself to be. Whether he’s successful or not in killing those who have wronged him, Dwight’s withdrawn behavior and defeated posture reflect a man who lets his response to his parents’ murders claim a victim in a quieter, less recognizable way.

Although BLUE RUIN is a somber picture, Saulnier gooses it with dark humor. As Dwight barricades himself in the house and sets up various traps, he resembles an older, more malicious Macaulay Culkin in HOME ALONE. Dwight’s inexperience with weapons, lack of thoroughness, and accumulating problems are also mined for laughs. Saulnier finds room for other mood-lighteners in the sound design, whether it’s Dwight having to distinguish between a ring being a telephone or a bird and dealing with feedback when trying to leave an answering machine message. For all of its grimness, BLUE RUIN never fails to spot the absurd.

Grade: B-

Homefront

HOMEFRONT (Gary Fleder, 2013)

Two years after the bloody end of an undercover operation with a meth-cooking and distributing biker gang in HOMEFRONT, Phil Broker (Jason Statham) chooses the simple life in a small town. The widower Broker is now content to bide his time fixing up his house in Rayville, Louisiana and caring for his almost ten-year-old daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic). If he’s taught her anything, it’s how to protect herself, as she proves to a bully on the playground. The incident sparks a confrontation with the boy’s parents, Cassie (Kate Bosworth) and Jimmy Klum (Marcus Hester). Cassie provokes Jimmy into fighting Broker, who has no trouble beating him down. He considers the matter settled but is told that in this part of the country people hold on to grudges and perpetuate feuds.

Cassie has no intention of letting the situation go, so she asks her brother Gator Bodine (James Franco) to intervene. While snooping around Broker’s property Gator slashes a tire and steals a stuffed animal and pet cat before stumbling onto something Broker’s files. Learning that Broker is a former DEA agent is valuable for a guy running a meth operation out of his boat and trailer repair shop. More importantly, he discovers that Broker was involved in the case that saw Shreveport kingpin Danny T. (Chuck Zito) sent to prison and his son killed by law enforcement. With the help of his girlfriend Sheryl (Winona Ryder), Gator plans to share his knowledge of Broker’s whereabouts to the bikers so he can improve his business in the area.

Although HOMEFRONT follows a standard action thriller recipe, it cooks up like a gumbo made from basic cable dramas. Even if it’s not derivative of any one show in particular, it contains elements of BREAKING BAD, JUSTIFIED, and SONS OF ANARCHY. While the TV series have time to develop multiple storylines and well-populated worlds of characters, HOMEFRONT has to introduce and wrap up everything in the equivalent of two episodes’ time. Certainly it’s possible to tell this kind of story in a hundred minutes, but Sylvester Stallone, who adapted the screenplay from Chuck Logan’s novel, tosses in several plot points without making any of them stick. Broker’s possible romance with a school psychologist (Rachelle Lefevre) is among the inconsequential side stories delaying the big showdown.

If Stallone were younger, it’s easy to imagine him starring in HOMEFRONT himself. Nothing here seems tailored to Statham’s strengths as an action star. As just another ruthless and efficient killing machine he doesn’t get much of an opportunity to display his fighting skills. There’s little character work to do either, as Broker is a generically sketched hero with little backstory or motivation. He’s concerned for his daughter’s well-being and seems to think his colleagues used excessive force in the Shreveport incident, but otherwise little time or detail is provided to explore what makes him tick.

Franco’s presence as the primary villain offers hope that he might spice up an ordinary action picture. On the plus side, Gator conducts himself in a smarter manner than the usual antagonists in this sort of film. He has the potential to be like JUSTIFIED’s Boyd Crowder, a redneck with a devastating capacity for manipulation, but unfortunately Gator functions more as a middle man in HOMEFRONT’s conflict. If the role weren’t so bland, a bad guy with a gator tattooed the length of his right forearm could have made a perfect addition to Franco’s seemingly career-long performance art act. So it goes for the homogenized familiarity of HOMEFRONT.

Grade: C

Under the Skin

UNDER THE SKIN (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

UNDER THE SKIN begins with the gradual reveal of a developing eye and language. It is the birth of a sort for Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed character, an alien in human form. Although her motivation for coming to our planet isn’t clearly defined, her task is to lure men into the white van she drives around Glasgow and its surrounding areas. With her curves, mop of black hair, bright red lips, and welcoming personality she wears a pleasing form to males of the species. Such attributes make it easy to entice men into going for a ride to a dingy house where they follow her into full submersion and suspension in a pitch-like substance for storage until harvesting.

