Don MalvasiFrench Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan (he made and starred in I Killed My Mother at 19) seriously gets in your face with the extravagantly jarring Mommy. The brutal arguments between tantalizing, violent-prone, just-released-from-juvenile-detention, ADHD 15-year-old Steve (Antoine-Olivier Platt) and his tough yet unconditionally compassionate single mom, Diane (a great Anne Dorval) have to be seen to be believed. Unencumbered by inhibition, Dolan displays an acute sense of knowing his characters, and allowing the viewer to get inside their fears and demonstrations of conviction. Steve yammers his way into his mother’s confidences one moment, strikes at her in a swift mood change the next, then washes it down with an all too believable vulnerability as he seeks placation. It’s at once heart-rending and totally disarming.
Dolan, 25, has an eye for marvelous shots and his use of the narrow 1:1 screen ratio, highly effective in itself, produced an anticipation of wondering just when he was going to spring the change of ratio to full-blown widescreen. He doesn’t disappoint. He also has a penchant for long scenes accompanied by an entire pop song. Oasis’s Wonderwall never sounded so good as it augments a particular scene that borders on the surreal.
Stylistic marvels aside, Mommy is essentially about a mother’s love against all odds. After Steve, who’s also been know to wet his pants, expresses fear to Diane that she’ll stop loving him, she replies, “What’s gonna happen is I’m gonna be loving you more and more, and you’ll be loving me less and less. That’s just the natural way of life.”
A harrowing, artistic view of a 15-year old who is a recalcitrant handful…4.5 stars (out of 5)
Director and screenwriter Mike Binder will be called on the carpet by the gripe-happy protectors of the politically correct. He’ll be accused of tripping over stereotypes as he presents the story of a custody battle over a racially mixed seven-year-old, Eloise. Despite being a little obvious around the edges, Black or White essentially presents a modern day racial drama with solid conviction and fresh ideas.
Raised by her maternal grandparents after her mother died in childbirth, Eloise (Jillian Estell) faces another tragedy when her grandmother dies in a car accident just before the film begins. Her grandfather, Eliot (a riveting Kevin Costner), a corporate lawyer, suddenly faces the task of raising the child by himself. Just when he begins to get his footing, Eloise’s fraternal grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer, very good) decides the girl would be better off in her custody–especially since her long-estranged, miscreant son, Reggie (Andre Holland), is suddenly eager to get involved with his daughter Or is he?
Rowena also presents the notion that the child would be better off getting acquainted with the black side of her culture, and blames Eliot for shielding Eloise from her other identity. Eliot contends his only objection is that Reggie stay away from the child. Eliot blames him for his daughter’s death, for not being forthcoming during the child’s infancy, and for basically not showing up. Defended by his attorney uncle, Jeremiah (Anthony Mackie), Reggie is heading to court, his shady drug-taking reputation notwithstanding. A potentially wobbly witness, Reggie gets a tongue-lashing from Jeremiah. He reinforces the worst stereotypes about a shiftless black man, Jeremiah says. Later, in a witness stand soliloquy, Eliot will call attention to these same traits as he explains a regrettable reference to Reggie where Eliot uses the n-word.
Although he’s got a serious drinking problem and is overloaded with self-pity, Eliot is a heroic character. His essential vibe is that he’ll let no caution over offending racial contrasts stand in the way of protecting his daughter from the peril presented by Reggie. The film often seems to be playing it overly safe until you realize how against the grain its essential viewpoint is. It plays with your expectations, and while it ultimately presents almost as many problems connecting the dots as it does putting forth fresh insight, Black or White is anything but a grandiose nose-thumb at conventional racial politics. It may often paint in broad strokes, but its heart is as wide as its vision. The racial midcourse it presents feels genuine, even if much of its point of view is that of the white guy.
