The Movie Vampire

            In the waning years of this decade, 2005-2008, we began to see a number of powerful films from American directors (or at least directors working within the studio system) that seemed to be subconscious reactions to post-9/11 confusion, anxiety, and Bush era discontent.  Among the film’s I’d include in this bubble of creativity are Children of Men, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and to some extent The Dark Knight.  Though part of me is afraid that I’m just lumping together a bunch of great movies that happened to be made around the same time period, I can’t help but make this link.  All of these movies seemed to be made with a certain intensity, they were all movies about uncertainty, about people who had to reconsider their assumptions or about people who fail to rethink their assumptions and paid for it.  I bring this little movement up because I think it’s over, most of the films made in the last two years have not really seemed a part of this, possibly because the election of Barrack Obama has changed the political landscape, cynicism is out and hope is in.  The Road, a film which was going to come out in 2008 before it was delayed, might just be the final film we’ll be seeing from this brief but rewarding movement of Hollywood cinema.

            Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title, The Road tells the story about a father and son trying to survive in a tough environment.  In the vague future of this film, society has collapsed and the environment has become harsh.  We are never told if this apocalypse is the result of environmental decay, nuclear warfare, or some sort of disease, but what’s important is that most of the people are gone, the cities are in ruins, and the sun is constantly being blocked by clouds.  We see this world from the perspective of an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his unnamed son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who must both try to walk south in order to escape the approaching winter cold.  The son has never really known a better world than the one he lives in, we are told through flashbacks that he was born on the eve of the apocalypse and that his mother (Charlize Theron) has long since passed away. 

            The film is all about survival, what survival is worth and what you’re willing to do in order to survive.  The Mortensen character is someone who values surviving above all else, he’s not someone who is going to let the dimness of the world force him to give up on living as many other people in the situation are reported to have done.  He tells his son that the two of them need to “carry the flame,” to remain human in the face of the horrible things around them, he wants his son to think that the two of them are the “good guys.”  For the most part the two live up to this aspiration, at least when compared to the “bad guys” that we encounter, particularly armed gangs of cannibals that roam the desolate countryside.  At the same time, being a “good guy” isn’t always easy and Mortensen’s character must make tough decisions about how to treat the people they encounter like a hungry old man (Robert Duvall) and a hungry thief (Michael K. Williams).  One also gets the sense that Mortensen’s character has become understandably paranoid, that occasionally he displays caution that hurts him rather than saving him.  These occasional moments when reality challenge the “carry the flame” philosophy that he’s trying to hand down to his son, and in some ways his attempts to be a good man and a survivor become mixed messages for the boy.

            Viggo Mortenson is an actor who’s been working since the mid eighties, but he was completely off the radar until he came out of nowhere and appeared in the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a starring role in which, against all expectations, he thrived.  He continued to deny expectations when he continued to do amazing work in his post-Aragorn work, partly because he seems to have refused to do roles in frivolous between his serious roles.  Working with David Cronenberg he did great work in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, both films where he must be a very tough character but one with a complexities and vulnerabilities beneath the surface.  That’s probably what makes Mortensen so special, he’s like a modern Clint Eastwood, a strong silent type but one who’s more than a stupid action hero.  This quality is what makes him perfect for his role here, he needs to be a strong person who’s been molded by a tough environment, but he’s also a caring father who needs to have the tough of a parent throughout.  

            The rest of the cast has also been very well constructed.  Any movie that has a large role for a ten year old kid has a pretty big hurtle to jump because nothing can kill a movie quite like an annoying kid.  Fortunately the kid they found, Kodi Smit-McPhee, has pulled off his role admirably.  It helps that the character he’s playing has had to mature to some extent beyond his years because of the tough situation he’s in.  That tends to erode a lot of the lame kid stuff that can so frequently lead to groan inducing line readings.  Aside from the two central roles, every person that these two encounter seems to be perfectly cast.  Charlize Theron manages to deliver an understated performance for a character that might have easily been overplayed and there’s also a neat small role for Guy Pearce that I won’t give away.

            Of course this is a film that’s defined by its post-apocalyptic setting, and John Hillcoat has made this setting into a character.  Hillcoat had done a similar thing with the Australian Outback in his previous film, The Proposition, which was reportedly inspired significantly by Cormac McCarthy’s earlier work.  This is a director that knows how to film desolation and he does it exceptionally well here.  In fact, visually, this is the best post-apocalypse on film since George Miller’s The Road Warrior, and it might even surpass that car warfare classic in its vision.  Most of the film depicts bleak and worn out forests, filled with trees who seem to have shed their leaves.  It’s always cold, that’s the threat they’re running from, and snow occasionally enters the frame which is an interesting departure from the desert locales that usually characterize the genre.  The sky is always overcast and the world seems to have the color sucked out of it.  The remnants of society that are left over, like a scavenged coca-cola can, add more to the feeling of loss than the destroyed landmarks that are usually found in this kind of movie.