As Johansson observes and speaks with the natives, she becomes more sympathetic to them. Her developing emotional capacity opens the visitor to new experiences of this foreign world but also puts her in danger from the men on motorcycles, presumably fellow aliens, and the subjects she is studying.

Jonathan Glazer’s stunning film provides an experience akin to hearing and seeing for the first time. The sound design starts as though it is muffled to convey the sense of one’s ears adjusting to a new environment. Mica Levi’s abrasive and sinister score heightens the physical and psychological uneasiness of navigating the unfamiliar. Even the thick Scottish accents, which require some work for this American viewer to understand, work in service of culture shock’s disorientating effects

Remarkably Glazer grants the audience the opportunity to see humans like extraterrestrials might observe us. Like THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, UNDER THE SKIN functions as an anthropological study. A shot of a wailing child on the beach gives the sensation of watching an animal in a nature documentary. For that instant it’s as if the kid is something other than what we are. Johansson studies the people around her as though tracking the movements of ants and, at least for a time, treating their welfare with no more regard than most would give tiny insects.

UNDER THE SKIN advances visually and sonically from sensory bombardment in the city to a calmer state as Johansson progresses from disaffected onlooker to empathetic participant in human culture. The stark lighting and locations become more natural. The score becomes somewhat more melodic, and the sound design softens from the previous buzz and harshness. The suggestion of potential malevolence remains in what is seen and heard; it merely fades into the background more.

Glazer’s exacting, detached style is the most immediately dazzling aspect of UNDER THE SKIN, but it wouldn’t work as well as it does without Johansson’s spectacular performance. Her acting turns on subtle expressions that show how her character flips from hunter mode to a passive manner she deploys to seduce men. As much as UNDER THE SKIN is about observing humankind, it is also concerned with what it is like in society to be seen as a woman.

Grade: A

Delivery Man

DELIVERY MAN (Ken Scott, 2013)

At a glance David Wozniak (Vince Vaughn) is no one’s idea of someone well-equipped for parenthood. He’s an irresponsible middle-aged man who can’t help but make bad decisions, which explains why he’s deeply in debt to a loan shark and is trying to come up with the cash by growing marijuana with hydroponics in his apartment. David has a steady job driving the delivery truck for the family meat market in Brooklyn, but he’s better at being liked by the clientele than making his drop-offs in a timely manner. His unreliability also affects his relationship with girlfriend Emma (Cobie Smulders). When he shows up at her place late one night, she informs him that she’s pregnant but isn’t sure she wants him involved with the child.

Although David begins to like the idea of being a dad, in DELIVERY MAN he soon finds out that he’s already the biological father to 533 children. From 1991 to 1994 he made nearly seven hundred donations to a fertility clinic while using the pseudonym Starbuck. His specimens proved to be potent and popular. Now many of the offspring want to know his identity and are filing a class-action suit against the clinic to break the confidentiality agreement.

A packet of his biological kids’ profiles is among the paperwork David receives regarding the case. His friend and lawyer Brett (Chris Pratt) advises against opening the envelope, but David’s curiosity gets the better of him. Reading the profiles become like eating potato chips: he can’t stop at just one. Although David doesn’t want to reveal who he is, he starts tracking down these previously unknown children and helping them as a guardian angel of sorts.

Although DELIVERY MAN director and co-writer Ken Scott is remaking his Canadian film STARBUCK, the material often feels half-formed than overworked. David’s qualities shift depending on how the film insists he is to be viewed rather than from him actually changing. He’s introduced as being a perpetually mistake-prone and inconsiderate man-child until he cottons to the idea of being a dad, yet information later comes to light of generosity and sweetness that his family has always acknowledged. Side characters appear and are dismissed without a second thought. Emma fades into the background until DELIVERY MAN needs an occasional reminder that David is also reproducing in a more traditional way. A subplot about toughs coming to claim the money David owes them is so haphazardly integrated that it might as well be excised. Brett’s situation with a household of four rambunctious little ones could use a bit more clarity, but Pratt’s amusing interactions with the kids distract from questions about his life’s vagueness.

Vaughn hits some nice notes, particularly in scenes with an institutionalized son, as he struggles with his fears for the well-being of all these kids he never knew he had and thrills at their successes. Although the process yields instant answers for David, the nervousness over what fate may hold for his children reflects any parent’s desires that everything will work out. With so many kids sharing his genes David’s brood covers the gamut, yet he learns that loving each one is more important than whether they fulfill his hopes and expectations.

