Le Havre (2011)

The opening credits of Aki Kaurismäki's "Le Havre" give prominent billing to Laika, a dog playing herself, and promise the appearance of a sixtysomething French blues-rocker by the name of Little Bob. This gives a good idea of the tone of the optimistic, understated confection that will follow.

Marcel (André Wilms) describes himself as a former Paris bohemian and artist. But now he is a sixty-year-old shoe-shiner, living by the sea in Le Havre with his wife Arletty (Kati Outinen). His neighborhood, and the film, seem to have skipped at least three decades, buildings, furnishings, stores, clothes and cars all of at least 1970s vintage. There are no young people here - the population of Marcel's neighborhood are like him, quietly and contentedly departing middle-age.

The quiet town is roused by the discovery at the port of a shipping container containing a couple of dozen Gabonese emigrants. The container was supposed to end up in London but has landed in Le Havre. All but one of the people inside are detained: a boy, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), runs away. By chance, while hiding from a police force led by the marvelously deadpan Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), he crosses paths at the dock with Marcel, who offers him food and later returns to leave more food and cash.

At the same time as Idrissa enters the lives of Marcel and his neighbors, Arletty leaves. She is hospitalized with severe illness, and the outlook is not good. "Miracles do happen," is all that her doctor can offer; "not in my neighborhood," she replies. This is by a large margin as pessimistic and reflective as anyone will get in this story of simple, pragmatic kindness. Arletty languishes as Marcel and his neighbors, without complicated plotting or discussion, undertake without fanfare to perform a miracle and get Idrissa to London, where his mother awaits him, before he is caught.

What is the nature of the mirror between Arletty and Idrissa? We see Marcel tender and concerned, journeying daily to his wife's decidedly not modern hospital room, but she sends him away, not wanting to be seen ravaged by her treatment, keeping the extent of her illness from him. She seems almost to be playing the role of a guiding angel for Idrissa, having been displaced by him and now granting her husband the time to help him. But as Marcel protects Idrissa and figures out how and where to send him onward, he cannot be there for his wife as her condition seems to grow more dire. If he succeeds with Idrissa, what about his wife? Are Arletty and Idrissa's fates linked or opposite?

For a plot that is ostensibly cat-and-mouse, "Le Havre" proceeds with little urgency or suspense. Things unfold in the order and at the pace that they are capable of, and anything modern or insistent seems malignant. One of the armed police who accompany Monet to the dock when Idrissa runs away point automatic weapons at the fleeing child; Monet is incredulous and pushes the weapons aside. Later a commuter uses an anachronistic-seeming mobile phone to summon the police when he spots Idrissa; one of the neighborhood intervenes to allow Idrissa to escape before the police arrive. Time is slow here, and this kind of thing has no place.

Time cannot trouble Marcel and his neighbors, and neither are they ever bothered by doubt. They make no trade-off between what is right and what is possible, which at first makes the whole down-to-earth business of the plot seem utterly unreal. Everyone is defined entirely by their actions, and their actions are matter-of-fact - a child is here, he wants to get there, and that's just the way it is. There is almost no antagonism, because almost no-one does anything wrong. "Le Harve" is as optimistic and compassionate a film as I can remember, but the optimism and compassion are just the boxes that the simple actions of Marcel and his friends naturally fall into. This is an alluring escapism, so that by the end the whole fantasy seemed to make all the sense in the world.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

At the beginning of Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) sneaks past sleeping bodies on the floor of a rickety farmhouse and runs into the woods. She is spotted and briefly pursued, but makes it to town. She makes a desperate call to her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who comes to collect her and take her to the Connecticut lakeshore vacation home of Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy).

Martha has run away from an extended stay with a small cult, whose leader Patrick (John Hawkes) had renamed her Marcy May. As she recuperates at Lucy and Ted's home, she is haunted by the memories of the group. The film moves fluidly between her cult life and the scenes from her new surroundings that trigger Martha's recollections, the boundary between present reality and memory blurry. The transitions are well-executed. Most jarring are the earliest shifts, since in them we move back to Martha's arrival at the group's upstate New York farmland commune. She is relaxed and happy, on a new adventure, in startling contrast to the broken, sluggish young woman we were introduced to. Over the course of the film the Martha of the past is ground through Marcy May into the Martha of the present.

What of that Martha before there was Marcy May? She refuses to talk to Lucy about what has happened to her in the time since they last spoke, insisting that she had only been living with a boyfriend and left. We, of course, get to see plenty of Martha's time with the group, but nevertheless I shared Lucy's frustration. How did Martha end up there? She is brought in by her friend Zoe (Louisa Krause) and quickly and readily assimilates to some degree into the group identity, despite the brutal wrongness of the initiation. Why? It might well be an accurate picture of group psychology, but we are left to draw our own conclusions about what drove Martha there in the first place. Just as the cult dominates Martha's thoughts, to the exclusion of everything else, we too never see beyond it. There is no "before".

Something similar is true of Patrick, who is the center of the group, and therefore in a way of the film, and yet in the end we see very little of him. We know nothing of his past, nothing of his motivations. Like everything else that Martha has experienced, he just is, which reduces him to little more than images in Martha's memory. The overall effect is to render the scenes from the past somehow soulless. It would be gratifying to know more, though perhaps this would undermine the lifeless, hallucinatory feeling of the memories.

In the present, once again, Lucy and Ted take on something of the same quality, Martha barely engaging them in any real sense. Ted is hardly an easy character to like: rich, English real-estate developer with money to spare, shuttling between his Connecticut and New York City homes. Comparisons between Patrick and Ted become easy and tempting, as the slightest hint of direction of Martha by her sister's husband come to carry sinister overtones.