A Custody Battle Between The Races ….3.5 (out of 5) stars
In the haunting Two Days, One Night, directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne add a profound level of morality drama to their customarily brilliant trove of social reality themes explored since their outstanding first film, Le Promesse (1997). What is unique this time is they are working with an actress who is emerging as one of the very finest in film. Marion Cotillard’s versatility and skills are bringing her to a whole new level. Here she plays Sandra, a woman who has just been voted out of her job by 16 co-workers who, in a Hobson’s choice, collectively choose a cash bonus for themselves over concern for her continued employment.
Taking a simple story in terms of plot and plumbing its depths for signs of both human vanity and sacrifice, the Dardennes demonstrate a surgical skill in extracting every nuance of feeling from scenes of confrontation. Their films are always primarily character studies but here the stakes seem raised. Basic working people make the most meaningful impact with what seem on the surface as mere ordinary decisions. Sandra, reluctantly, and with heartbreaking fragility, is convinced by both a co-worker and her husband to find and visit each co-worker who voted against her. She must convince those who voted “no” to change their minds for a re-vote taking place in a mere two days. What may seem like a shallow Ayn Rand-esque virtue-of-selfishness mode of thinking takes on a level of complexity as some of Sandra’s co-workers express their own financial needs in refusing to give up their money.
Expressing a spare, savvy naturalism, Two Days, One Night seems steeped in a higher order of art–one concerned primarily with how people treat each other. Sandra’s plight seems bent on destroying her mental and emotional wellbeing yet no matter how stressed she becomes, she somehow moves on from one co-worker to the next, sufficiently composed. Attempting no grandstanding flourishes of persuasive oratory, nor any psychological angles, she offers matter-of-fact, in-your-face directness. As Sandra comes to make realizations about not only her co-workers, but also about herself, the film’s larger meanings and questions unfold. Playing a character as distressed but as equally determined as the memorable Bruno in the Dardennes’ film, L’enfant (2006), Cotillard surpasses her previous roles, including the Oscar-winning La Vie en Rose. She and her directors have constructed an insightful, wise film with great heart and a timeless subject: the struggle of man’s inhumanity to man versus an alternative sense of compassion and community.
Belgium’s Choice For Oscars’s Best Foreign Film Is A Stunner…..4.5 (out of 5) stars
Far from an excerise in yahoo-ism, American Sniper offers us a film startlingly immediate in its action scenes. Coming to be known as “The Legend,” Navy Seal Chris Kyle, its subject, went through four tours in the Iraq War, in which he performed around 160 official “kills.” (and apparently another hundred unofficial ones). The film does an adequate if not equally proficient job of showing the tally all the warfare takes on his psyche. Like Kyle, director Clint Eastwood seems eager to get back to Iraq. In between the tours, domestic scenes with his wife (Sienna Miller) show an increasingly distant Kyle. More detail could have been presented but his emotional and mental deterioration come across nonetheless. Although Kyle approached his mission with an unwavering patriotism, Kyle viewed himself much differently than his peers viewed him.
Although it may be tempting to dismiss American Sniper, based on Kyle’s best selling memoir, as a warts-and-all apologia for what was an ill-advised war effort, it goes beyond taking political sides. The film keeps enough distance from Kyle, who Lee, a fellow soldier, says has a “savior complex.” When Lee’s mother later reads at his graveside a letter her son wrote questioning the war, Kyle’s response contains no empathy. “It was the letter that killed him,” he tells his disbelieving wife on the drive home from the funeral.
Once the war was underway it was real human beings who made the personal sacrifices. Just war or unjust war, the stress and strain of the day-to-day combat was as harsh an undertaking as can be imagined. Eastwood brings it home with panache. He leaves no stone unturned in putting us on the front lines. All the chatter surrounding Kyle’s lost defamation suit after claiming to have beaten up in a bar fight none other than Jesse Ventura, may indeed point to a less than reliable source of truth and reality. Does that mean American Sniper’s facts are possibly skewed? Subtract some of the hyperbole surrounding The Legend’s feats and you’ve still got a helluva story. Operating in the myth arena as usual, Eastwood is mostly going for an archetype here anyway. He succeeds. Chris Kyle is memorable for his extreme focus on going after the enemy, at exalting his comrades, at finding himself bewildered that the ostensibly important areas of his life–his wife, his kids–seem to pale in comparison with his getting himself back to Iraq to continue The Fight. No matter the fight itself might be a futile, misguided folly that’s gotten out of hand. That only makes it all the more tragic.