DELIVERY MAN sets up as though it might be a farce yet resists the comedic possibilities in the David’s stalker-like activities to get closer to his unfamiliar children. Instead the film plays as a mostly sentimental portrait of imminent fatherhood. Still, for as much as DELIVERY MAN wishes to confirm that David has the makings of a good father, Scott often undermines such thinking. A poorly conceived scene mines for laughs as David vacillates over whether he should commit a junkie teenage daughter for care or sign for her release from the hospital. She says she can quit if she wants and claims to be starting a department store job the next morning, so she doesn’t need rehab to get her life in order. While the scenario has a happy ending, David’s decision demonstrates he’s far from the level-headed guy the film says he is and always has been.

Grade: C

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS (David Lowery, 2013)

The latest armed robbery by husband and wife Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) goes south when it leads to them and their partner getting holed up in a shack shooting it out with the cops in Texas hill country.  In the exchange of gunfire their accomplice Freddy (Kentucker Audley), the son of their criminal mentor Skerritt (Keith Carradine), is killed while Ruth wounds police officer Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster).  The outlaws have no choice but to surrender, and Bob accepts all of the blame to keep his pregnant wife from also going to the penitentiary.  Although they are being forced apart, he promises he’ll be with Ruth and their unborn child soon.

Nearly four years later Ruth and daughter Sylvie (Kennadie Smith and Jacklynn Smith) have something resembling a normal life in a small town.  She leaves her wild ways behind to support her kid.  Skerritt sees to it that they have a home next to his, although his charity may just as well be a means of keeping an eye out for Bob if he ever manages to break out of prison.  Indeed, on his sixth attempt, Bob escapes.  Based on the passionate letters he wrote to Ruth for the duration of his incarceration, their former associates and law enforcement expect him to turn up eventually at her door.

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS is set in what looks to be the 1970s, and the style is reminiscent of that decade’s new Hollywood even if the scenario belongs to classic westerns taking place in the Old West a hundred years prior.  Through spare storytelling, magic hour cinematography, and naturalistic voiceover writer-director David Lowery’s film displays the influence of Terrence Malick, BADLANDS in particular.  Although Lowery zips through considerable plot, he’s far more interested in mood than narrative details.

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS swells with regret and romantic longing.  Bob imagines a future with the woman he loves and the little girl he has yet to meet.  The intense singular focus undiminished by the circumstances bestows nobility on the character despite the shortcomings that led him and Ruth to be separated.  Affleck transforms Bob into a sympathetic figure by wearing his heart on his sleeve and seeming naive to the situation’s reality, yet his overwhelming passion is also a weapon for making a reunion with Ruth possible.

Ruth’s feelings for Bob are harder to discern, not because she has reason to love him less but because his presence will complicate the stability she needs to care for Sylvie. Mara maintains the film’s internal tension by being difficult to read as she processes what Bob’s escape means and how she needs to respond.  Ruth has made it through recent years by hiding the truth, so there’s suspense in determining her real motivation in entertaining Patrick’s shy flirtations and sadness in knowing she is probably stuck in a spot unresolved without at least one person suffering grievous injury.  

The characters in AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS receive sanctification of a sort through self-denial. They are permitted to express affection but only from a distance, for direct contact possesses too much mortal or emotional danger.  Lowery’s achingly beautiful film vibrates with the knowledge that sometimes love means depriving oneself from giving in to it.

Grade: B+

Twenty Feet from Stardom

TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM (Morgan Neville, 2013)

No one dreams of growing up to be a backup singer, but for some skilled vocalists, standing behind or to the side of the star is as close as they come to the spotlight. While TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM suggests that these supporting performers deserve greater solo success, it also contends that they should be proud of the careers they have made.  Those interviewed for the documentary have contributed to some of the biggest pop and rock hits of the last fifty-plus years and toured with many of the most popular entertainers.  Unlike many all-or-nothing showbiz stories, this one recognizes that it doesn’t take coming out on top to be valued in the industry and to find satisfaction in the work.

Director Morgan Neville talks to a lot of backup singers, many of them African-American women, in tracking the path of this particular kind of performer since the 1960s.  None of their stories are told in full, although four are granted a little more time to link their prospects through the decades.  Darlene Love, the best known of the bunch and one who eventually managed to cross over as a solo artist, speaks of her days in a session group that worked for producer Phil Spector on many of the time’s most memorable hits and the problems she encountered in trying to establish her name.  Merry Clayton tells of her time working with Ray Charles and how she came to provide backing vocals on rock classics such as “Sweet Home Alabama”.  Lisa Fischer released a Grammy-winning single in 1991 but has primarily worked as backup singer, most notably on tour with The Rolling Stones since 1989.  Judith Hill was preparing to tour with Michael Jackson when he died and aspires to solo career.

