The Glass Castle

THE GLASS CASTLE (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2017)

The Walls family doesn’t have much in THE GLASS CASTLE, but as far as father Rex (Woody Harrelson) and mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) are concerned, that’s all part of the adventure in their nomadic way of life. Rex is an alcoholic who can’t hold a job for long and is often rushing his family out of town to avoid the police or those seeking overdue payment. Rose Mary spends her days painting and enabling Rex’s destructive behavior. The family moves constantly, relocating all over the western U.S. before the reluctant return to Rex’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia. The shabby home where they place roots is no glass castle, the long-promised and aspirational home Rex talks of building, but at least it provides some stability.

THE GLASS CASTLE is based on the memoir by Jeannette Walls, Rex and Rose Mary’s second oldest child, and the film is told from her perspective. Played at different ages by Chandler Head, Ella Anderson, and Brie Larson, Jeannette admires and tries to help her father while regularly being disappointed by him. She eventually saves enough money to flee West Virginia, get a college degree, and become a professional success as a writer in New York City, yet her parents are the shadow she can’t shake. She lies about her family in social situations, and it’s not hard to see why. When Rex and Rose Mary move to the Big Apple, she does not avoid them, but she is ashamed that they are squatters who sift through the trash to survive.

Co-writer and director Destin Daniel Cretton studied those coping with trauma in his previous film, SHORT TERM 12. THE GLASS CASTLE also explores the cycle of abuse, although this time he focuses on the dysfunction within a single family. To the average person, the squalor and extreme poverty the Walls family lives in is horrifying, yet Cretton emphasizes how normal these conditions seem to those who don’t know anything different and have just accepted it. Rex and Rose Mary romanticize their dire situation, a strategy which comes off like self-protection and a manifestation of mental illness. They don’t beat their children, but the neglect and psychological damage they inflict is no less harmful. It is sad but altogether unsurprising to discover that the unhealthy dynamic Rex and Rose Mary raise their kids in looks better when compared to the upbringing he had.

Although viewers will surely leave the film unlikely to feel charitable toward the parents, THE GLASS CASTLE isn’t interested in judging Rex and Rose Mary. In it and SHORT TERM 12 Cretton seeks for the victim to move on from steeping in deserved resentment, as hard as that may be. Jeannette loves her mom and dad and despairs at the wreckage they’ve made of their lives and and its effect on her. Seen through her eyes, the film demonstrates enormous amounts of empathy and forgiveness while not discounting all the complicated and conflicted feelings churning inside the Walls children. THE GLASS CASTLE wrestles with how to integrate the positive qualities and memories with all of the pain those same people brought on.

When Jeannette is a child, Rex tells her about the point that’s hard to distinguish where a flame ends but heat is visible in a clear, wavering form. He explains that this place is between turbulence and order, where rules don’t apply. Rex and Rose Mary choose to occupy this space but fail to recognize that this zone distorts what is seen in it. They are not beholden to anyone, but their situation is stifling more than it is freeing. THE GLASS CASTLE carries you through a range of emotions with this family. Harrelson in particular is adept at showing how an important family member can attract and repel loved ones to the point of confusion. THE GLASS CASTLE permits the knotty family relationships to stand as complex, unresolved interactions, which is why showing the real people in the end credits seems like a mistake. Perhaps Jeannette and her siblings have worked through all their grievances, but the way the subjects of the dramatized story are presented, it comes across like an apology of sorts or a hastily applied but ineffective bandage. The film embraced the contradictions and opposing feelings, so it feels like being undermined somewhat with the conventional happy ending suggested when the real Walls family appears.

Grade: B

War for the Planet of the Apes

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (Matt Reeves, 2017)

At one point as a kid I wondered what it would be like in movies or after-school cartoons if the bad guys won for a change. After all, no matter how things appeared to be going in these shows and films, everything predictably worked out in the end. I suspect that this fleeting thought from my childhood was common among those of the same age who were becoming bored with the formula. Now that my generation has a lot of sway in what gets made, it seems that we’re getting the chance to discover what it feels like when the course reverses and good doesn’t triumph or its victories in mass entertainment are pyrrhic. Think of all the remakes and franchise reboots in the last decade or so whose differentiating quality is that they are now dark, gritty, or edgy. The new normal is an overwhelming sense of gloom and doom, in part because it is considered more artistically serious. While any framework will yield worthwhile and lousy results, this worldview in event films has become exhausting.

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES picks up two years into the combat between humans and the apes. Having toppled Koba in the previous film, Caesar (Andy Serkis) leads his kind, making him the top priority for The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) to find and eliminate. Caesar wishes for the fighting to stop, so when the apes capture some of the enemy, he sends them back as a gesture meant to broker a detente. Instead the intel of where Caesar is invites a slaughter of many he’s been trying to protect.

Caesar sends most of the survivors toward a new home while he intends to exact revenge on the Colonel. Rocket (Terry Notary), Winter (Aleks Paunovic), and Spear (Alessandro Juliani) refuse to let him go alone. On their search they take pity on and add to their group a mute girl given the name Nova (Amiah Miller). They also come across former zoo animal Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), who knows where the Colonel and his men are stationed and agrees to show them.