Only once does Martha show real signs of fiery life. Her outlandish behavior and outbursts wear on Lucy and Ted; they cannot understand, because they have no idea of the severity of what she has gone through. Lucy tries to absolve herself of the years-old guilt she feels at not having supported Martha more, and invites Martha to share it. Ted pushes Martha to decide what she might want to do with herself. She explodes. To Lucy she parrots Patrick's words to her: she is a leader and a teacher. What should she have to feel guilty about? She derides Ted's materialism, accusing him of equating success with possessions, insisting that there are other ways to live. When cornered, she has lashed out; how much is the ethos of the cult and how much might at last tell us something about who Martha really is?

But soon the flash has subsided and we are left back with Martha's introversion and almost paranoid anxiety, the color of the other characters once again turned down. Olsen's performance is gripping throughout, but we are doomed not to really meet Martha or any of the people around her. Whoever she was has been wrung out by abuse and trauma, the cult robbing Martha of her personality and robbing us of our chance to have seen it.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

Kill List (2011)

Simple enough: the "Kill List" is a list of people that Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley) are contracted to kill. But Ben Wheatley's film is more psychological thriller than crime thriller, and arguably horror, and arguably very oblique war allegory.

The two men are veterans of one or other of the last decade's wars in the Middle East. The long first act of the film is a long, realist look at their suburban life that plays like a high-class version of a British soap opera. Londoner Jay has a Swedish wife, Shel (MyAnna Buring), and a young son. He seems vaguely depressive, maybe just bored of doing not very much all day. He and Shel cycle through loud rows and quiet reconciliation. The wry Northern Irish Gal brings a new girlfriend (Emma Fryer) to a dinner at Jay and Shel's home that is punctuated in the middle by a blazing shouting match between the hosts; Gal reassures and comforts their son while they fight.

Subject to their personalities, everyone is as normal as can be. The dialogue in particular is among the most naturalistic that I can remember. There is no rush whatsoever to get to the point where Jay and Gal get to business. We learn that the two former soldiers still work in violence, now as extralegal contract killers. Since the movie has gone to such lengths to establish the two men in familiar domestic-drama roles, there is nothing glamorous, exotic, or at first even interesting about the concept that this is how they earn money. This is a realist picture of working-class hit men. Their last job - "Kiev", it is coded throughout - got messy in a way that we never learn, and Gal must talk Jay into ending his lethargy and getting back to work.

And so finally the kill list. They are travelling businessmen, checking into that quintessentially British kind of cheap, characterless hotel to scout and then murder their targets. The job, though, seems somehow off-kilter, and quite soon Jay's professionalism starts to lapse as he is (quite understandably) unable to figure out exactly what is going on. He seems to now - after Kiev, maybe? - be a soldier who cannot kill without thinking, and because this job is a puzzle with little prospect of a logical solution, the thinking makes him volatile, and the volatility feeds on itself. Gal remains sensible, but he cannot restrain his friend.

The key to the effectiveness of the whole thing is the unorthodox and impeccable pacing. The excellent domestic realism of the first half plays very slowly, but when the acceleration starts it never stops. The best cut is to the title card at the end, when it is suddenly clear in hindsight that the pace has been increasing steadily and maniacally for quite a while. We are swept up like Jay in the maddening, nightmarish weirdness that would be absurd if it were less unsettling. It is nihilistic in the way a dream is nihilistic, and perhaps this is why Jay continues to kill through it all.

There is one key moment in which he and Gal try to extricate themselves from whatever it is that is happening and are clearly compelled to continue. At first I wondered if perhaps it wouldn't have made more sense not to have this compulsion, since Jay at times seems unstoppable anyway. But it seems right that he retains his common sense, so that we can't give him up as deranged. His world has become nightmarish, but he is tragically lucid, the victim of the horror, not the perpetrator.

The more time goes by since I saw "Kill List", the better I think it was. This is because it is pretty clear that there are plenty of ways in which it doesn't make any sense, and the temptation to poke at the flimsy logical fabric or to play plot hole games is strong. In retrospect, though, the tone resonates long after any arguments about what is or is not going on. Jay and Gal have to kill people they don't understand on behalf of people they don't meet for reasons they don't know. Why should any of it make sense?


Links: IMDb

Take Shelter (2011)

(A warning: this review is more spoiler-heavy than usual.)

A bit of mystery about a character's mental health can stretch a long way. I found "Donnie Darko" compelling because of the fragility of Donnie's connection to reality - the movie was strictly his, but his what? Visions, wishes, delusions, dreams? It was like watching oil on water. I was therefore disappointed when I learned that the whole thing was intended as straight science fiction. Figuring out sci-fi mechanics can be fun, but not when the whole fabric of the movie had seemed to be up for grabs. All of poor Donnie's relationships become uninteresting at a stroke.

I had something like the opposite problem with "Take Shelter". It tells the story of Curtis (Michael Shannon), a construction worker who has what his colleague calls "a good life" with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their young daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). Hannah has (presumably quite recently) lost her hearing, and Curtis and Samantha's strength and tenderness against this challenge shows them to be a sturdy pair who we can trust.

Curtis begins to experience vivid, violent dreams and hallucinations of catastrophic storms or violence toward himself or Hannah. We see some of them first hand, stitched into the film as they are stitched into Curtis's life. They are jarring, and so we can share Curtis's twin reactions to them. On the one hand he knows that he is ill and seeks treatment, but on the other he cannot shake the terror and pursues real-world solutions to his dark visions, fixating on disassociating from those who hurt him in his visions and on building out the storm shelter on his property in anticipation of the apocalyptic storm.