Neville incorporates a lot of great music and draws attention to the parts of the songs where his subjects made a difference.  Clayton’s isolated track from “Gimme Shelter” is still a stunner when separated from the rest of the recording.  Love’s stories about unwittingly ghosting hit songs and being limited by her contract reveal the injustices in a system where these performers lacked power.  These and other tales bring into greater focus the challenges of the job, but as TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM floats among the backup singers without going deeper on anyone in particular, it feels like a hodgepodge of anecdotes.

Although TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM doesn’t display a lot of range, Neville does well at pulling together the history and noting how the role of the backup singer has evolved.  The film makes a good point about how technological changes are having an adverse affect on these vocalists.  AutoTuning and home studio recording lead to less demand, even if such digital solutions make qualitative variations that some don’t feel improve the music.  While Neville doesn’t point out the increase of featured roles in songs, those parts seem like what would have been the domain of backups but now go to stars.

No one has a quick and easy answer as to why these women have trouble going from backup to lead.  It would’ve been interesting if TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM explored that question more.  Nevertheless, it succeeds as a celebration of talents often unheralded by wider audiences.

Grade: B-

Adult World

ADULT WORLD (Scott Coffey, 2013)

The glut of talent competition shows on television push the narrative that everyone is a potential superstar.  A glance at AMERICAN IDOL, THE VOICE, SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE, and the like reveals teens and young adults convinced that discovery is the only thing keeping them from fame and fortune.  Even when the judges and viewing public deny them passage to the next round, the aspiring performers often refuse to believe the rejections stem from not being good enough.  Some are surely right that evaluators are failing to recognize their skills, but a great many are incapable of accepting the hard truth that they aren’t as great as they think, especially when their self-esteems have been shielded from challenges.

ADULT WORLD’s would-be poet Amy Anderson (Emma Roberts) is one of those special little flowers.  She sails through Syracuse University with top grades and is told by everyone how terrific her writing is.  The economic prospects for a poet aren’t exactly numerous nowadays, but Amy eagerly submits to as many literary journals and contests as she can find with full confidence that something will come through.  Like many who have earned degrees but aren’t yet making a living, she stays at home with her parents in the suburbs.  They’re supportive of her dream but eventually have to insist that Amy starts bringing in some money in the meantime. She has $90,000 in college loans beginning to come due, and they can’t foot all of her expenses.

Amy’s specialized education and lack of retail experience do not make her an attractive candidate to those doing the hiring, so she’s desperate to find anyone who might provide an opportunity for a regular check.  Although the mom-and-pop porn shop Adult World isn’t where she envisioned herself working, the owners are willing to bring her on as a clerk.  Every small victory seems to come with a setback, though.  Shortly thereafter Amy has her car stolen and gets into an argument with her parents over her financial irresponsibility.  She runs away from home with nowhere to go but the place where transvestite acquaintance Rubia (Armando Riesco) is squatting.  She meets Rat Billings (John Cusack), a writer she idolizes, and wears him down into letting her be his assistant even though he has no interest in serving as her mentor.

Unlike AMERICAN IDOL, which derives pleasure in humiliating singers deluded about the level of their abilities, ADULT WORLD doesn’t intend to burst Amy’s bubble but to remove it gradually for her own benefit.  In reading verse aloud as if it were divine wisdom, Roberts plays up the insufferable nature of the self-identifying artiste.  She is funny in maintaining the sincerity of the character’s passion while displaying the clumsiness of her inexperience.  Amy’s hilarious attempted seduction of Rat typifies her actions as the caricatured motions and words of someone whose deepest interactions have been with art than people.

As Rat, Cusack demonstrates no patience for such obliviousness and optimism.  His wry performance carries the fatigue of someone famous who has long since lost any enjoyment in having admirers excitedly bare their souls and repeat favorite passages to him.  Films tend to depict the act of creation with great romance, but Cusack is here to yank those images aside to say that it can be a grind.

ADULT WORLD’s forced quirkiness overwhelms the good effort Roberts and Cusack give it.  Amy’s naiveté would be more credible if she had just finished high school.  The porn shop setting and what can uncharitably be described as a magical transvestite character come off as lazy attempts to try and make the film edgier without actually doing so.  In that way ADULT WORLD is not very different than Amy as it mistakes idiosyncrasy for cleverness and knowledge.

Grade: C

The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu)

THE WIND RISES (KAZE TACHINU) (Hayao Miyazaki, 2013)

It is said that Alfred Nobel hoped he might bring about an end to war by inventing dynamite. The explosive would cause mutual destruction and thus deter combat. Nobel’s hypothesis, whether apocryphal or not, was proven grossly incorrect.  The unintended consequences of creation also come into play in THE WIND RISES, writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s fictionalized and animated biography of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Japan’s Zero fighter.

