Month: November 2014

It’s as dramatic as when you first lay eyes on Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull. In Foxcatcher, Steve Carell is not at all the Steve Carell with whom we’ve become accustomed. There’s not a sliver of the character from The Office or The 40 Year Old Virgin to be found. Nor does Carell, fitted with a prosthetic nose, smile once in the film. In one of the year’s very best performances, a super serious Carell gives an uncanny, haunting take on John Eleuthere DuPont.

Those old enough to remember the stir created by DuPont in 1996 may have forgotten how the man who had the Villanova athletic pavilion named after him came to, in disgrace, have his name removed. In this circumspect yet fascinating drama, director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball) captures the eerie, reticent disposition of DuPont. Drawn to the world of competitive wrestling despite knowing little about it, DuPont lures 1984 Olympic gold medal winner Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) into accepting a residential training and coaching stint at the DuPont Newtown Square, Pa. mansion. A team will be put together to capture the 1988 Olympics medals. Schultz stays in the guest house and trains at a facility, Foxcatcher, that DuPont created merely to satisfy his craving to get himself in the game. Tatum successfully conveys Mark’s gullibility, giving the not very socially savvy Mark a childlike dimension. Mark has long been overshadowed by his older brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow gold medal winner.

Dave has everything Mark doesn’t–a wife and kids, social skills, and a job as a wrestling coach. DuPont wants Dave at Foxcatcher, too, but Dave has little interest, at first, in uprooting his family. Dave is protective and loving of Mark but Mark’s character is so insular that even in the best of time he has trouble reciprocating Mark’s fraternal affection. When Dave is eventually convinced by DuPont to join the Foxcatcher team, tension between the brothers mounts. The straightforward Dave has a hard time figuring out the eccentric DuPont and his volatile relationship with Mark.

DuPont, calmly and increasingly psychopathically, possesses an intensity that takes for granted he’ll get anything wants in life. He already has all the money he needs and more. DuPont wasn’t just a “one percenter” in terms of wealth, he was a part of the 1/10th of one percent of the wealthiest of our population. Watching DuPont inside his world of private jets, helicopters and servants, he seems like a man who has the whole world in his hands.

Then we learn that inside his own family, he must defer to a strong-willed mom (Vanessa Redgrave) to gain permission for something as seemingly slight as what sports trophies will be allowed in which trophy cases. Redgrave hardly has any dialogue yet she is superbly provides the subtext for what inner demons may be lurking inside her increasingky strange-acting son. He rebels against her equestrian interests; she looks down on his penchant for wrestling as ignoble. DuPont, responding to the rare occasion his mom visits a wrestling practice, pretends to actually coach the team so he can show off for her. The scene exposes him as pathetic yet deeply troubled. The movie takes poetic license here since in the real story DuPont’s mom was already dead when he took in Schultz but this is an example of how a condensing of facts can effectively provide dramatic reward. Portraying the truth would have relied on clunky flashbacks and impeded the story. Screenwriters E. Max Frye (the brilliant Something Wild) and Dan Futterman play around with another timeline pertaining to the movie’s climax but their decision here also increases the film’s intensity, all the while staying true to the spirit of the actual events.

Foxcatcher’s great strength is in its rendering so vividly the inevitable enticement wealth and power hold over both the most innocent (Mark Schultz) and the most grounded (his brother Dave). It’s an American tragedy alright, no less so due to DuPont’s hollow talk of patriotic principles, yet the tragedy of DuPont himself resonates. A guy who had everything comes across as a big nothing inside. Adding great insult to injury, we can only begin to guess why.

A Filthy Rich Eccentric Loses His Mind…4.5 (out of 5 stars)

A haiku:

Cringe-worthy, inane.
Jim Carrey had me laughing:
Guess that is enough

Oppressive, delusional regimes will use nearly anything to preserve power, including the demeaning brutality of solitary confinement. In Jon Stewart’s powerful, perceptive adaptation of journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir of his 118 days in an Iranian prison in 2006, we see the resiliency of the human spirit. We also witness a prisoner fighting back by exploiting his interrogator’s own vulnerabilities.