We learn that his mother is a paranoid schizophrenic, in assisted living since her illness manifested when Curtis was around the age that Hannah is now. This experience makes Curtis admirably pragmatic, immediately researching mental illness as the library and making an appointment with his doctor. Small but critical barriers begin to appear: he is referred to a distant psychiatrist but cannot make the long trip. He self-diagnoses as potentially schizophrenic to the local counselor he visits instead, but she is not licensed to medicate him. He talks about his mother's history and his fears to the counselor, but she is transferred.

While the path to a solution based in reality is blocked, the path to "solving" the problems of his delusions is entirely clear. When he asks his work partner for help in breaking company rules to borrow equipment for the folly of the storm shelter expansion, he is indulged. His distancing himself from those who hurt him in his dreams is allowed by his wife and boss, who of course at first have little notion of his mental deterioration. Critically, he easily obtains an ill-advised home improvement loan for the expansion of the storm shelter. It would have been easy to overplay a subtext that here is a hard-working man who is crushed between a healthcare industry that cannot help with his real problems, and a financial industry that enables his folly.

Luckily the film's balancing act between lucidity and delusion is too subtle for that, and Shannon makes Curtis too compelling for triteness. I found it easy to share both Curtis's creeping dread and his self-aware despair. Because of this, as his tether back to the right path frays, his deluded decisions that would seem so incredible in a vacuum  become almost unwatchably brutal. The trick of making the outlandish empathetic is pulled off here as well as I can ever remember. When Curtis finally explodes in paranoid rage, it is not a stereotypical crazed rant but a tragic culmination. When Samantha pleads with him and tries to force him to address his delusions directly, she seems naive rather than strong.

But there is a problem. This painstaking, wonderful portrayal of a man grappling against himself and his own demise is inexplicably undermined by a parlor trick of an ending that dishonors everything that has gone before. There is emphatically no question of when and whether Curtis is suffering from visions or delusions at any given moment, until the very last moments of the whole film. Then, suddenly, we seem to be invited at least to entertain the notion that Curtis's delusions are somehow real. Suddenly nothing is ruled out, and the whole film is up for grabs.

I'm sure it is possible to construct as many plausible, coherent explanations for what is going on at the end as we could care to, but why allow this? The solid whole that was so affecting seems to dissolve into an oil slick of interpretation. Perhaps for some this will give the whole more resonance, but I would have been happier if the portrait that had seemed so convincing and powerful had been allowed to stand on its own.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

Albert Nobbs (2011)

Whoever Albert Nobbs is, I'm still wondering. Our title character (Glenn Close) is a woman posing as a man, working as a butler in a hotel in Dublin, circa late 1800s. She is living an anonymous and simple life, saving money, presumably to escape her station. This humble plan is disturbed when a full hotel forces her to share her bed with a male painter, Hubert. Hubert discovers Albert's secret, but turns out to be living a similar lie. Hubert (Janet McTeer) becomes a small kind of confidant for Albert. She lives with a wife and has an outwardly normal life, worlds away from Albert's extreme withdrawal.

It is tragic that the catalyst for Albert's downfall should be a kind of hope, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that in seeing and trying to emulate Hubert's relationship Albert reaches for a life she had never believed she could have. It is easy to believe: Hubert is an alluring figure, Janet McTeer easily the most compelling presence in the film. Albert embarks on a chaste, nearly inexplicable courting of the young hotel maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska) as - what? Albert tells her that she wants Helen to live with her, run the tobacco shop she has scouted out and saved money for, be a family. But what is Albert looking for? The question of her emotional desires or sexuality is never addressed. She wonders openly about Hubert's life with his wife behind closed doors, but she pursues that life without ever seeming really to understand it, perhaps again doing little more than play a part.

While Hubert is certainly sympathetic toward Albert, she has a kind of leering astonishment that I thought suggested that she shares our view of Albert as a repressed naïf. Sadly, beyond a single scene in which Albert sketches her past for Hubert, she and we see a character made trivial and forgettable by her debilitating guardedness. Throughout the film we see frustratingly little of Albert beyond that she is saturated with fear. But why? Whose fate is she trying to avoid? The film gives us little notion of the world that Albert would face as a woman, which has the unfortunate consequence of making her fear seem almost unintelligent. A charitable view would be that Albert's life-spanning secret has buried mature emotion and left her stunted, but I found it difficult to work up any sympathy in that direction without at least some help from the film in understanding Albert a little better.

And so decisions by Albert that should be infused with meaning become perplexing, and it becomes too tempting to see her as inexcusably simple-minded. The effect is made much, much worse by the bizarre decision to occasionally have Albert, when alone, narrate her actions as if to a child: counting her money, for example, she methodically itemizes her coins and relates - presumably for us - her progress towards her goal. The movie is adapted from a play, and Close's wide-eyed wonder when she talks to herself would perhaps play well on stage but on screen seems jarring. Along similar lines, when Albert fantasizes about how the for-lease storefront might turn into her shop, we see a Disneyesque daydream, all gold-tinted soft focus and cloying music.