Airplanes captivate Jiro (Hideaki Anno) so much that he often imagines conversations with Italian plane designer Giovanni Battista Caproni.  Too nearsighted to be a pilot, he sets his focus on becoming an aeronautical engineer.  Jiro is single-minded in his work and becomes a golden boy at the Mitsubishi Internal Combustion Engine Co. between World Wars I and II.  He is given time to let his mind roam and sent to Germany to see the all-metal airframes that the Japanese hope to use as they develop new fighters. Although Jiro experiences setbacks, he continues to dream of the beautiful flying machine that he will bring into reality.

A verse from a Paul Valéry poem--”The wind is rising! We must try to live.”--begins the film, provides its title, and is mentioned regularly throughout.  The quotation describes Jiro’s mindset as he endures his country’s poverty, an earthquake, war, and a tragic romance with Naoko Satomi (Miori Takimoto).  Terrible things happen and are on the horizon, but there is beauty and wonder to behold as well.  Just as the wind can inflict destruction, so too can it spread life.  

For Jiro the plane he is trying to perfect embodies mathematically elegant design that enables sailing among the clouds like in his childhood visions.  In actuality his achievement becomes a killing machine.  THE WIND RISES suggests that Jiro is a dreamer who isn’t ignorant of what he is creating but is susceptible to going about his work with an idealized conception of its purpose.     To Miyazaki the great sorrow is in lovely inventions being perverted into agents of death and ruination.  Technological advances are not inherently moral or immoral.  The enormous challenge, one that is often failed, is to choose to use such discoveries for the good.

THE WIND RISES is purportedly Miyazaki’s final film.  If so, it presents a fitting summary of his loves and concerns.  It celebrates ingenuity and imagination, as when Jiro observes the curve of mackerel bones and applies natural design to make a better frame for his plane.  It bemoans how militarism and economic forces can harm the health of the people and the environment.  No villain exists in THE WIND RISES other than the destructive human instinct.  For all of his enthusiasm about the wonderful things humanity might dream up, Miyazaki worries to what end they will be employed. The bittersweet tone is not intended to discourage progress but to inspire mindfulness in how innovations are implemented.  The verse his film quotes implies that obstacles will always be in the way of happiness, yet it is worth striving to grasp whatever grace exists and resist the forces of doom.   

Grade: A

Prince Avalanche

PRINCE AVALANCHE (David Gordon Green, 2013)

PRINCE AVALANCHE can easily be assigned a narrative marking it as a return to writer-director David Gordon Green’s roots.  After beginning his career with Terrence Malick-indebted independent films that include GEORGE WASHINGTON and ALL THE REAL GIRLS, Green shifted to making ’80s-reminiscent studio comedies like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS.  The departure from his early work and poor critical reception of THE SITTER and YOUR HIGHNESS fueled the conventional wisdom that Green had lost his way.  Following up those misfires with the small scale drama-comedy PRINCE AVALANCHE would seem to confirm such opinions, but the return to a lyrical style simply provides a better vessel for the weird sense of humor that runs through his work instead of Green’s confession of past creative waywardness.  

The mismatched road crew of Alvin (Paul Rudd) and Lance (Emile Hirsch) spend the summer of 1988 living and working in central Texas’ woods to fix the damage the previous year’s wildfires caused.  The work week requires staying in a tent in the middle of nowhere while performing repetitive tasks such as driving posts and putting stripes and reflectors on the road, but they’re free to make the long drive into town during the weekend.  

Alvin thrives in isolation.  He relishes the opportunity to better himself and to embrace a traditional concept of rugged masculinity that includes supporting his girlfriend and child back in the city.  Alvin carried out the work on his own in the spring and would have been content to keep it that way except he wanted to do his girlfriend a favor by employing her brother.  Lance is less enamored of the solitude, especially with the lack of female company.  When quitting time on Friday arrives, he takes off for civilization while Alvin sets up camp in their next spot.  As far away as they are from anyone, though, they’re still forced to confront their existential fears.  

The Sundance-friendly male bonding story, Tim Orr’s handsome cinematography of a scorched landscape, and Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo’s evocative score signal a serious film.  Alvin acts like he’s making a sacrifice even though he’s really doing what he wants and threatening a relationship he claims to hold dear.  For all of the signposts of solemnity, PRINCE AVALANCHE teases the mythopoetic men’s movement.  Alvin and Lance are outfitted to recall Nintendo’s Mario Bros., and when Lance bellows his co-worker’s name, it’s clearly intended as a reference to Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Like the ashes Lance smears on his face to simulate war paint, Alvin’s inflated pride in his survival skills and maybe even his bushy moustache are funny signifiers of what they think it means to be men.