Played with remarkable subtly by Gael Garcia Bernal, the Newsweek correspondent Bahari’s endures his tormentor’s crushing tactics. Bahari’s interrogator, “Rosewater,” is hellbent on extracting a false confession. Though Rosewater postures himself as puritanical, Bahari comes to identify his abuser’s sexual obsession and reduces him into prurient revery with tales of ecstatic massages in New Jersey. (Rosewater’s family, we come to learn, was brutally repressed under The Shah.)

Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay, pulls no punches in holding up a mirror to a regime that brazenly responds to the protesters with violence once they take to the streets. A passionate, rebellious electorate that supports dissident challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi is insulted by a fixed election forced on them by the theocratic government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While covering a peaceful demonstration Bahari changes course to cover another group’s taunting of the government militia, and the militia’s particularly harsh response. He then shoots video footage that was exclusive at a time when most foreign journalists had either gone home or stayed in their hotels. What was to have been a mere weeklong absence from his pregnant girlfriend back in London changes into his sudden apprehension while asleep in the home of his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) in Teheran. Accused of being a spy for the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, Bahari is blindfolded and the torture begins.

Stewart, who took off 12 weeks from The Daily Show and filmed in Jordan with veteran cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, demonstrates an economy of style that is surprisingly savvy for a first time director. Archival footage is seamlessly mixed into the street scenes. Stewart’s handling of Bahari’s solitary confinement is upheld with the recurring device of Bahari’s dead father appearing in his cell. Their conversation details his communist father’s own time in jail during The Shah’s regime in Iran but it also captures his fierce dedication to standing up to especially despotic authority. Bahari’s sister, recently deceased after also facing imprisonment under the Ayatollah Khomeini, also appears in flashbacks.

Before his imprisonment, Bahari interviewed with satirist Jason Jones on Stewart’s Daily Show. What was intended as a preposterous interview with Jones asking Ali-G-style questions to Bahari, is later brought up to him by his interrogators in prison as if it were somehow proof of his complicity in spying against the Ahmadinejad regime. “Why would a spy have a TV show?” Bahari asks. Later, as international pressure from Hillary Clinton starts a momentum that will eventually spring him from jail, Bahari does a dance in his cell to Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. It’s one more incredible moment of Bernal’s highly textured interpretation of what it must have been like, in terms of anger, despair, and resilience, to have stared in the face of his own death. His survival gives hope to truth overcoming fear in times so fraught with uncertainty that no matter who’s in charge they’re probably not to be trusted.

Of Torture, Tales of Massages, and Leonard Cohen….4 (out of 5) stars

In Les Miserables, Eddie Redmayne sang a song called “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. In The Theory of Everything, playing Stephen Hawking, Redmayne might very well have changed the words to “Missing Answers to Begging Questions.”

Redmayne and co-star Felicity Jones, who portrays Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, do a fine job but director James Marsh and screenwriter Anthony McCarter go heavy on visual detail but seem reluctant to provide exposition on important matters. Little effort is made to explain Stephen or Jane’s motives regarding life decisions. Confirmation of Stephen’s awareness or possible endorsement of Jane’s possible dalliance with a kind choirmaster (Charlie Cox) is left up in the air. The script, based on Wilde’s memoir, Travelling To Infinity,” counts on Jones’ ability to nonverbally suggest her frustrations with her devotion to Hawking but that proves to be too much to ask. When Stephen later, after 25 years of marriage, decides to leave Jane for a nurse who is attentive but dictatorial, we have little idea what in his makeup caused this. As viewers, we shouldn’t need to go outside the film for biographical explanations.