Of course we need to understand what Albert wants to achieve, but the film never seems to work out a way to display this in a way that respects Albert's intelligence. Perhaps we are supposed to see Albert as a tragic case of arrested development, her simplicity, asexuality and confusion the product of a life lived in secret and without the oxygen of human relationships. Then her contrast with the pragmatic and assertive Hubert would recast her whole history as a horrible half-life. But in practice the contrast favors Hubert too much, and Albert becomes so much of a challenge as to be easy to dismiss. Maybe that is Albert's true tragedy, but it is a difficult one to hang a whole film on.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

Melancholia (2011)

I suppose Melancholia is science fiction. It consists of two long halves after a wonderful prologue. In the first half, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) are just married. They are playful and happy as they arrive for their lavish reception at the vast country estate that is the home of Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). There is much familiar upper-crust domestic drama, but it becomes apparent that Justine is suffering from horrific depression, her behavior increasingly unpredictable and outlandish. We are left as helpless as Michael to prevent her from being overtaken entirely by her malaise.

In the second half, washed out after the richly colorful reception, we focus on John and Claire, their young son, and Justine. As Justine recuperates, they live under the shadow of the imminent arrival in Earth's vicinity of a planet Melancholia. John's position is of scientific wonderment. He insists that the experts have declared no risk of a collision and educates his son in his amateur astronomy. Claire reads conspiratorial websites that predict apocalyptic doom (in the movie technology tradition, the scenes of her internet search for information are jarringly unrealistic). As time goes on and the situation grows dire, Justine, like a see-saw, the role of the calm, sensible realist as those around her shrink in fear.

Ultimately then we can contrast Justine's breakdown at the reception and Claire's breakdown in the face of death, and, parallel, the reaction of each to the other. Is Justine growing absolutely in strength as disaster approaches, or only relative to Claire? She is as resilient to terror in the second half as she is drained of all high emotion in the first. It is telling that Claire is tender and indulgent of Justine, but as her own anxiety grows, Justine refuses to coddle or reassure her. Justine's bluntness seems almost shaded with a slight vindictiveness. It is horribly obvious that the sisters are worlds apart mentally, that Claire's terror and Justine's depression are entirely dissimilar. It is remarkable that the tangible, rational distress of second-half Claire never for a moment trivializes Justine's illness: Justine's outlandish behavior at the reception seems easier to grasp after we see the collapse of the first half's healthier characters. All private distress gets equal billing.

The planet Melancholia is hinted at only very lightly in the first half of the film, although it is unambiguous, particularly in retrospect, that everyone is aware of it. Is life going on regardless? Despite its name, I wondered exactly how much to read it as a manifestation of her depression. For her to be summoning it would be too much of a stretch, but I got the feeling that Justine at least understands what it means for the people around her, maybe in some sense has already encountered it. By the time the private apocalypse is completed, it has proved that the pragmatic rationalist John and the kindly caregiver Claire are both utterly useless against it. But all along Justine it completely unfazed. Dunst shows Justine coming slowly into focus as she comes into her element, her brilliant portrait of depression complete.

The prologue: before the action of the movie begins, we open with a long sequence of exceptional and striking beauty. The entire film will take place on the vast country estate, and we see long, posed tableaux of the main players in their reception dress in various places around the estate. The shots are in agonizingly heavy slow motion, saturated with almost ultraviolet color, all incredibly rich, dark purples, greens and blacks. The sequence previews in an oblique and abstract way some of the touching points for the rest of the film. I found the whole effect entirely disarming and captivating. I would call it Gothic if that didn't seem like such faint praise - it was somehow like the checkerboard in Lewis Carroll's second "Alice" book "Through the Looking-Glass", with the cast set up as helplessly immobile players as they went about their business with the world crashing around them.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

The Ides of March (2011)

"The Ides of March" follows the run-up to the Ohio Democratic primary, with Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney, also directing) and Arkansas Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell) the last two candidates standing. The race is close, and we learn that the winner will be the prohibitive favorite in the general election.

This is a formidable cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are the heads of the Morris and Pullman campaigns, Marisa Tomei is a New York Times reporter, Evan Rachel Wood a young intern. But this is not a broad, interlocking-pieces movie, instead focusing narrowly on Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), the young media mastermind who is second-in-command of the Morris team. This somewhat defuses the potential for fast-paced scheming but lets us be disarmed as Myers is whenever news arrives and to weigh options alongside him when he has to make decisions.

I'm not sure how to take Myers. Is he a novice idealist or a skilled politico? We don't get to see much evidence of the superior abilities that everyone - bosses, peers, competitors, flatterers - attribute to him. He is supposed to be smart, capable and experienced beyond his years, but he is easily outmaneuvered by his seniors and shows questionable judgment. To Tomei's reporter he on the one hand claims idealism to distinguish himself from the well-worn Hoffman, but on the other insists that at the age of 30 he has worked on more campaigns than most others would by 40. It is a puzzle that is never fully resolved, as even Myers' successes seem more reactive than proactive. Maybe he is more tactician than strategist.

Although it's nice not to adhere strictly to the standard operating procedure of establishing the hero as an expert before challenging him, these unresolved questions become important because of Myers' centrality. For a political drama to forgo both clear personal antagonism and complex intrigue is a refreshing risk, but in that case I would perhaps have preferred to know more about Myers.