While Green pokes fun at exaggerated masculine characteristics, PRINCE AVALANCHE still considers a man’s responsibility to others while feeling the tug for independence and adventure.  Rudd registers the confusion and pain of a good, caring person who thinks he needs to live up to a truck commercial’s version of manliness. Hirsch locates the soft spots in a character slowly awakening to the fact that he’s running up against the limitations of carrying on like a younger man.  The modest jousting between Alvin and Lance and the respect that builds gives them the chance to discover what manhood can be without having to save the world or get the woman.

Although Green adds poetic flourishes, like slow motion montages, PRINCE AVALANCHE works best when he focuses on direct, honest talk.  The most touching scene features Alvin’s conversation with a lady (Joyce Payne) sifting through the remains of her home.  Having lost everything she has in the fire, she wonders what evidence will remain of the life she has lived.  The answer for her, or for anyone, is the relationships shared and the memories passed along.  PRINCE AVALANCHE isn’t an inordinately profound film or close to Green’s best, but it integrates his indie origin and recent mainstream sensibilities in a mostly satisfying way.

Grade: B-

The Wolf of Wall Street

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

If THE GREAT GATSBY’s Nick Carraway arrived on Wall Street in the late 1980s and decided that the corruption and decadence was pretty awesome, he’d look something like Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.  Jordan starts out with notions of doing right by the clients while making money for his firm and himself, but his first day on the job he’s quickly disabused of such thinking.  As his boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) makes clear, they’re playing with other people’s money.  The point is to keep the investors’ cash in the game so they can keep getting their share via commission.

Jordan finds himself out of a job after the October 1987 stock market crash, but his fortunes take a marked upturn when he begins pitching penny stocks in a strip mall boiler room in the suburbs.  He’s a gifted salesman who knows exactly what to say to convince blue collar types to risk their hard-earned cash on companies unlikely to produce the returns he implies are possible.  The commission percentages are much higher on the garbage he’s selling than on the blue chip stocks, so it isn’t long before Jordan is earning fat checks and striking out on his own.

Jordan’s brilliant idea is to open his own brokerage house that lures wealthy investors with familiar investment options and then pushes a bunch of the crap stocks on them.  Jordan perfects the script that he teaches to his right hand man Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and some old friends so they can land well-heeled clients.  The plan works like a charm.  Jordan rebrands the firm as the more legitimate-sounding Stratton Oakmont and moves them out of a former auto body shop on Long Island to offices in New York City’s financial district.    

For three hours director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter present enough bad behavior and language to make a proverbial sailor blush, yet by and large the illegal business practices, heavy drug use, and degradation of women is rewarded and mostly consequence-free.  Jordan and crew achieve their warped vision of the American dream because on some level society deems this acceptable, even if the ugly truths may be hidden from view.  Jordan lives the high life in the land of get mine rather than the land of opportunity, and Scorsese makes it look like a blast to be able to be bombed out of your mind on cocaine and quaaludes and enjoy all that money can buy, whether it’s purchasing a mansion, yacht, helicopter, and sports car or trading up from mousy wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) to lingerie-designing model Naomi (Margot Robbie).

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET has faced some criticism for making Jordan’s excessive and criminal lifestyle seem too attractive without condemning it, especially because this is based on a true story, but that’s precisely the point.  Jordan has what a lot of people want.  He’s just one of the few able to get it by exploiting get rich quick dreams.  It goes without saying that Jordan and associates are horrible people, but they’re the manifestation of a culture that confuses the pursuit of wealth with the pursuit of happiness.

Jordan and his employees are nothing more than con men operating under a more respectable banner. DiCaprio shines as a huckster whose disdain for his marks ignores the fact that he too has bought into the slick talk he uses to rip them off.  When Jordan gives savage inspirational speeches to his work force, DiCaprio comes off like a bright-eyed cult leader.  He’s very persuasive, yet his monologues seem designed to convince himself of the worthiness of his choices as much as they are to fire up the cold callers doing his bidding.  This puffery emerges in Jordan’s unreliable narration.  For instance, an amount of cash he claims was stolen from his Trump Tower apartment increases as he tells the story.  When Jordan is wrong or inconsistent with the details, it’s in service of building his own legend, which makes him more self-assured and more of an authority to those turning to him for guidance.