Cooper, securing his third straight Oscar nomination for this role, makes Kyle’s gee-whiz righteousness believable. He chillingly brings to life a character who, despite being an uncanny shot, fails at the Seals shooting range until a live target presents itself. Once in Iraq, as he runs over everything in his path, he gains the nickname al-Shaitan (“the devil”) and a bounty on his head increases. Miller (also the stung wife in Foxcatcher), showcases a character who rolls with a determination to bring her husband back to a status quo that is steadily slipping away. It’s a shame the same cheesy magic bullet depicted here to travel more than a mile to meet its target once Kyle lines up his money shot, didn’t also possess similar extra powers to heal Kyle and his family. Instead, what seems like a cruel joke hangs over the coda of the film, as Kyle meets an ironic fate that takes place entirely offscreen. Despite a missed opportunity for a closing statement, Eastwood, 84, has proven with American Sniper that there’s plenty of life left in his talents after the empty chair episode at the Republican Convention.
Eastwood Finds Traction In A Brutal Iraqi War Pic….4 stars (out of 5)
Inherent Vice will likely be a polarizing film. It is bound to either bring belly laughs and fresh insight on the one end of the spectrum, or confusion perhaps to the point of walking out of the theater on the other. Those hidebound filmgoers who see the need to evaluate every film in terms of cogent plot and conventional story arc will be at a loss here. Those nostalgic for a film that captures the freewheeling and often capricious nature of 1960s and early 1970s culture need only check out Paul Thomas Anderson masterful if highly unorthodox film. Anderson’s adaptation of idiosyncratic author Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel represents the first film to be attempted from the reclusive 77-year-old Pynchon’s canon. Its release heralds a high-mark in the marriage of a seemingly unfilmable author with a highly talented director (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Magnolia, Boogie Nights). Here when geniuses meet the seemingly impossible comes to fruition, albeit through a prism bent on significantly twisting our heads.
Joachim Phoenix has played a series of quirky if not full blown crazed characters. In Inherent Vice he portrays Larry “Doc” Sportello, a stoned but clever private detective constantly at odds with Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a cop who alternates between mercilessly harassing and ridiculing Sportello, and simultaneously gleaning information and services from him. Their interactions are the highlight of a film that constantly plays with expectations of conventionality and classic detective film tropes.
Its tongue firmly in its cheek, Inherent Vice toys with and even seems to taunt its increasingly convoluted dramatic progressions. What is left when the realization hits that following a plot isn’t all that important here, is a film whose essence is its incredible tone and its often surreal characters. Owen Wilson keeps popping up as a musician estranged from his family, first he seems compromised and possibly kidnapped by the evil forces of The Golden Fang, an Indochinese drug cartel, then later he’s possibly an operative for Vigilant California, a pro-Nixon, anti-subversive group.
Even Eric Roberts makes an appearance as the kidnapped, ultra wealthy Mickey Wolfmann, the former lover of Sportello’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, daughter of actor Sam), who shows up one day out of nowhere. The perfect femme fatale, Shasta has Sportello right where she wants him and he goes off on an odyssey full of crazed characters. There’s Reese Witherspoon as Penny, Sportello’s sometime lover who works as a lawyer for the D.A.’s office; Martin Short as Rudy Blatnoyd, a shady and hilarious dentist; and Benicio Del Toro as Sportello’s lawyer, Sauncho Smilax (Pynchon’s penchant for colorful names is never more evident than here).
Inherent Vice makes many references to the failure of the 60s counterculture. It’s not long after Charlie Manson’s tragedy and many of the hippies portrayed here are involved in harder drugs and subsequently have a washed-out look. Similarly, Wolfmann, confined in a sanatorium in Ojai, tells how he planned to spend his fortune by developing a desert community where everyone could live free of charge. He would have called it “Arrepentimiento” (translation: sorry about that”) but now, seemingly having come to his senses, Mickey says he’s “waking up from a bad hippie dream.” Inherent Vice includes a panorama of many of the “ancient forces of greed and fear” that came to destroy that dream; it also serves as a wondrous kaleidoscope of the dream’s original vision.
Phoenix and Brolin Are Brilliant/Inherent Vice Soars….4.5 (out of 5) stars
Selma builds its way toward a celebration of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sharply focused on the key months leading up to a series of three nonviolent protest marches in Selma, Alabama, it agonizingly captures the textures of human toil and determination that led to the momentous legislation. Director Ava DuVernay zeros in on Martin Luther King’s ability to channel enormous power, yet exercise exceptional self-containment and control. The film is at its strongest when it portrays the intimate, inward side of King and his entourage of key advisors and assistants. Anything but an icon, the King depicted here is very much a walking and talking human being. His worries and sorrows are portrayed side by side with his contagious confidence. We see King at a low ebb–calling Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night and asking her to sing to him. We see King whispering his despair to Ralph Abernathy as they sit in a darkened jail cell, the latter providing succor to his friend by quoting the Bible.
King must go head to head with a vacillating Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). Although Johnson’s opposition might possibly be exaggerated by DuVernay and screenwriter Paul Webb, they nonetheless give a sharp picture of the political need for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strategize as much as to call for action. In fact, in one of the film’s most stirring scenes, it is King’s decision for inaction in support of a safer outcome that resonates. In a second march to the bridge, this time with clergy and activists from all over the country, King halts the march, sensing that the police are poised for another brutal attack that caused the first march to be called “Bloody Sunday.” With 2,500 marchers behind him, he kneels down in prayer to get direction and then returns the marchers around to return to the church. Later, when met with fierce criticism, King says, “I’d rather have people hate me than have them get unnecessarily hurt.” David Oyelowo is great at conveying King’s ability to refrain from impulsive decisions. As King goes, so goes his strong supporting group.
Selma also does a very fine job with its set pieces. The group’s first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 and the brutal response against the 600 unarmed black marchers from state troopers and Selma police, was a game changer in terms of spurring the American public’s outrage. DuVernay depicts a scene fraught with the terror of an attacking police on horseback with clubs and whips and tear gas. Yet DuVernay wisely pulls back, eventually cloaking the brutality with a white cloud of tear gas. She practices a similar restraint in a scene that devastatingly depicts the slaying a year earlier of four little girls at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The previously unheralded DuVernay picked up the reins to this film at the behest of Oyelowo, who starred in her 2012 feature Middle of Nowhere. Had the film been left up to Lee Daniels, her predecessor as the announced director, we likely would have been given a product much closer to his The Butler, which paraded before us a series of cartoonish presidents. While DuVernay (who did a rewrite of Webb’s screenplay) flirts with one-dimensionality in her depiction of Lyndon Johnson and racist Alabama governor George Wallace, two veritable acting pros save the day. Wilkinson is paired with Tim Roth as Wallace, and their performances outweigh any rumblings of melodrama. Also strong in the stellar cast is Carmen Ejogo as King’s wife Coretta, Andre Holland as Andrew Young, Colman Domingo as Ralph Abernathy, Common as James Bevel, and Stefan James as John Lewis, who at age 74 is currently in his 28th year as a Congressman from Georgia.
Ever the brilliant strategist, King is fully aware that previous voter registration drives in Georgia failed to move the public’s consciousness because the police reaction there had been as equally nonviolent as that of the protesters. His wish to move the needle on the response of the American public was due to a wisely prescient determination that Selma’s bad guys would not counter as tamely. Throughout he cites a “we can’t wait any longer” urgency to end egregious voter registration practices. Among them were ludicrous civics tests (brought to life in the film by a victimized Oprah Winfrey), poll taxes, the need for “vouchers” by an existing voter (when no other black for miles was actually registered), and the publication of a successful registrant’s name and address in the local paper in case anyone cared to direct any violence their way.
Remarkably, this is the first dramatic film to deal with Martin Luther King as a main character (the 14-hour documentary television series Eyes on the Prize is essential viewing on the subject). Selma’s timeliness pertains not only to the imminent 50th anniversary of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson (heartbreakingly depicted here), but to our current news headlines as well. A mere year-and-a-half after The Supreme Court overturned many of the provisions contained in The Voters Rights Act, the freedom of minorities to vote is sadly again in jeopardy. Side by side with a politicization of the voting booth is the reoccurrence of racial unrest in the face of unarmed citizens again finding themselves at risk. While Selma celebrates one of the most important victories in our history, it serves as a bittersweet reminder that King’s fight serves as a beacon of exemplary behavior in the light of an ongoing struggle.
Essential History But Above All, A Stunning Film…. 4.5 (out of 5) stars
The paintings in Big Eyes remind one of the most insipid examples of a summer boardwalk art show. Bulging-eyed lonesome-looking urchins, pretty much in cookie cutter fashion, dominate each canvas to the point where the rest of the painting seems to have disappeared. In many ways, a miscast Christopher Waltz, normally a very fine actor, gives forth an equally bulging, one-note performance. He plays Walter Keane, who in San Francisco in the 1950s, began bamboozling both the art buying public and his own wife, Margaret (Amy Adams), the actual artist behind the paintings.
Pretending to be the actual artist, Walter shucks and jives his way to notoriety and a large financial gain. A natural salesman, he is glib and patronizing to the point of inanity. Naturally, a serious art dealer (an amusingly dour Jason Schwartman) and critic (Terence Stamp channeling John Simon) see right through him, and eventually, contribute to his downfall. It takes Margaret nearly the length of the film to finally get the gumption to make a move and resist. Her reticence is, of course, a product of the Mad Men-era times. Relegated to second-class citizens, women endured everyday punishment as much as the big one depicted here.
When approached as a woman’s story of self-actualization and liberation, Big Eyes works fine. Amy Adams conveys perfectly the terrible dilemma of a woman whose very deepest and
most personal work was doubly violated. Her intellectual and creative property was denied her for the mere “crime” of being a woman and for pure financial gain. Although she reaped the outward rewards of wealth, Adams allows us to identify with just how
hollow the expensive house and other luxuries make Margaret feel. Scenes where she must lie to her daughter brings her to tears.
As long as Big Eyes stays focused on Adams, it moves along just fine. The problem is the film doesn’t avoid overexposing us to Waltz’s schtick. We can’t help but wonder how a guy this lame ever managed to not be stripped of credibility long before his wife turns on him. Burton, usually famous for visual extravagance both good and bad, actually tones down production design elements this time. Instead his penchant for excess produces a breezily ludicrous cartoon-character who very nearly ruins the film.
A Really Good Amy Adams In An Uneven Depiction Of Spousal Psychological Torture…3.0 (out of 5) stars
In a year where two highly innovative English language films (Birdman and Boyhood) stood above the pack, it was foreign language films in 2014 that contained much of the lifeblood of the year’s cinema. Pawel Pawlikowski weaves a magical, deeply meditative spell with the lean and sublime Ida, a black-and-white film shot in a nearly square format. Containing two of the year’s best performances, the film is at once melancholy and luminous as it explores its themes of guilt, pain, transformation, loss, and survival in post-holocaust Poland. Equally haunting, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night takes a simple story in terms of plot and plumbs its depths for signs of human vanity and sacrifice, extracting every nuance of feeling from the film’s spare, savvy depiction of confrontation.
Eighty-five-year-old Chilean surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowky made his first film in 23 years and also had a documentary featuring his wild attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune. Not to be outdone, 84-year-old Jean-Luc Godard kept up his late in life mission of attempting to bend the boundaries of film itself. While the results of each of these efforts certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (I found Godard’s The End of Language essentially impenetrable yet still intriguing) they represent a life force largely missing in American films. Jodorowsky meanwhile, unfortunately received far less attention for his wondrously crazy memoir The Dance of Reality than for the eye-opening Jodorowsky’s Dune. Understandably, a film with a limitlessly imaginative scope and one that, had it ever got made, would have in its cast the likes of Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles, drew much attention.
Other highlights among foreign language films was Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, a deft combination of two ostensibly strange bedfellows: philosophical speculation surrounding a married couple’s conflict and deadpan humor. Two films that had little in common except their central theme of just how far an overbearing mother will go to protect her difficult son, also shone with sharply realized filmmaking and outstanding acting. Child’s Pose, the Romanian film from Calin Peter Netzer, features a stunning performance from its lead, Luminita Gheorghiu, and the forthcoming 2015 Canadian film, Mommy, from “boy wonder” director Xavier Dolan, both are emotionally draining yet superb. Finally, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-da, always excellent in depicting children, in Like Father, Like Son tells how two families deal with the bombshell revelation that their six-year-old sons were switched at birth.
Innovation and risky filmmaking is also represented in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, a wacky, infectious adaptation of the heretofore unfilmable author, Thomas Pynchon. Yet Inherent Vice may not be the oddest concept for a film this year. In Stephen Knight’s Locke, Tom Hardy gives one of the hear’s best performances as a Ivan Locke, a construction manager who takes a momentous overnight drive to London. The highly compelling film contains one set–Locke’s car–and no other characters except those on the other end of a series of increasingly frantic phone conversations.
First-time directors also made a huge impact in 2014. Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, delivers a disquieting dagger with a film that was both a real kick and one that teetered on the edge of many of our worst fears. Jennifer Kent’s first feature, The Babadook, blurred the supernatural and the psychological in a film that both scares the hell out of you and makes you think. Obvious Child, directed by Gillian Robespierre, tackles the subject of an aspiring stand-up comedian (Jenny Slater) who decides to get an abortion after a one-night stand, and was both bracingly funny and resonant in its capturing the angst of Brooklyn twenty-somethings.
Finally, the year’s biggest box office winner was uncustomarily actually a very good film. After all the year’s fine art films, Guardians of the Galaxy was a crowd-pleasing jolt of fresh air.
Dozen Best:
Ida Birdman Two Days, One Night Boyhood The Dance of Reality The Grand Budapest Hotel Inherent Vice Only Lovers Left Alive Snowpiercer Foxcatcher Nightcrawler Blue Ruin
Runners-Up:
Force Majeure Gone Girl Locke Starred Up Guardians of the Galaxy The Babadook Child’s Pose Chef Like Father, Like Son A Most Wanted Man Calvary Top Five Obvious Child
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – J.K. Simmons, Whiplash; Edward Norton, Birdman; Ethan Hawke, Boyhood; Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher; Kristofer Hivju, Force Majeure
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Agata Kulesza, Ida; Emma Stone, Birdman; Patricia Arquette, Boyhood; Uma Thurman, Nymphomaniac: Volume 1; Laura Dern, Wild
BEST ACTOR– Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler; Tom Hardy, Locke; Steve Carell, Foxcatcher; Joachim Phoenix, Inherent Vice; Jack O’Connell, Starred Up; Michael Keaton, Birdman
BEST ACTRESS – Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night; Agata Trzebuckowska, Ida; Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl; Luminita Gheorghiu, Child’s Pose; Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive
FAVORITE FILMS OF 2015 SO FAR – Mommy, Stations of the Cross, Clouds of Sils Maria, Human Capital, Gabriel, 10,000 KM, It Follows
OVERRATED – Under The Skin, Goodbye to Language, The Immigrant, The Theory of Everything, Listen Up Philip, Whiplash, Interstellar, Lucy
FAVORITE DOCUMENTARIES – Life Itself, Jodorowsky’s Dune, The Dog, Rich Hill, The Missing Picture, The Overnighters, Point and Shoot