In Gosling's other recent starring feature "Drive" his no-name, no-background character is established as a meticulous expert, where here he is merely in charge, so that we somehow know both more and less about him. Here, as there, Gosling is wonderfully patient, with the best moments being when he is processing unexpected news but hasn't yet reached a decision. Surely Myers - and the audience - can't be learning for the first time that politics is a dirty business. Gosling's performance and the unflinching focus on Myers form a good illustration of a point that on reflection should maybe be no less obvious: politics is a lonely business. The film opens with Myers alone on a stage, and ends with him alone in an interview chair, his face filling the screen, and that is really how it has to be all along.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

Rampart (2011)

Woody Harrelson is front and center in Oren Moverman's "Rampart", playing Dave Brown, a Los Angeles cop. We meet him in the familiar role of the uncompromising veteran, hazing a rookie officer and beating information out of a man in custody. He has the respect of his peers, although he displays it in an unusual way, quoting obscure (and possibly invented) legal precedent to paperwork-shuffling colleagues.

This is typical of his silver tongue, which we are treated to often. He is a wordy, funny and indignant conversationalist, especially when challenged, and the best moments in the film are his verbal spars. And he gets plenty of them, with a broad parade of women, lawyers, associates and antagonists. Brown has two daughters, one by each of two sisters (Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon), and all five live improbably together under a single roof: if anyone could have talked themselves into such an unusual arrangement, it would be someone with Brown's gift of gab.

Yet he is capable of violent and vengeful anger. His troubles begin when his cruiser is sideswiped and he beats almost to death the offending driver. The act was somehow videotaped and is broadcast all over the news. Brown's question is: why was the camera there? Was it a setup? In a different movie, he might have tried to find out, maybe discovered something, but here we aren't even allowed to know whether there are any sinister motives at all. Brown doesn't pursue it as any more than a paranoid accusation, and so instead we see only him as he goes on the defensive. The script is by Moverman and James Ellroy, but there is no "L.A. Confidential" intrigue here. I found it difficult to tell who was doing what to whom - if anything - which is a little frustrating, but I suppose Brown is going through the same thing.

The crucial question then is what drives Brown. He is not "Dirty Harry", getting results and to hell with the rules: he is not getting results. We see him do no police work, unless the early "enhanced interrogation" counts. He is challenged throughout his increasing turmoil - by Sigourney Weaver's desk cop, by the lawyers he looks to retain as his troubles deepen - to explain why he has to stay a police officer. Why not go quietly? His answers are never convincing. He seems wedded to a notion of himself as a solider and the job as a war.

But he is also broke, and maybe that explanation is the best. He certainly is highly protective of his unconventional family and seems to want to provide for them. While embroiled in the mess from the videotaped beating he seeks out a tip from a retired cop, a friend of Brown's father, about a card game he can rob. The trouble goes from bad to worse as Brown's plan goes badly awry, and his circle of suspicion expands. Harrelson shows Brown's smooth-talking, in-charge swagger give way easily to pathetic desperation, with Brown hustling for money and scattering wild accusations. His words that were so impressive are useless or forgotten. At no point does he seem willing or able to really investigate what, if anything, is going on, not so much a dirty cop as just dirty.


Links: IMDb

Coriolanus (2011)

Ralph Fiennes makes his debut as a director and stars in "Coriolanus", adapted from the Shakespeare tragedy. Fiennes plays Roman general Caius Martius. We meet him as he quells grain riots at home and leads a siege and assault abroad, against Rome's Volscian enemies on a Balkans-like urban battlefield. Martius is soaked in the blood of his enemies and seems at the height of his powers, pushing himself and exhorting his men. He clashes in single combat with Aufidius (Gerard Butler), the Volscian commander and Martius' mortal enemy, until they are dragged apart. Everything we see shows Martius as tireless and relentless. What is driving him?

At home he is received as a hero and honored with a new name of Coriolanus. The home front wants a piece of him. First, his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) and politician Menenius (Bryan Cox) maneuver to have him elected consul. He reluctantly agrees. He is approved by the Senate, but a popular riot is instigated by a rival faction. Martius is humble under praise, but explosively defensive under criticism - Fiennes' proud anger is something to behold. Martius is provoked to fury at the mob, and ultimately exiled. He journeys to his rival Aufidius, and offers his life or his services against Rome.

In every case when someone tries to use Martius for their own ends, trouble follows. The efforts to use Martius as a political figurehead, the successful conspiracy to oust him, and Aufidius' decision to retain him all bring mess that compounds towards tragedy. It seems most remarkable that Aufidius, who perhaps would know Martius' motivation better than most, would agree to fight alongside him. Butler doesn't have a huge amount to do in the film, but he sells well Aufidius' dilemma, weighing whether he can get the better of Martius, using him while plotting his subsequent demise.

By now it is clear that Martius cannot be changed, so either he must succeed in his revenge or be stopped. Redgrave displays Volumnia, sent with Martius' wife and son to try to stop him, beseeching in physical and emotional waves. Redgrave and Fiennes are captivating. Where Martius at war circled and parried when fighting Aufidius in battle, now he is pinned to his chair by Volumnia, bearing her relentlessness that seems so much like his own.

Despite the crackling dialogue in this confrontation and throughout the film, I found the most satisfying scenes those where we observed Martius alone: sweeping through a shell of a building in the opening combat, and hiking into exile away from Rome and to Aufidius. It is never quite explained why he is blamed for the grain riots that open the film, but he is unwavering in his self-belief, so we are forced, like the people, to take him or leave him without debate. His world is black and white, with only one correct, honorable path. When we see Martius with others they fill the scene with words, talking to, at or about him. Their words are bound to provoke him. Alone nothing disturbs him from within: he simply moves forward.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

God Bless America (2011)

Bobcat Goldthwait's "God Bless America" played in the inimitable Midnight Madness at this year's TIFF. Maybe it's just safer to use Canada to open a story of a blood-soaked killing spree motivated by the alleged base evil of American popular culture. Thankfully the Midnight Madness stamp helps as a reminder not to take premises too seriously. I watched it as a caper rather than a satire, which is most definitely what I would recommend.