Jordan uses words to seduce, and DiCaprio relishes every one in his performance, whether he’s barking out motivational speeches or flirting with bribing an FBI agent.  DiCaprio hints at a wink behind everything Jordan says.  It’s as if he’s asking the rhetorical question “ain’t I a stinker” while beaming with pride at his ignoble accomplishments and actions.  DiCaprio also attacks the physical comedy with zest, particularly when Jordan crawls down a country club’s front steps to his car while incapacitated on powerful sedatives and engages in a slow motion chase of Donnie when he gets home.

Although THE WOLF OF WALL STREET places the spotlight on an unflattering portrait of individual and collective aspirations, Winter’s screenplay spots a lot of humor in the squalor and buffoonery.  All that’s missing is a laugh track to these men behaving badly.  The question is whether all that cackling is because of the idea that these slimeballs are to be envied and emulated or that there are so many suckers waiting to be bled dry.

Grade: A

Inside Llewyn Davis

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2013)

When Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) tells Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) that he doesn’t connect with people, the manager of influential Chicago folk music club Gate of Horn is evaluating him as a performer.  The assessment could just as well apply to the singer’s interpersonal relationships, though. Llewyn tends to approach the world as if it owes him for gracing everyone with his presence and talent.  He’s perpetually in need of a couch to crash on, and he doesn’t think twice about asking his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) to lend him money to terminate another pregnancy he may be responsible for.  Never mind that the unnamed woman wanting an abortion is Jim’s girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan).

Despite his sour disposition and frequent impositions,  Llewyn continues to be treated generously, which suggests people believe he deserves their help even if he takes it for granted and risks alienating his friends and acquaintances in the Greenwich Village folk scene.  Perhaps it means that while he behaves like a jerk now, he didn’t always, or not to this degree.  His current career struggles and the way his musical partnership was severed explain why he’s mired in a funk and why people may be willing to cut him some slack.  Set during a blustery February 1961, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS externalizes Llewyn’s depression.  Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel swabs the singer’s environment in gray and often suggests occupying a dark space for enduring Job-like trials.  

Co-writers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen merge O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? and A SERIOUS MAN into INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS’ bleak but comic musical journey with an impeccable soundtrack.  Structured like a song in the round, Llewyn’s odyssey takes a circular shape with which he’s out of sync.  He doesn’t come in at the proper place and stumbles to find the appropriate exit point to break the cycle and rejoin where he should.  Although he can anticipate what’s coming, Llewyn is doomed to remain in the loop at the wrong measure.

Isaac isn’t pressed to mold Llewyn into someone appealing to have around, yet his apparent neediness attracts empathy despite his surly and defeated bearing.  Misery loves company, and he’s the kind of person who can be comforting to have around when everyone is having a rough time of it.  If and when others in Llewyn’s circle break through, something that is likely closer than the characters suspect, he’s also one they’ll leave behind because his unfulfilled high self-regard and standards will make him intolerable to be near.  Llewyn isn’t chasing professional success as much as he’s trying to escape himself, and he’d rather decry what he perceives as selling out than to compromise the integrity of his art.

The cool emotional tone of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS benefits from the humor the supporting cast generates.  Adam Driver’s gut-busting backing vocals to novelty song “Please Mr. Kennedy” represent everything Llewyn resists.  John Goodman’s scornful jazz man, who derides the inferiority of a suicidal man’s leaping spot, indicates what Llewyn’s future could be if he doesn’t change course.  Mulligan’s brittleness and seething anger toward Llewyn produce a funny inversion of the sweet harmonizer she is on stage with her boyfriend.  Timberlake doesn’t play his moments for laughs but does well displaying the decency and heart that Llewyn resists in himself.

Although the protagonist appears unable to tap any reserves of affection, the Coens present his story as a common, tragic tale with a lot of compassion.  For filmmakers often accused (and wrongly so) of being snide, this prickly comedy-drama demonstrates that there’s more below than surface to discover if one’s willing to take a closer look.

Grade: A

Captain Phillips

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (Paul Greengrass, 2013)

Based on the true story of a container ship hijacked by Somali pirates in April 2009, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS follows Tom Hanks as the title character as he strives to protect his crew and stay alive through the ordeal.  Vermont-based Richard Phillips picks up the Maersk Alabama in a port in Oman and is en route to Kenya when he spots two boats he suspects are being driven by pirates.  Although he is able to outrun them on the first attempt, another skiff returns the next day with four men who succeed in taking control of the cargo ship.

Their leader is Muse (Barkhad Abdi), a reed of a man who makes a living ransoming ships and their crews for a local warlord.  He promises that no harm will come to the men on the ship as long as everyone follows his orders.  They just want to get paid.  The captain does what he can to stall Muse and his team, but despite the best efforts of Phillips and his crew, the standoff ends with him in the lifeboat with the four pirates as their hostage.  From there the race is on whether the U.S. Navy can intercept them and safely extract Phillips before the pirates reach Somalia’s coast.

Even with the foreknowledge that the hero is delivered from danger, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS plays out as an expert action thriller.  Director Paul Greengrass’ filmography includes the process movies BLOODY SUNDAY and UNITED 93, which use documentary techniques to reveal how real-life events unfolded, and two installments in the BOURNE series.  In CAPTAIN PHILLIPS he combines his skills for authentically recreating historical episodes and investing plot with the awe and breathless excitement of Hollywood suspense and action spectacles.  Regardless of news accounts and Phillips’ book, these endeavors seem barely believable, yet Greengrass stages the hijacking and rescue as convincing evidence of military and technological might..

In his best performance in nearly a decade Hanks disappears into the role of a man thrust into an extraordinary survival situation.  He plays Phillips as always being strategic yet not inhumanly clever considering the circumstances confronting him.  Hanks showcases the character’s tactical flexibility as an extension of the attention to detail his job demands of him.  In this situation he applies emotional aptitude with mechanical calculations.  Hanks seals a terrific performance with a devastating final scene.  His post-stress breakdown highlights his technical ability as an actor, but more impressively, his loss of control conveys the raw feeling triggered in this experience.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS screenwriter Billy Ray isn’t shy about drawing an equivalency between the American and Somalian captains to reflect on the world economy.  By no means is the film an apologia for hijacking ships, but it asks viewers to consider the financial ecosystem that brings Phillips and Muse together.  The pirate’s decisions are not justified, yet Muse is acting in accordance with the opportunities he has.  Both men are offered jobs and accept them.  One has the advantage of not needing to employ illegal and immoral means to scrape by, but with a shrinking globe, the two become more likely to cross paths.  

Grade: A

The Spectacular Now

THE SPECTACULAR NOW (James Ponsoldt, 2013)

The Ryan Adams song “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is to Be High)” sums up THE SPECTACULAR NOW’s Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), although he’d probably deny that he feels all that down about anything.  Sure, he’s upset when his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson) breaks up with him, but their relationship remains on generally friendly terms, keeping him confident of their eventual reconciliation.  Why wouldn’t she come back to him?  He’s the life of the party, and together they are the fun, beautiful couple to be admired at their Georgia high school.  As for being high, Sutter drinks a lot, but it isn’t something he views as a problem.  It’s what teenagers do.

After a particularly intense night of imbibing Sutter wakes up on the front lawn of fellow senior Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley) with no idea where his car is.  She gives him a ride, he helps out with her newspaper deliveries, and they make plans to meet for lunch one day at school.  Initially Sutter shrugs off their socializing as a favor he’s doing for a nice girl who is tutoring him in geometry.  The unassuming Aimee has never had a boyfriend and focuses her energies on academics and helping her mom pay the bills, but as they spend time together, they form a close bond despite their differences in personalities and priorities.

Sutter is a figure familiar to anyone who is or ever been in high school.  He’s in his element there and, like Simon Pegg’s character at the start of THE WORLD’S END, wants to stay forever partying with his friends.  Teller’s finely shaded portrayal shows that there’s more to Sutter than the gregarious and unserious guy that most people see. Acting with swagger, Sutter can appear like a player and a goof, but Teller also hints at the wounded spirit he’s hiding.  His commitment to being a failure becomes all the more tragic when the genuine self he bares to Aimee proves that he can be better than he’s permitting himself to be.

While Aimee is good for Sutter, he may a bad influence on her.  Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber’s screenplay, adapted from Tim Tharp’s novel, manages the tricky balancing act of creating a relationship that encourages a rooting interest and an awareness that it may be causing more harm than providing benefits.  Woodley is marvelous at conveying Aimee’s intellect and shyness while always feeling in control of the risks she takes.  Although Aimee is better adjusted than Sutter, she is also limited by the perceptions of herself she carries around in her head.  Woodley seems effortless in discovering who Aimee realizes she can be while not giving up her interests and dreams to keep the first boy to flatter her.

Director James Ponsoldt lets key scenes between Sutter and Aimee play out in wide shots and long-ish takes that do wonders for showcasing the chemistry developing between them.  The conversation leading to their first kiss and their sex scene advance with tenderness and humor, heightening the real connection of two kids on the verge of adulthood enjoying these moments in time and fumbling toward the future.  Their path is funny and painful and ever so believable.  With its sharp insights into teenage insecurities and relationships, THE SPECTACULAR NOW reveals itself as an instant coming of age classic.  

Grade: A