Beginning with 2011’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the rebooted series has always had dark clouds looming over it because the original films provide the roadmap for where the new ones will arrive. They’ve become progressively darker and now reach the exceedingly grim WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. What gets depicted is restrained enough to stay within the confines of a box office-maximizing PG-13 rating, but what happens is pretty horrific regardless of which side comes out on top. Tragedy builds upon tragedy to the point that by the time this aggressively feel-bad film concludes I left the theater hoping the sun hadn’t been extinguished in the interim. WONDER WOMAN features its share of darkness, but at the core it prizes earnestness, decency, and love over fear, nihilism and hatred. It’s unfair to WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, but I’m seeking more of what WONDER WOMAN is promoting at this point in time.

Perhaps I was just in the wrong mood when I saw WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. It’s a marvelous technical achievement that the number and variety of simians are so convincing that it’s taken for granted that they are real. Although Zahn’s Bad Ape probably belongs in a more lighthearted film, the provides comic relief and a much-needed glimmer of fun. Director and co-writer Matt Reeves lingers on the breathtaking scope of the landscapes being traversed and occupied. The action scenes are brutally effective. The film’s allegory about humanity’s penchant for mutually assured destruction hits hard in the context of the daily news. But WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is such an oppressive film to watch. Plus, there’s the sneaking suspicion that its purpose is just to advance the series to where we knew it was eventually headed.

Grade: C+

The Edge of Seventeen

THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2016)

Smart and strong-willed seventeen-year-old Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) has always felt like an outsider at home and among her classmates. Her brother Darian (Blake Jenner) is popular and can seemingly do no wrong in the eyes of their parents. She never seems to see eye to eye with her mother Mona (Kyra Sedgwick). Her father was one of the rare people who understand Nadine, so when he dies unexpectedly, she feels she’s lost her foundation. Now a high school junior in the comedy-drama THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN, her longtime best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) is virtually the only person who helps Nadine feel less alone.

This key relationship dissolves when Nadine discovers Krista being intimate with Darian. She considers it a betrayal of the highest order and thinks that demanding that Krista have nothing to do with her brother will right the wrong. To her surprise, Krista refuses to stop being involved with him, leading Nadine to cut off communication with the person she’s closest to. Now feeling more isolated than ever, Nadine reaches out to Erwin (Hayden Szeto), who has awkwardly shown interest in her. She also turns to her history teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson), whose lunches she interrupts with her anxious chatter and a dramatic announcement that she’s going to kill herself.

THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig recognizes that people in general, and teenagers in particular, can get so obsessed with the stuff swirling inside their own heads that they fail to understand what others are dealing with and invite more of the problems on which they fixate. Nadine would likely deny that she’s a narcissist because she isn’t vain, but her self-absorption runs deep. She nurtures her aggrieved feelings and think they make her special, possibly even superior. Nadine clings to a limited and melodramatic worldview that is inward-looking to the point that she blinds herself to the misery she’s generating in her life and those around her. It’s apparent that she’s always been uncomfortable with herself and takes that out on others too.

Nadine is a complicated character, both self-hating and sharply funny, sometimes cruelly so. Steinfeld does a remarkable job of molding the self-involved teen into someone who can be exasperating without snuffing what’s inherently likable about her. She makes her into someone that can be empathized with yet never pitied. When she does something that embarrasses her or who she’s with, her actions evoke laughing and cringing. Nadine has a tendency to be her own worst enemy. Steinfeld doesn’t try to ingratiate herself for the audience’s benefit but inhabits Nadine’s naked neediness and confusion as the natural state of teenage existence.

To that end, Nadine’s interactions with Mr. Bruner go a long way in humanizing her and gaining perspective. To someone overhearing parts of their conversations in the hallway, the teacher’s sarcastic give-and-take with his emotional student might sound grossly insensitive. It’s funny and at least a little alarming when THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN opens with him brushing off her intention to commit suicide, but the more we come to know about how they talk to one another, the more his dry humor in serious conversations is how he’s able to signal that he cares without getting touchy-feely, which neither of them seem oriented toward being. THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN doesn’t dismiss what Nadine is going through as a phase, but through Mr. Bruner it is capable of taking the long view to relate to her anxiety and know that in time she can get past it.

Grade: B+

Seven Psychopaths

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS (Martin McDonagh, 2012)

In SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS screenwriter Marty Faranan (Colin Farrell) is struggling to come up with a script for a film of the same name.  His creative block might be related to the alcoholism that his friend Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell) suggests he has.  Then again, Billy can’t exactly be trusted completely.  The temperamental aspiring actor is hellbent on finding some way to collaborate with Marty on the screenplay.  While Billy is a good friend, he doesn’t make the wisest choices.

For instance, Billy is involved in a dog abduction scheme with Hans (Christopher Walken).  Billy takes the adored pets, and Hans returns them to the grateful owners for the reward money.  It looks to be an easy and risk-free method of lining their pockets until they take the beloved Shih Tzu of organized crime boss Charlie (Woody Harrelson). He doesn’t take kindly to news of his dog’s disappearance.  Charlie and his men don’t have to search long before they are chasing Billy, Hans, and a guilty-by-association Marty.
 
As a mash-up of ADAPTATION and ‘90s Tarantino-inspired films, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS is either too clever by half or not clever enough to fulfill all of its ambitions.  Like Charlie Kaufman, writer-director Martin McDonagh loads the film over capacity with ideas and structural complexities.  McDonagh zigzags plenty, sometimes to the film’s detriment, but he provides plenty to chew on among the ample laughs and bloodshed.  

On one level the existential comedy is about the process of filmmaking.  On another it’s concerned with what makes a man a man and the social expectations of how machismo is expressed.  Ultimately SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS is most interested in exploring the need for dreams, be they reflected in the movies or offered through religious promises about an afterlife.  Is what we do in our lives meaningless or the basis for the potential earning of some greater reward?  Are we even in control of writing our own life scripts, or is another screenwriter--the Almighty Creator, in fact--determining how the narrative develops?

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS doesn’t knuckle down and decide how to answer everything tossed out for consideration--how could it?--but even when it feels like little more than intellectual, postmodern spitballing, it satisfies as an exercise in storytelling.  It helps that McDonagh employs a who’s who of character actors to flesh out a rogue’s gallery worthy of living up to the film’s title.  As a foil to Farrell’s straight man, Rockwell is amusingly unhinged as a wild card of a friend.  Walken brings gravitas and soul to an eccentric man who knows all too well the tension between faith and despair in the face of the seemingly random.  Harrelson is a fearsome and humorous study in the film’s clash between violent and loving impulses.  Tom Waits and Harry Dean Stanton are plugged into the lineup for good measure.  SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS doesn’t reach the high bar McDonagh sets for it, yet he distributes a good number of pleasures with the film’s wit, contemplative offerings, and unpredictable nature.  

Grade: B

Rampart

RAMPART (Oren Moverman, 2011)

With the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division already mired in scandal, the actions of 24-year veteran officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) add more black marks on a station noted for its corruption.  Set in 1999, approximately a year after a real-life investigative task force was formed to scrutinize the division, RAMPART follows Dave as he abuses his power and refuses to adapt to changing times.

Twelve years earlier he was suspected of killing an alleged serial date rapist.  While no charges against him stuck, the nickname Date Rape Dave did.  He employs highly questionable but effective methods to fight crime and doesn’t believe his behavior leaves anything to apologize for.  

One day while on patrol a civilian driver plows into Dave’s car.  The offender flees when Dave confronts him.  Dave chases him down and delivers an excessive beating that a bystander catches on tape.  Ever so quick to mount a defense, Dave claims he was responding to being assaulted with a deadly weapon.  Whether he or anyone of his superiors really believes this justification is likely irrelevant.  Dave will continue to operate as usual until he no longer carries a badge.  With pressure increasing on the LAPD to get rogue cops under control, that time may arrive sooner than he thinks.

Director/co-writer Oren Moverman and co-writer James Ellroy examine the corrupt law enforcement culture by occupying the headspace of a damaged officer on a downward spiral.  Although the character study doesn’t leave Dave’s side, the narrative style is rarely direct.  Instead, like police work, RAMPART requires paying attention to details and inferring the scale of the division’s scandal and Dave’s rocky personal life from careful viewing and honing in on stray dialogue tidbits.  The oblique storytelling technique rewards with the economical way it fills in the background without piling on excessive backstory or psychological portraiture, but it can confuse by needlessly obscuring relevant information.

While Moverman wishes to keep character and plot specifics inconspicuous, he tends to use the camera in a distracting manner.  Showy motion, like a 360-degree revolving camera during a meeting with district attorney Bill Blago (Steve Buscemi), and unconventional angles reveal a director trying too hard.  Since Dave believes the department has set up and targeted him to remove focus from their problems, Moverman wants to convey paranoia and uncertainty through his framings and movements.  More often than not he attracts undue awareness of what the camera is doing.

Ultimately RAMPART is Harrelson’s showcase, and he takes full advantage of fleshing out a complex role.  Harrelson shows Dave as being good at his job, in large part because of his misanthropy and cleverness.  He wears disdain and smarts like other weapons on his belt, which gives him an unpredictable nature that intimidates colleagues and criminals alike. Those qualities are just as likely to get him in trouble, especially when he’s off duty.  He interrogates eldest daughter Helen (Brie Larson) about a confrontational art project and thus puts more of a chill in an already cool relationship.  In good cop mode he propositions his ex-wives, sisters Barbara (Cynthia Nixon) and Catherine (Anne Heche), but lacks sincerity.  Fueled by cigarettes, pills, and booze--others regularly remark about how he never eats--Dave is an instant gratification machine unaware of increasing malfunctions.  Harrelson plays him not as a monster but a self-destructive relic.  Either way, the damage is done.

Grade: B-