Frank (Joel Murray) is divorced and lives alone through a duplex wall from his loutish neighbors and their perpetually screaming baby. He fantasizes violence against them. He has trouble sleeping. His routine is to take sleeping pills and slump in insomniac stupor in front of a TV that shows shrill wall-to-wall reality TV: we are treated to broad parodies of the state of the art of that genre. The Kardashians come in for particularly harsh treatment. The targets are easy, but the jokes are so relentless that it doesn't matter.

At work Frank's colleagues spout recycled soundbites from talk radio and discuss the film's version of "American Idol". He fantasizes violence against them too. Frank delivers a blistering, eloquent, whining rant to his cubicle mate on incivility and stupidity. We are in wish-fulfillment territory, Frank our champion against the vapidity of mass media culture. Then Frank is fired, and somehow this is the best joke so far. Where a film like "Idiocracy", with similar targets but a different approach, asks little more than that we agree that everything and everyone is stupid, Frank's outsize misanthropy is occasionally challenged and skewered. Worse is to come: his migraines are apparently the product of a brain tumor. His young daughter is beginning to bear an unnerving resemblance to the entitled teenaged star of one of the reality TV shows on his insomniac dial.

Frank steals his neighbors' car, drives through the night, and kills the star. We're off! He intends to kill himself too, but he is interrupted by Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr). She saw the killing, she approves, and she wants to join Frank to deliver more "justice" to the ignorant and undeserving. The two embark on a spree that allows us to celebrate grisly comeuppance for everyone from loud moviegoers to thinly disguised Fox News hosts. Joel Murray cuts the misanthropy with a squinting, grumpy wryness that plays happily against Barr's wiseass teenager. The relationship is firmly paternalistic. Frank's principles come in handy in ruling out less savory undertones - as he makes clear to Roxy, he includes sexualization of children among society's crimes.

"God Bless America" lives in the differences between Frank and Roxy. The two killers are in constant discussion over the criteria for victims. Roxy errs on the side of killing pretty much everyone. Her nihilistic teenage bluster allows Frank to display his principles, and those principles in turn let her push at the logical boundary of his absolutism. They make a great pair. Their defining exchange is Roxy putting "anyone who gives high fives" on her list of the guilty; Frank quite likes high fives and is disappointed. That they are not the same means that we can't see the film purely as a universal rant for the smugly superior. Then we are free to simply tag along and enjoy the what-the-hell fun of the spree against their common enemies.

The man-and-girl team naturally recalls "Super", itself a 2010 TIFF Midnight Madness pick. In that film Rainn Wilson was driven to fantastic violence, with Ellen Page his young sidekick. But where Super's protagonist was driven to insane heights by personal vengeance, here Frank is motivated by a much broader, matter-of-fact hate, and at no point is he allowed wild-eyed craziness. This helps: Frank can stand in for us, and the shocking violence can be our shocking violence, which I think makes it a bit less shocking. Of course it also helps that "God Bless America" has excellent jokes.


Links: IMDb

Moneyball (2011)

Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball" was published in 2003. For years afterwards Joe Morgan, ESPN's leading baseball color commentator, repeatedly insisted that the book had been written by Billy Beane. This is absolutely nonsensical. But now that "Moneyball" has made it to the big screen, Morgan's nonsense be a tiny bit less ridiculous: this is most definitely now the Billy Beane story. Can a person be a success if he is not the best?

The book painted a detailed picture of the lineage of the then state-of-the-art in the analysis of baseball players through the lens of the 2002 Oakland A's and their general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt). Bennett Miller's movie condenses the story of the gradual revolution in analysis into an adapted story of that one season, using it as the backdrop to its relaxed portrait of a man driven by hatred of losing. To get away with this, the film stereotypes the peripheral baseball figures around Beane in a way that the book was careful not to, but I had no problem there. Who needs fidelity from a baseball movie, let alone one about player valuation? This goes also for the liberties taken in illustrating the 2002 A's without so much as mentioning their MVP shortstop or three elite starting pitchers. So be it.

Instead we are left with the character of Beane, composed entirely of his relationships to baseball and his young daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey). We first see him sitting alone in stands of the dark Oakland Coliseum as his team, on the other side of the country in Yankee stadium, loses in the first round of the 2001 playoffs. He cannot even stand to listen to the radio he is holding, flicking it on and off. He is drained by defeat, but he is not there to witness it. It is the endpoint of success or failure that affects him, not the way it is earned. "We lost", he says repeatedly, refusing any consolation.

His challenge then is to rebuild the team after this disappointment - and the loss of several key players to other teams and the big-money contracts he and his A's cannot afford. Pitt plays Beane almost manically, in his drive to win at one moment cool and focused and the next shooting from the hip. He senses that he cannot replace his lost stars in any straightforward sense of the word. He notices and then poaches a young analyst, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), from a rival team's administration, elevating the data-cruncher to be his right-hand man. Together they forge a plan to punch above their weight, to find value in the darkest corners that richer teams can afford to overlook. Brand has little obvious motivation other than his correct conviction that the conventional wisdom is wrong; Beane's motivation is enough for two men.