            This is also a movie that is capable of operating like a thriller when it needs to.  The movie opens with a tense standoff between a threatening raider and a frightened Viggo Mortensen.  The tension here is excellent and the abrupt way it ends is the perfect capper.  An even better scene occurs later on when they sneak into a seemingly abandoned house only to find some profoundly disturbing things are happening there.  This scene is as frightening as anything seen in a horror movie this year, and the fact that it furthers most of the film’s themes while also providing visceral chills to the audience is a testament to Hillcoat’s abilities as a director.  That said, this isn’t really a thriller even if individual scenes are very tense.

            I won’t lie, this movie isn’t exactly a laugh riot.  This is a movie that can be a bit tough to watch, it’s a downer and it isn’t exactly “fun.”  Great films are usually challenging and they’re not always going to be a light-hearted evening out, but this is a movie about the end of the world and it isn’t some kind of juvenile work that things the end of the world is going to be a blast.  If “fun” is all you want out of a movie, then you’ll probably be well served by 2012, it’s your loss.  That’s going to be one hurdle for this film; another is going to be the inevitable comparisons made to 2007’s Oscar winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men.  No, this film isn’t going to be as great as that Coen Brothers opus, then again very few movies are.  This may not be an instant classic that everyone will agree on the way No Country for Old Men was, but it is far and away better than most anything you’re likely to see in theaters on any given week.  This isn’t 2007 and I don’t think we’re going to get too many more films like this for a while.  Appreciate this one while it lasts.

**** out of Four

            If in 2005, you’d asked me about the importance of the Coen brothers to the world of film, I probably would have sadly reported that they might have been on the road to irrelevance.  After all, their 2004 remake of The Ladykillers was not well received, nor was their previous film Intolerable Cruelty.  Even the films they made earlier in the decade like The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother Where Art Thou? were by no means unmitigated triumphs.  What a difference two years make.  In the last two years the Coens have not only reclaimed their crown as American masters but have gone a step further.  With their 2007 Oscar winner No Country For Old Men they made a taught thriller while pushing their aesthetic forward, and with their 2008 comedy Burn After Reading they proved that they could still make hilarious and accessible comedies while maintaining their dark sensibilities.  I’ve always loved the Coens when they’re making broad comedy and dark thrillers; but their 2009 victory lap A Serious Man takes the form of that third type of film they’ve made throughout their careers, quirky/metaphorical dramedies, and that’s the side of their oeuvre I’ve never quite been able to close the deal on.

            Set (and setting is never an unimportant detail in the work of the Coen brothers) in a Minnesota suburb circa 1967, A Serious Man sings the ballad of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor of theoretical physics.  Gopnik is up for tenure as the film begins and his son will soon be undergoing his Bar Mitzvah, but he soon finds himself in the middle of an existential crisis.  Gopnik’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) seems to be deep in some shady dealings and has come to live with Larry.  Worse yet, Gopnik’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) tells him that she’s been seeing another man named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) and that she wants a Get (a divorce within “the faith”).  If that weren’t enough, he’s having a moral crisis over how to handle a Korean student who has left him an envelope of cash in order to receive a passing grade and he’s been getting threatening calls from the Columbia Record Club.  As the movie goes on, these troubles seem less and less like coincidences and more and more like a series of tests from “Hashem.” 

            The Coen Brothers have always been an auteurist’s dream; they’ve had an incredibly distinct yet oddly adaptable style that absolutely envelopes everything they touch, at times almost to a fault.  Fitting this film into the Coens’ body of work is one of its bigger pleasures.  The film’s Minnesota setting will immediately invite comparisons to Fargo, but that’s a red herring, this film’s depiction of that setting is pretty different and its story is less literally blood soaked.  Narratively I’d probably compare it to The Man Who Wasn’t There in that it’s about an ordinary man whose world collapses around him, tonally I’d probably compare it to the dead faced Miller’s Crossing, but the movie I’d most readily compare it to is Barton Fink both in its surrealism and in its spiritual overtones. 

As such the film will probably fit pretty well into the Coen cannon, but its real gift to those analyzing the Coens as auteurs is much richer.  This is a very personal film for the Coens, as it depicts the place where their odd, subdued psyches formed, as such this could be something of a Rosetta Stone for their sensibilities.  The suburb here is unnamed, but it is presumably the Coens’ hometown of St. Louis Park, an old inner-ring suburb west of Minneapolis.  The place has a very large Jewish population that lives among the town’s otherwise gentile Midwestern inhabitants.  As I am myself a Minneapolis resident, I can attest that this is indeed a pretty detailed an accurate depiction of the area, although a lot has changed since 1967.  St. Louis Park doesn’t look as desolate now as it does in the movie (which was actually filmed in a suburb called Bloomington), but there still is a pretty large Jewish population there.  Less important than the look are the mannerisms and the details, which rang a lot more true here than they did in Fargo, a film in which everyone seemed to talk like they came straight out of a bad Ole and Lena joke. 

All this meticulous setting detail isn’t just window dressing either; it serves to explain a lot of the main characters psychological state.  Larry Gopnik is made to feel like an outsider in this suburb filled with mowed lawns and gruff gentiles who play catch and go hunting.  His knowledge of Physics seems to mostly go unrewarded (he says he’s never published) and he’s only got three mostly unhelpful Rabbis to turn to during his crisis of faith.  Gopnik’s nebbishy tendencies might have served him better in New York where he could have made friends with Woody Allen or something, but here he’s pretty much on his own.  Also interesting is the effect the setting has on his children, particularly his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) who is most likely a stand in for the Coens.  The summer of love exists only on the radio for Danny and he’s pretty aggressively uninterested both in his father’s travails and in the faith that makes him an outsider.  One can picture him eventually getting bored enough to pick up a guitar to imitate the Jefferson Airplane music he’s always listening to, or if film had been his area of interest, perhaps a video camera.

Philosophically, the film addresses the age old question of why bad things happen to good people.  That’s never really been a concern to secular thinkers like myself, but to people like Larry Gopnik who feel they are under the protection of a benevolent God, it is a conundrum. 

Many have seen the film as having been based on the book of Job, and I will not disagree, in fact there are images toward the end of the film which all but confirm the connection.  Essentially, Larry is subject to every cruel unpleasantly that the Coens can throw at him, but he puts up with it all because of his faith and his passive aggressive nature.  I’m no theologian so I’m not going to comment on this too much; but I’m pretty sure that the Coens have changed the story’s ending to cynical effect, and that I like. 

            Some have said that the Coens have used celebrities as a crutch as of late, something this film will never be accused of as this film is pretty much devoid of them.  The cast here is for the most part solid but anonymous, many of them being never before seen on film.  Michael Stuhlbarg is quite strong in the lead; he manages to walk the fine line of nebbish stereotype, always falling just on the right side, and as his desperation grows he’s able to perfectly panic while trying desperately to internalize as much as he can.  Richard Kind is probably the most recognizable face in the whole film, and he brings a pretty good presence to the whole thing.  Similarly, Fred Melamed brings a real “that guy” presence to the film.  If those names aren’t obscure enough for you, the Coens have also filled the movie with people who’ve never been in a movie before like Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, and David Kang who fit in right alongside the anonymous veterans.

            Had this film come out in 2005 (in the wake of the Ladykillers debacle) it probably would have been called a return to form, coming out 2009 it’s more like a return to weirdness.  In spite of all the film’s many merits, this is simply a movie that is almost smothered in the Coens usual quirks and it will probably baffle anyone who isn’t a diehard Coen veteran.  Coen films are almost never “for everyone” and this one is even more “not for everyone” than usual, and I’m not sure it was “for me.”  This is a film that is hard to truly like but almost impossible not to respect.

*** out of Four

            Star Trek was once just a T.V. show, and not a particularly well produced show either, but that show laid the groundwork for a universe that would support five spinoffs, ten feature length movies, countless novels, and unlimited merchandising.  This is a series that elicits some of the most passionate fandom in all of pop culture, but that was also its undoing.  I for one love Star Trek; I own all the movies and I’ve seen every single episode of all five live action T.V. series.  In spite of this, I’d never call myself a full fledged trekkie, because that word conjures up disturbing images of grown men living in their mother’s basement who dress up as Vulcans to go to conventions and spend a fortune on toys.  No one wants to associate themselves with those Klingon-speaking freaks, and I think that’s a big part of why the last couple movies did poor at the box office, and why the last series got cancelled pre-maturely in spite of solid third and fourth seasons. 

            I may be in the minority I thought the last feature film in the franchise, Star Trek: Nemesis, wasn’t half bad.  It didn’t have a wildly creative story, but the battles were pretty cool and at its center was a nifty exploration of the debate between nature and nurture.  I would have loved to see the series go on with The Next Generation cast; after all, the original cast’s film series frequently recovered from lackluster installments, and the abandonment of the series left fans without the sense of closure they deserved.  As such, I wasn’t too thrilled when I heard J.J. Abrams was going to “reboot” the series.  As was the case with Casino Royale, I was afraid this was an extreme solution to problems that had simpler solutions.  What’s more, J.J. Abrams has always been hit or miss for me.  While I dig his show “Lost” and I thought Cloverfield was a pretty cool project, but I generally disliked his debut film Mission: Impossible 3.  Flawed as the previous Mission: Impossible films had been, they at least took themselves seriously; Abram’s third entry to the series on the other hand was a very smug film that used quirkiness as crutch.  That’s a very cheap tactic which I have a great distaste for, and it’s a style that Abrams very easily could have fallen into while making a Star Trek reboot. 

If Abrams was just going to turn the series into a great big joke I was going to be pissed.  Add to that the young MTV-ready cast and the general ambiguity as to whether this would fit into the continuity of the series and I was more than prepared for this to be a disaster.  Thankfully, most of my fears were only half founded.  The film does have a handful of problems, and I’ll get into them momentarily, but in general this is a pretty decent film and Abrams has clearly matured some since his debut.  Word of warning, while I will generally be a spoiler-free review, there are some surprises fairly early in the film that I will be discussing, so you may not want to read further if you want a completely pure viewing experience.

 The film opens with an attack on a Federation Starship by a very larger and mysterious Romulan vessel.  The Federation ship is destroyed, but a few people escape including a pregnant woman whose husband is killed on the ship, she soon gives birth to a son and right before her husband is killed he persuades her to name the boy James T. Kirk.  Twenty-some years later, James Kirk (Chris Pine) is a reckless young man roaming Iowa making trouble.  Fate will eventually lead him to meet a Starfleet officer named Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who convinces Kirk to join Starfleet and put his considerable skills to work.  Kirk is an ace cadet but his skills will be put to the test when there is a crisis near the planet Vulcan which sounds an awful lot like the disturbance that occurred in the attack at the beginning of the film.

Obviously this entry of the series is a prequel of sorts going into the younger years of the cast of the Original Series.  Abrams has cast young actors in all the roles, so I suppose an analysis of the cast is the best place to start.  I was pretty surprised when I heard that Chris Pine had been cast as Kirk, mainly because I’d never heard of the guy or seen any of his movies.  I went in not knowing what to expect from the guy, but I was pretty impressed with his work.  The original Kirk was basically an All-American Flash Gordon-type space hero, and Pine is able to embody this without taking it too far.  Also he… never… does that… stuttery… William Shater… impersonation that I… was afraid he’d… do.  Pine is trying to embody Captain James Tiberius Kirk, not that hammy actor who’s turned his career into a joke.

Mr. Spock is portrayed by Zachary Quinto, who was a little more familiar to me from his work on television’s “Heroes.”  While I hated that show pretty much from the beginning, but Quinto and his character Sylar is one of the few elements of the show I liked.  In the previous shows they would occasionally mention that Spock was half human, but that element was rarely explored in depth.  This younger Spock is clearly trying a lot harder to come to terms with his partially human ancestry, and that’s an interesting take on the character. 

The rest of the cast is given less screen time.  Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is given a sexy makeover, Saldana is certainly easy on the eyes and I hope her character is given more to do in the sequels.  McCoy is his usual caffeinated self, Carl Urban does a pretty decent DeForest Kelley impression and provides some of the film’s more appropriate comic relief.  Sulu (John Cho) is given a pretty cool action scene (he’s an accomplished fencer, a callback to an original series episode called “The Naked Time”), but is otherwise not given much to do.  Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, is the only cast member I was particularly familiar with going in.  He doesn’t look anything like James Doohan, but he clearly understands the rhythm of what makes the character work, and his Scottish accent is significantly better.  The one performance I didn’t much care for at all was that of Anton Yelchin, who plays Chekov and maintains and magnifies the character’s horrible Russian accent, which is odd considering that Yelchin was born in Saint Petersburg (but raised in the United States).  There are extensive (lame) jokes about the character’s ridiculous accent, so I can only assume that this was Abrams’ doing rather than Yelchin’s.  If they could give Scotty a better accent why not Chekov?

Wait a minute… What’s Chekov even doing here?  Wasn’t Chekov first introduced in the series second season?  Well, Abrams has found a way to get around these kinds of continuity issues; this is a little bit spoiler-ish so you may want to skip to the next paragraph.  The mysterious ship from the first attack is a Romulan mining ship that has transported itself back in time from the Next Generation era.  The idea is that the actions of this ship have cause a butterfly effect that has altered history.  So Trek continuity before March 22, 2233 remains in place, but events after it are more or less fair game.  I don’t know if I like this, Abrams has basically wiped out forty three years of material, none of it ever happened.    Does this mean Kirk’s dogfight with Khan was all for nothing?  Does it mean Jean-Luc Picard never gets born?  Does it mean Captain Sisko’s fight against the Dominion was a big waste of time?  In fact, it means that the only Trek series that hasn’t been wiped to oblivion was “Enterprise,” and I’m sure that alone will piss off a lot of people.  That’s an unsettling development, and unusual considering that the one part of Trek continuity that really needed shaking up was the back story which claims that World War Three occurred in the early 90s.  On the other hand I like that Abrams found a way to reboot the series within its continuity rather than inexplicably rebooting it the way they did with James Bond.

In order to gain back some Trekkie-cred, Abrams has filled the movie with references and interesting aspects of pre-reboot continuity.  For instance, we see Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru, a Starfleet exam referenced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Also interesting is the inclusion of Captain Pike, the leader of the Enterprise from an unaired pilot called “The Cage” who was established as the previous pilot of the Enterprise when footage from “The Cage” was used in a two-part episode called “The Menagerie.”  The film also includes various trademark lines from the series like “I’m a doctor, not a physicist” and “I’m giving it all she’s got, Captain.”  In fact there are probably a lot of smaller references I didn’t pick up on in one viewing, and many fans will probably be so busy combing through them that they’ll forget that J.J. Abrams has wiped everything that ever happened on their favorite T.V. show from the history books.

However, most people aren’t going to give a damn about these obscure references.  They just want to know one thing: “is this a fun movie?”  The answer is certainly “yes”.  As an action movie this is up to the standards of recent summer blockbusters in a way that most other Trek movies haven’t.  There are at least two good ship to ship battles, one shootout, and a particularly exceptional set-piece involving space suits, a giant drill, and a samurai sword.  Action has always been part of the franchise, but rarely to this level, and occasionally the technology that’s been established isn’t ideal for high octane thrills.  The Enterprise itself is a large and not overly nimble vessel, it was clearly meant to be more like a giant tall ship than a slick motorboat.  This doesn’t stop J.J. Abrams from constructing elaborate effects sequences that are occasionally too big for their own good.  For instance, the set in the final shootout is almost hypnotically huge and complicated; the action taking place there almost gets drowned out by the massive effects in the background.

There was however one action sequence that was blatantly misguided, and that was a completely gratuitous car chase in the beginning of the film.  The scene involved Kirk as a thirteen year old boy stealing a classic car and recklessly driving it off a cliff.  I question this scene firstly because it’s pointless, everything it says about the character is established just as well in a later bar fight scene, it does nothing to advance the plot, it comes very soon after another better action scene that is more than enough to kick off the movie and its style is generally out of place in a Space Opera.  This chase to the tune of The Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” (a song choice I would more than aprove of in a better chase scene), feels more like something out of The Fast and The Furious than Star Trek.

That misguided chase scene isn’t the only mistake J.J. Abrams makes in order to reach a larger audience.  I think there are generally a few too many attempts at humor going on in the film.  There are plenty of jokes that are brief, unobtrusive, and funny, and I’m more than happy to see them in the film.  Then there are other jokes that are long, misguided and out of place.  I’ve already mentioned that they go too far with Chekov’s thick accent, and that’s more than apparent in a lengthy portion of the film in which he bungles a monologue to a lame comedic effect.  There’s also a dumb joke about enlarged hands and a goofy effects sequence about Scotty getting stuck in a series of tubes.  Other jokes aren’t so bad in and of themselves, so much as in their quantity.  I have no problem with Abrams using occasional humor to lighten up the mood, but at time there are a few too many light moments in a row for comfort.  That said, the humor here isn’t anywhere near as smug or obtrusive as it was in Mission: Impossible 3, so Abrams is clearly learning a little restraint.

I was more than willing to give this a pass for a lot of continuity errors, but there are a few larger qualms I have with its adherence to the larger themes of the show.  In particular, I object to the way that McCoy has been relegated to the role of comic relief.  I’ve always viewed the trinity of Spock (logic), McCoy (Emotion), and Kirk (a mix of the two) to be essential to the dynamic of the Original cast.  Here they’ve made Kirk more impulsive and turned focused on a duality between him and Spock.  I hope they make McCoy, and the rest of the cast for that matter, more important in the next film. 

The more insidious problem here is the focus on action over ideas.  J.J. Abrams has said that he wanted to explore the optimism at the center of Gene Rodenberry’s vision, but you wouldn’t know it from watching the film.  Previous Trek films have all managed to explore philosophical issues in the midst of adventure, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was an examination of death, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was an elaborate political allegory, even lackluster installments like Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Insurrection had more thematic ambition than this.  There’s none of that here, this is an action movie, a very fun and well crafted action movie that establishes interesting characters, but an action movie nonetheless.  That’s why I cannot rank this new film among the best this series has offered, but that’s not to say I didn’t have fun along the way.  This is a good movie, but on the spectrum of summer entertainment it’s much more in line with Iron Man than The Dark Knight, though there are of course much worse things to be in line with than that.

*** out of four

The Holocaust was an almost unthinkable tragedy that was unparalleled by any event that occurred during the twentieth century.  It’s understandable why an event of such magnitude would invite film adaptation, there’s a lot of drama to it and it’s generally an important part of history which deserves to be discussed and remembered.  However, I’ve found a lot of the films made about it have had serious problems.  Sophie’s Choice was strong whenever it focused on the event, but the film as a whole was torpedoed by a horrible framing story that dominates most of its running time.  Schindler’s List, while strong at certain points, generally lacked focus and despite its colossal runtime it failed to develop any of its characters except for Schindler.  The strongest movie about the Holocaust was probably Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which wisely maintained its focus on the title character and did not distract itself with material that was ancillary to that story.  All of these projects were at least respectable, but there have been plenty of less than reputable movies on the subject like Life is Beautiful, Jakob the Liar, and the like.  That’s why I get queasy whenever  one of these projects comes along, whenever a filmmaker is dealing with a subject as powerful as the Holocaust the potential is open for distraction and manipulation.  That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to find that Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, while hardly a perfect drama, was not really about the Holocaust and it did not unnecessarily dwell on human suffering. 

It starts in 1995 and focuses on a German lawyer named Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes). Quickly, the film flashes back to 1958, when Michael (now being played by David Kross, not to be confused with comedian David Cross), is fifteen and living in Neustadt.  On a rainy day, Michael finds himself getting very ill and throwing up on the doorstep of a random apartment building.  A tram conductor in her thirties named Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) notices this sick adolescent and helps him home.  Once he recovers, Michael returns to her building to thank her for her kind turn.  The next thing he knows, Hanna’s standing behind him naked, banging commences.  The two have an affair for about a year or so, and during their nightly screw-sessions she asks Michael to read some of his books to her.  Eventually she comes to her senses, cuts the humping off and moves out of town without leaving a forwarding address.  Michael eventually goes to Law School and it would seem that he will finally move on with his life, but soon he’ll run into Hanna again and learn a dark secret about her past.

I’ll admit that that plot description is rather glib, but when a movie takes itself this seriously you really can’t help but talk about it like that.  This is very much a story that would only come from a novel, that is to say a novel with a capital “N,” the kind that focuses on characters and symbolism rather than plot.  In this case it was a 1995 German language novel by Bernhard Schlink that Oprah apparently liked a lot.  Much like play adaptations, movies based on these kind of novels tend to have a very distinctive and slightly lifeless feel to them.  Producer Anthony Minghella’s 1996 Oscar winning film The English Patient had a similar novelish tone to it, though this project never reaches that level of literary stuffiness. 

The film’s reputation and advertising will have you thinking about it as a holocaust movie starring Ralph Fiennes, but there are no scenes set before 1958 and David Kross has a lot more screen time than Mr. Fiennes.  Anyone ready to guess what Hanna Schmitz’ dark secret is yet?  The movie is probably better if you don’t know, but everyone else in the world has given it away by now so I won’t dance around it any further.  The chick was a former Nazi who worked as a guard in a concentration camp.  A good hour of the film is dedicated to the affair between the title character and the former-nazi twice his age, and the second half depicts the effects that this dark secret has on his life.  In other words, the kid humps a Nazi for a year and then spends forty years moping about it.  At a certain point I was about ready to shout “you bagged a Nazi, get over it!” at the screen, but my sense of theater etiquette prevented such an outburst.

The acting is really what saves this film, and without really talented performers this wouldn’t have even begun to work.  Kate Winslet is clearly the standout; her role is very demanding and if she had overplayed it the film probably would have bordered on unwatchable.  In the early portions she needs to show that she has a haunted past and cold demeanor while simultaneously seeming normal enough for Michael to fall in love with.  Winslet easily could have tried to play for more sympathy, and if she had the whole movie would have fallen apart.  David Kross is also a nice discovery, he hadn’t been in anything I’d heard of before this, but he certainly brought what was needed to his character here.  Like I said before, Ralph Fiennes isn’t really in this all that much, but he is pretty good when he is on screen.

Does the film really deserve the massive amount of sarcasm I’ve directed toward it?  Probably not, but something about this movie just encourage that kind of response, it takes itself really, really, seriously, but it’s literary source give it a certain artificiality that makes it hard to really love it as it wants to be loved.  All the film’s symbolism and psychology probably works a lot better on the page where it can be pondered with a certain detachment, but when you’re watching it on the screen it just seems kind of fake and pretentious.  But the film’s problems can’t all be blamed on the potential inadaptability of its source material, I think last year’s Atonement succeeded marvelously where this failed, in fact The Reader kind of reminds me of how good that movie was.  Most people were pretty shocked to see this nominated for Best Picture, and many fans of The Dark Knight and The Wrestler have jumped on this film for stealing their slot.  I share their anger, but most of the wrath should probably be saved for Frost/Nixon, which was a lot more manipulative and didn’t have this film’s control of tone.  I’ll probably never be able to really enjoy it, but it’s mostly put together well, and as far as deathly serious dramas go you can do a lot worse.  Recommended, but mainly for the acting.

*** out of Four

            Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories was a film that went entirely under the radar throughout 2008 and built a small but devoted following while playing at film festivals.  After hearing enough strong praise for it I decided it was worth a rental.  All I’d known about it was that it took place in the south and had to do with a murderous feud between rival families.  Between the title and the description I was expecting something a bit closer to Deliverance then what I got, which feels a lot closer to the work of the film’s producer David Gordon Green.

            The film is set in a microscopically small southern town and opens with the funeral of a family patriarch.  This man had two packs of children from different women, the first he mistreated, the second he doted on.  One member of the first pack named Son (Michael Shannon), decides to speak up at this funeral and curses the man who mistreated him and his three full brothers.  This sparks a feud between the two packs, which will end in blood.

            When would you think such a story would take place? The 1800s? The 20s? Even the 70s?   Well it doesn’t take place in any of those eras, it takes place in 2008.  But how many people are really going to be starting a blood feud over a few disagreeable words in this day in age?  That’s the problem I have with this movie, the people in it make decisions as if they were in a crazy southern gothic exploitation movie, yet Jeff Nichols goes out of his way to ground the film in absolute reality. 

            From a filmmaking perspective, there is a lot here to be impressed by.  I mentioned earlier that David Gordon Green was one of the film’s producers, and if I was told that he was the director I wouldn’t be shocked.  First time director Jeff Nichols’ visual style borrows from Green’s work so heavily that it sometimes feels closer to rip-off than influence.  Though if you’re going to borrow a style it might as well be from someone as talented as David Gordon Green.  The cinematography by Adam Stone is almost as good as Tim Orr’s work in the david Gordon Green cannon, and the film has the same kind of naturalistic calm that David Gordon Green had in The Good Girl and Snow Angels.

            But all the artful compositions, restrained violence and minimalistic acting only serve as a means of concealing that this is an exploitation plot in which characters make illogical decisions for two thirds of a movie.  As small as this town is I have trouble believing that there wouldn’t be some kind of police force or sheriff trying to stop the idiotic and often deadly feud that is going on.  If Nichols had chosen to embrace rather than conceal some of this stories sillier aspects he may have at least had a movie that was true to itself.  As it is the movie feels like a fraud, a slow and uninteresting one at that.

** out of four  

            There’s an oft-quoted phrase in show business that “dying is easy but comedy is hard.”  This is probably true, comedy is incredibly hard because it’s a genre needs to make audiences react on an almost primal level.  What’s perhaps even harder is horror.  The brave souls who try to make good horror films also need to force an audience to react to something almost by reflex.  This already complicated genre has another big hurdle too, namely that most horror productions are cheap cookie-cutter garbage that studios rush into production because horror fans are easily duped into seeing garbage, thus beefing up their profits.  Still, every once in a while someone is able to get something interesting out of the genre, and the 2008 thriller The Strangers had a really promising trailer.

            The Strangers opens with a title card explaining that what we’re about to see is a true story.  Right.  This tactic of pretending your movie is factually based was cute back in the 70s but who do they think they’re kidding now?  You’d have to be a real moron to think any of this is actually true.  Anyway, the film opens with a youngish couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) returning to the house they’re staying at after attending a wedding.  Soon thereafter they hear a knock at the door, a woman asks if someone named Tamera is home, they send her away, but soon they hear another knock.  The atmosphere quickly becomes unpleasant, suddenly a face emerges from the darkness, there’s someone in the house.  The rest of the night these two are terrorized by three seemingly human stalkers wearing masks.

            This is a slasher/home invasion film striped down to its barest elements.  If nothing else, it’s a noble attempt to correct some of the wrongs and pitfalls that these movies frequently fall into.  One of the problems it desperately tries to avoid is this recent trend of giving killers elaborate back stories a mistake that often robs the villains of their mystique and aura.  Rather than go down that route, the film opts to give the killers absolutely no back-story whatsoever, nothing, not even at the end, not even the slightest hint as to why they’re doing all this.  This is sort of a double edged sword, though.  It does indeed avoid giving as much useless detail as Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but in doing so it even fails to give as much back-story as John Carpenter’s Halloween.  Indeed, the killers don’t need a full back-story, but a mere MacGuffin would have been nice, the mystery works for a little while but one quickly begins to seriously wonder why they’re going through all this trouble.

            The first thing one wonders when hearing about this concept is how they can make feature length slasher film with only two possible victims for the oncoming killers.  The answer, frankly, is that they can’t.  The film really cooks for about a half hour but it becomes quickly apparent that there’s really no place for these people to run or hide, they’re doomed, but there’s still another hour of stalking to go.  As such, the killers seem to go through an inordinate amount of trouble in order to draw out the film’s plot.  They spend a lot of time stalking the two and have full control of the situation, but for whatever reason they never seem to go in for the kill.  The film quickly get really redundant after the killers get into the pattern of appear, scare the main people, disappear, and the without any real hope of escape the whole thing quickly becomes an exercise in inevitability.

            Also, while the film avoids some of the genre’s clichés, there are plenty of them that the film still falls into.  The main characters frequently do stupid things rather than escape from the situation.  Also the killers have an annoying habit of being on frame and then disappearing in the second it takes for the character to glance away from the window.  This is something a lot of killers in slasher movies do and it usually has little bearing on logic or the laws of physics.  I sometimes picture these killers running and ducking out of frame in order to outrace the editor for no reason other than to be kind of creepy.  There’s a particularly egregious use of this tactic here where one of the killers taps Scott Speedman on the shoulder only to disappear when he turns around.

            The Strangers is a movie that ultimately doesn’t work, but it’s a noble effort.  Bryan Bertino crafts the movie well and there’s a real attempt on display to make something better than the average Hollywood thriller.  That first half hour really works and it’s unfortunate that it all leads up to a general anticlimax.  Unfortunately this is a movie that tried to be a little too hardcore for its own good.

** out of Four

            Politicians are always talking about family values, whatever that really means.  There are dozens of movies about the supposed strength of families, about parents losing all control to protect children, about families coming together in desperate situations.  Of course most of this is nonsense, when the chips are down blood usually isn’t as thick as most of these movies will have you believe.  Sometimes, there are going to be people you dislike, and happening to have the same parents as them isn’t always going to change that.  Rachel Getting Married is not a movie about “family values,” it isn’t idealized and it isn’t pretty.  It is, however, an incredibly honest movie; one that I think anyone can relate to on some level.

            Despite the title, the film’s central character is a woman name Kym (Anne Hathaway).  As the film begins Kym is leaving a rehab facility, seemingly for the first time in a while.  She’s going to be with her family for a week or so in order to attend her sister’s wedding.  Her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) seems excited to see her at first, so does her father Paul (Bill Irwin).  But Kym seems to start wearing out her welcome real quick, it becomes increasingly clear that the family holds more animosity toward Kym then they let on because of all the things she put them through while she was a drug addict.  As the weekend goes on the tensions continue to rise, and one begins to wonder if this family is ever going to come back together.

            One has to keep in mind, that this is a film that’s very much about its characters and the way they interact, it is less story driven than most films.  This is a film about an aftermath, about people living with the consequences of things that happened before the movie has started.  The plot description I’ve given is probably frustratingly vague; it had to be because Rachel Getting Married can potentially be a hard film to talk about without spoiling the experience.  A big part of why the film works so well is the way it slowly lets the audience in on this family’s troubled history over the course of the film, but not discussing some of this material makes it hard to really discuss the characters, and their various perspectives and motives.  I’m definitely not going to give anything away, but I will tell you that the film’s first act is not what it appears.  Jenny Lumet’s screenplay drops a bombshell on the audience about a third of the way into the movie which changes everything, forces the audience to rethink all the preceding scenes and fully clarifies everything that’s been going on between the characters.  This is not a plot twist of the M. Night Shyamalan kind, it doesn’t change the plot, but rather it changes things on a personal level, and it changes the audience’s perception of this family’s dynamic.

            The film was directed by Jonathan Demme, who’s probably best known as the filmmaker who brought us The Silence of the Lambs.  That Oscar winning film is not particularly representative of Demme’s body of work; his heart seems to be in independent filmmaking and in the world of low budget documentaries.  Demme is a filmmaker who seems to have a “one for them and one for me” mentality, making studio thrillers like The Truth About Charlie and The Manchurian Candidate (2004) between documentaries like The Agronomist and concert films like Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold.  Rachel Getting Married is clearly one for the independent side of his cannon.

            The film is shot entirely on handheld digital cameras and I’m sure this was done for stylistic rather than budgetary reasons.  The film looks almost like a home movie, albeit one that is made very professionally, and this gives the viewer a subliminal sense that they are like one of the people in the crowd attending the wedding.  Bear in mind though, that this is an exercise in narrative Cinéma vérité, not mockumentary.  The camera is only supposed to look handheld, and one is not meant to think any actual character is filming everything.  The visual style is reminiscent of the Dogme 95 films that were going on in the last decade, except without the strict “rules” or the general whiff of pretension surrounding that movement. 

            Anne Hathaway was an actress who I hadn’t had much exposure to until now.  Aside from her relatively small role in Brokeback Mountain, I hadn’t seen a single one of her movies.  This performance, however, was a revelation; I’ll definitely be watching her work more closely from now on.  In the film Hathaway almost has to play two roles, as both the scarred Kym who has a profound sense of guilt about her past behavior, and the public Kym who uses sarcasm as a façade to block her more vulnerable side.  Rosemarie DeWitt also has a lot of work here; her character is just as complex as Kym in that she is torn about her feelings toward her sister.  Bill Irwin has a smaller role than either of them, but he’s also important and he’s also really good in the role.

            The film also excels at a form of acting that isn’t often appreciated: extras.  The whole movie is filled with bit or non-speaking parts that are vital to the film’s success.  Frequently the film requires the whole wedding party to perform at the same time in order to create a mood.  There’s a good example of this early on when the family and friends of the betrothed are going around and giving a toast to the couple, each giving appropriate tributes to the two.  There’s a really nice jovial feeling in the room, then Kym stands up and instead of focusing strictly on the soon to be wed couple she starts giving an update of her own condition.  Quickly the mood in the room changes and awkward looks come over all the extras, the sense of discomfort is palpable.  This type of wide raging ensemble work is a big part of what makes this movie work.  The film’s excellent ensemble, vérité style, and down to earth dialogue bring an amazing degree of reality to the whole movie.  The whole thing really does feel like a real wedding, it hasn’t been Hollywooded up at all. 

            The film’s trailer is clearly trying to make this look like the next Juno or Little Miss Sunshine, but that’s wishful thinking on the studio’s part, this is probably not going to cross over into the public as easily as those two did and it’s not really that similar to either of them.  Kym does have a somewhat Juno like attitude every once in a while, but that’s only 10% of the time, and it’s very clearly a defense mechanism rather than her real personality.  It’s even less like Little Miss Sunshine, in fact the two movie are almost exact opposites; LMS is about a family that seems dysfunctional but comes together when the chips are down, while Rachel Getting Married is about a family that seems perfectly cordial but which actually has deep tensions.  Instead I’d liken it to last year’s independent hit Once, except without the whimsy. 

            Rachel Getting Married is an amazing piece of work, one of Jonathan Demme’s absolute best.  There’s something almost voyeuristic in how the film works, the whole affair feels so real that the viewer really thinks he’s wandered into the wedding preparations for a family you don’t really know, but soon will.  There are no easy answers here, the film knows that these people’s problems aren’t going to be solved over the course of a mere weekend, and by the end you wonder if they’ll ever be solved.  The movie is ultimately about forgiveness, or lack thereof.  All of the characters need to find out whether they are truly willing to forgive Kym for her past, most of all herself.

**** out of Four