What the film does right is give a feel for Hawking’s interesting mix of awkwardness and brashness. His courtship of Jane while they were students at Cambridge in 1963, was the result of a nerdy yet highly determined and confidant young man. His vision included wanting to find “one single equation that explains everything in the universe.” After receiving a diagnosis of ALS that will give him at most two years to live, he pushes Jane away. She withstand his efforts and marries him. The Theory of Everything is as much or more about Jane’s tremendous perseverance as it is about Hawking’s.

Three children later (the film also does little to give much sense of Hawking’s relationship with his children) Hawking is lighting up the world of cosmology. His mentor (David Thewlis) gets him meetings with distinguished experts and Hawking dazzles them. Through his trials and tribulations, Hawking maintains an extraordinary sense of humor. When a friend asks Hawking, when he could still speak a little, whether his affliction “affects everything,” Hawking replies, “Different system.” It would have been nice if Marsh and McCarten discovered a different system in their filmmaking for what is indeed a very interesting subject.

Traveling to Infinity: A Missing Probe….3 (out 5 stars)

It gets a little complicated when assessing Laggies. Sam Rockwell has become such a mesmerizing force onscreen he often elevates a work he appears in by several notches. Last year’s The Way, Way Back would have been a rather good film without him; with him, it rose to one of the year’s best. In Laggies, Rockwell plays Craig, the lawyer single dad of Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz). The set-up is Megan (Keira Knightley) accidentally stumbles into the much younger Annika’s world while bored and frustrated with her own. On the day she’s to attend a multi-day self-actualization conference of some sort she has second thoughts and not just about the gabfest. She’s just accepted a proposal from her stuffy boyfriend (Mark Webber) to elope after the conference. In addition, her nosy, advice-pushing friends annoy her.

So the almost-30 Megan bolts, and before you know it she is is not only hanging out with high schooler Annika, she’s crashing in her room. Craig’s reaction is pure Rockwellian. Able to blend a naturally stern response with a compassionately humorous one, Craig has charisma to burn. Rockwell steals every scene he’s in, and he and Knightley are dynamite together. This despite a fine performance from Knightley, who’s getting Oscar buzz for her role in the forthcoming The Imitation Game. Moretz (who also does very well supporting Juliette Binoche in the forthcoming Clouds of Sils Maria) gives Annika depth and believability. In lesser acting hands the connection between the two women could have easily seemed phony. Knightley and Moretz lend strength to their character’s ability to find instant compatibility. When Annika asks Megan to pretend to be her mom at a parent-teacher conference, Knightley pulls it off nicely. A later scene with Annika’s estranged mom (Gretchen Mol) provides plenty of insight on why Annika is a prime candidate for hanging out with a woman more than a decade older than herself.

Director Lynn Shelton (Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister) has fashioned a film that’s three parts fun and one part insightful. It differs from her previous work in that it embraces a conventionality that her previous work avoided. It’s also is her first film that she didn’t write. Some Megan’s scenes with her friends-since-high school border on clichéd, and her hyper-deliberate, impossibly sincere fiancé is pure cookie-cutter. And did we really need to include a prom here? Yet its sense of good fun and interesting characters are more than a mere veneer. They stick. Laggies is the perfect chaser to wash down the many heavy fall movies that go from deep to deeper. It’s lightness is no flaw.

Keira Knightley Floats Around Finding Herself….3.5 (out of 5) stars

Force Majeure presents a situation between a married couple that forces us to reflect on how our own response to the same situation might be similar or different. Swedish Director Ruben Ostlund demonstrates great control with a deft sense of humor that bursts forth to perfectly offset the many tense moments of conflict. Philosophical speculation and laugh-out-loud intervals may seem like strange bedfellows but in this Cannes Jury Prize winner, it works magnificently.

Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) embark on a family ski trip with their adolescent kids in tow. Cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel conveys the tranquility of the scene with get verve. Ostlund throws in ironic sonic flourishes that portend an eeriness suggesting the calm might be temporary. Then, in a flash, a natural event occurs that ostensibly seems matter-of-fact. As the day turns into night, a decision made by Tomas takes on an increasingly momentous status. While their kids express worry that their parents might be heading for divorce, the problem grows and grows. Another couple who they’ve acquainted offer compassionate support. Yet their very involvement also tangles them up in the quagmire. Speculation is rampant. No relationship is safe given the extraordinary challenge presented. (Here’s a hint: it has to do with the protection of the female by the male, or precisely, the lack of it.)

Much has been made about couples entering into Force Majeure’s force field at their own risk. One reviewer has suggested seeing it alone so as not to jeopardize your relationship and I’m not so sure he was entirely tongue-in-cheek. What is clear is this is clearly a film whose vision offers an almost unparalleled uniqueness. While its ending may baffle some and anger others, it, too, seems especially singular in its irony-on-irony ability to spoof itself into an even more unsettling emotional terrain. Its instant and recurring tone changes providing exhilarating strength, Force Majeure seems like a patently rigorous Michael Haneke film juxtaposed with the deadpan glee of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. That is to say, near-perfect.

The Lack of Manliness Never Looked So Nonchalant…4.5 (out of 5) stars

Writer-director Alex Ross Perry is no stranger to controversy. When his prior film, The Color Wheel, dropped a particularly vile plot bomb at its climax, it seemed like a crude tack-on from another movie. In Listen Up Philip, Perry launches a much slower-igniting agitation but one equally demoralizing. Jason Schartzman plays Philip Lewis Friedman, a novelist of some repute, who takes himself seriously. At the start of the film he looks up old girlfriends and former college chums and, after barely saying hello, flays them mercilessly for all their shortcomings, especially any underestimation of him.
His publisher and his live-in girlfriend, Ashley (an excellent Elizabeth Moss), get even worse treatment. Philip has little patience for the feelings of others when he’s having such a smug good time pontificating his pitiful, albeit occasionally witty, chin-wag.

If he respects anyone at all, it’s the older, esteemed novelist Ike Zimmerman, who has taken an interest in mentoring the young turk. When Philip basically just suddenly leaves his New York apartment to take residence upstate with Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), his matter of fact announcement startles Ashley. Moss’s character, simple on the surface yet ultimately complex, adds the missing emotional punch to the film as she tries to deal with her mess.

Philip eventually takes on a college teaching job where Zimmerman once taught. To no one’s surprise, he’s a reclusive professor who refuses to even engage in conversation with his students unless it takes place in class or during office hours. Pryce is as good an actor as there is but Zimmerman feels more like a sketch of an old jaded novelist than an old jaded novelist. Suggestions he is a barely disguised model of Philip Roth also don’t add up to much, unless you think it’s a good idea to portray Roth onscreen by first stripping everything Jewish from his character. Zimmerman’s adult daughter sometimes shows up at the house he and Philip share to remind us from yet another angle how much of a misanthrope Philip is. Oh, and, the mighty baritone of no less than Eric Bogosian narrates these proceedings, recalling Rod Serling. But the narration is as void of interest as is the face of Philip, which Perry relishes giving is in frequent close-ups. The 16mm film stock no more than puts a creative ribbon on a disappointing package.

After telling his publisher he’s not interested in doing a book tour or otherwise promoting his novel, Philip recognizes a female publishing assistant who seems interested in him. He insist they’ve met before. She doesn’t recall. Naturally where this is heading is Philip only cares about giving her shit for refusing his advances when he was an unknown neophyte. Now that she pays him attention, he doesn’t want it because it’s tarnished by her not having recognized his charm and genius beforehand.

And on and on…..Perry’s trick this time is to put forth a totally unlikeable character and then challenge his viewers to accept Philip, whether or not a sliver of redemption can be found. The view from here is it’s not a matter of choice between praising or burying Philip, but of finally being bored to death by him.

The Most Miserable Writer You’ll Ever Meet (and those who fall in his wake)….2.5 (out of 5) stars

Listen Up Philip is currently playing at the Roxy Theater