Pitt's relationship with Jonah Hill occasionally recalls that with Ed Norton from "Fight Club", as Beane mentors Brand by challenging and wrong-footing him. But Brand talks back. Through their discussions we see that Beane is credulous and does not struggle against what, to the old-school baseball lifers that compose his staff, is sacrilege. Eventually he even descends to explain himself to his players, teaching his misfits how they can achieve the success that Brand has convinced him they can attain. Still he will not watch the games, but neither is he sitting alone in an empty stadium. He is now intervening in fate.

Beane's tragedy throughout is that he cannot conceive of exceeding expectations as success. It's not enough for his team to do better than they "should", given their resources. The point is driven home by interspersed scenes of the young Beane, a supposed sure-fire baseball star, not the underdog but the favorite. He flames out, fails, and there is no space for him between this failure and that. Later, Brand tries to demonstrate to Beane that progress, and beating the odds, is not failure, at worst a different kind of success; Beane seems to concede in principle without quite agreeing.

It is another story entirely with his daughter. Baseball consumes the vast bulk of the screen time, but in a sense Beane's most important relationship in the film is with his Casey. He takes her to buy a guitar. She plays well and he asks her to sing too, but she is reluctant - she's not very good, she claims. But now it doesn't matter to him. He convinces her to sing, and she is good, better than we could expect, and Beane is speechless and proud. Suddenly the question of who is the best singer doesn't matter; Casey is good, and Beane cares about Casey.

Pitt's performance is too subtle and the film as a whole too patient for melodrama or triteness. Yet by the coda when Beane is invited to ascend to the throne as general manager to the Red Sox, to suddenly have a buffer of the resources as well as the drive to win, it seems that more than just being close to his family or a perverse desire to be the underdog drives him to decline. Perhaps Beane, without ever quite admitting it, is now willing to admit that different kind of success.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

Violet & Daisy (2011)

I saw "Violet & Daisy" at TIFF, where after the screening an audience member let Geoffrey Fletcher know that "Tony Soprano" was perfect for the role of Michael. This seems to me to be a horrific insult to James Gandolfini. His Michael is the gravity at the center of Fletcher's film. When Michael arrives in the film, he pulls the title characters to a standstill, his apartment, where the majority of the action takes place, slow and quiet against the chattering pace that Violet and Daisy have established. Gandolfini plays Michael with his special kind of heaviness, but there is not an ounce of danger or volatility.

Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) are teenage contract killers. We meet them disguised as nuns, cracking wise while blasting improbably through a bunch of adversaries to rescue someone or other. So far, so Tarantino. They are excruciatingly childlike, playing pat-a-cake, accepting the next job only because they need money to buy the latest dresses from a pop star's clothing line. We seem established in a familiar place, from where the two girls can go on an improbable, guns-blazing adventure.

But it is not to be: the target of the job they accept is Michael. They fall asleep in his apartment while waiting for him to come home, and like a fairytale they wake up in a different world, and we, the audience, wake up in a different movie. They are still in Michael's apartment, yes, but it appears that he has been expecting them and is ready and willing to be killed. The world stops. Michael bakes cookies.

The awful sadness that soaks the film from Michael's introduction on is powerful because it is set against the consequence-free movie-hitmen world we had been led into. It is remarkable that the about-face works so well. Even when the first world bleeds into the second, via a protracted encounter with a group of four rival hitmen (who seem to have wandered in from a Jim Jarmusch movie) also sent to kill Michael, the dislocation is complete. I felt a deeper suspense in the second world than would have been possible in the first.

The mystery of why Michael would want to be killed turns out to be almost no mystery. He is dying and has been unable to repair relations with his estranged daughter. In being killed he would get a quick exit and some cash to leave to her. At last it becomes apparent why Violet and Daisy have been established as so childlike, as they will be allowed, obliquely, a sliver of the love and guidance that Michael could not give his daughter. When, in the uncertain stasis in Michael's apartment, events seem to point to a disastrous fracture in Violet and Daisy's relationship, Michael can shepherd them through.

The character of the absent, innocent, noble father is perhaps not a new one, but it helps here that Michael is allowed to be wise without being overtly smart. The decisions he makes during our time with him are subtle; his big decisions are made. His almost childlike dictation to Violet of a heartbreaking letter to his daughter allows him to express the pure emotion that seems a distillate of everything he must have felt before we ever met him. He has become simpler and simpler, but like a pendulum the complexity and nuance has passed to Violet and Daisy. Why do you want to die, they ask throughout. Michael knows, but they cannot see it, and so they are not children any more.


Links: IMDb

Shame (2011)

The pivotal scene of "Shame" has Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and his boss David (James Badge Dale) watching Brandon's sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) sing in a fancy, high-above-Manhattan cocktail lounge. She's singing a version of "New York, New York" in a fragile voice and at a glacial pace, wringing pathos from a song that might not deserve it. Director Steve McQueen fills the frame with Sissy's face for almost the whole protracted length of the song, her eyes flickering downward but with little expression. Only briefly are we allowed to glance away from Sissy to the table where David sits, like us, captivated, and Brandon cannot quite bear to watch.

We have been introduced to Brandon as a successful thirtysomething Manhattanite, living alone. We see him in the opening scenes padding naked around his apartment, watching porn, having sex with a prostitute, flirting silently on the subway. None of what we see seems seedy. He conspicuously and repeatedly ignores a message on his answering machine from a female voice, someone who clearly has strong feelings for him in some way. Celebrating success at work with his colleagues, he outflirts David before a group of women; when he leaves, one picks him up for some al fresco sex.

We learn that the voice on the answering machine is Sissy's. She appears in Brandon's apartment one day, surprising him despite the messages. We see her as emotive, demonstrative, playful - a musician, a performer - utterly at odds with Brandon. She is disruptive to him, but he allows her to stay for a time.

Later, in the lounge, as Sissy's song ends there are tears in Brandon's eyes. Why? Because he is forced, like us, to watch? Throughout the film we are permitted to sense some of what he feels for Sissy but we are never allowed to know why. If Brandon's shame relates directly to her, in any way - if it even has a source - we can only guess. David, on the other hand, is awed by Sissy's performance; whatever Brandon is being forced to feel, David, unencumbered, feels only attraction. David and Sissy openly flirt, and end up together, loudly, in Brandon's bed. Brandon is forced out, to run on the nearly empty, late-night Manhattan streets. McQueen shows us Brandon's run in a long, side-on tracking shot that reflects the long scene of Sissy's song. We saw her up close and static, but we see him in motion. Whatever he is feeling we have to infer from his movements.

Sissy becomes the object for David. Is this what Brandon cannot stand? His relationship with Sissy is the only real relationship we have seen him to hold, yet David sees her in the same way that we have seen Brandon look at prostitutes and strangers on the train. I found it almost maddening to guess whether Brandon was feeling possessiveness or was spurred to feel something about his own life. Whatever it is, it drives him for the rest of the film. He tries to establish a proper relationship with a coworker, and goes on a real date. But Sissy is there when he gets home, there to observe him, and perhaps there in his mind when he cannot consummate his new relationship. He seems unable to address his relationship to Sissy, and unable to establish a relationship with someone else.

In this limbo, "Shame" remains beautiful throughout. McQueen presents a New York that I saw as rich and flat, as if seen through a window. We first see Brandon from only the torso down, but by the end his face is profoundly unhidden, and the progression is matched by Fassbender's transition from feline assurance to unrestrained doubt.

I found it difficult to see "Shame" as an addiction movie, despite that Brandon is explicitly intended to be a sex addict. His behavior is certainly not normal - or at least it covers the whole spectrum of normalness from top to bottom - but the degree of his compulsiveness seems entirely reasonable. No revelations about addiction will be forthcoming; the film is infused with sex, but this is about the sibling relationship between Brandon and Sissy. She is undeniable, and he is defensive. McQueen and Mulligan combine to make Sissy magnetic, but still Brandon cannot be drawn in.


Links: IMDb

Drive (2011)

The Driver (Ryan Gosling) is economical of action when we see him at work. I found it easier to believe in him as an expert driver than if he had chattered and had his head on a swivel as in more whizz-bang car chases. Outside of the car he is equally reserved, using few words and leaving long pauses before speaking or acting. Perhaps this is why his decisions also seem so assured?

The Driver is introduced in a getaway job that immediately places the film's action as more Michael Mann than Michael Bay, and establishes the Driver as a craftsman. He is a wheelman, stunt driver, and mechanic, all in association with his mentor-like boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston). We see him perform a driving stunt on a movie set, and the Driver seems invincible behind the wheel. The distinction between legal and illegal is fuzzy; work is work. The same seems true for Bernie (Albert Brooks), who claims a former career as movie producer and now a middling criminal boss. Shannon talks him into bankrolling a stock car venture for the Driver.

The scheme will not see fruition. The Driver meets his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and bonds with her young son Benecio (Kaden Leos). Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is in prison; she and the Driver form a friendship that is suggestive but decorous. The Driver is honorable and restrained.

Upheaval arrives when Standard is released, but thankfully not because Standard is angered by the interloper. His jealousy is allowed to flicker, but he too is allowed to be honorable and accepting. This becomes crucial. Standard is beaten and his family threatened; if he does not work to steal money to repay arbitrary prison  protection fees, Irene and Benecio will be targeted. The Driver, with no explicit prompting, negotiates the job with himself as wheelman in exchange for Standard's debt to be considered repaid. In this way the mutual respect of the two men, through Irene, is the pivot on which the tragedy turns, as the "good" and simple heist goes wrong, and the consequences unfold.

But through it all the Driver consistently makes sensible choices (notwithstanding some of the vicious violence attached). We are told almost nothing about him in the film, yet he is permitted some open emotion that jars with the "anonymous stranger". What is going through his head? Early on the long, watchful pauses seem detached, maybe affected cool. As the Driver becomes more and more helpless to inevitability and the pauses are stoic and damp-eyed I wondered if maybe he was uncertain of himself all along. He is presented as a classic loner but ultimately seems lonely.

"Drive" reminded me a bit of another lonely film in "Lost in Translation". Some of the visuals parallel, especially the soft focus city-at-night scenes and the music was used in a way that felt similar. The tone of Irene's relationship with the Driver mirrors that movie too: it is brief, profound and restrained, although of course the characters are very different. Carey Mulligan seems not to take a deep breath throughout, Irene never totally relaxed and eventually drained by grief.

The Driver remains an expert to the end, but cannot end reassured. His best abilities and best-available decisions cannot salvage much from the inevitable path of events. Gosling shows this vulnerability and frustration with understatement, which is more than enough after the extreme reservation of the first half. The exception to this understatement is followed by the most poignant moment in "Drive". The Driver's most passionate outburst, of desire and violence, comes in an elevator with Irene and a man presumably sent to hurt them. Afterwards, Irene, grieving and freshly shocked, backs away and says nothing as the elevator door closes on the Driver. His reservation was briefly dropped, but his reward is to be left immediately speechless and alone. Later, after the story here is over, I wondered if he would have been changed by what happened, if the next person to meet him would see something that we didn't.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic