The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
In the bracing American Splendor, Harvey Pekar told us that he doesn’t buy that personal growth-through-difficulty crap - he’d trade growth for a little happiness. What a refreshing bit of common sense that is, from someone who’s clearly acquainted with pain on a level more intimate than abstract. The real problem with most of the star-studded Oscar wannabes hounding the theatres this time of year isn’t the budgets or the moralizing, or even the laughable conviction that reaffirming the most obvious tenets of life in the most obvious ways is somehow something new – the issue with these pictures is what all of those smaller problems compound to release – a blind, senseless, egotistical, smothering emotional stupidity that’s (hopefully unintentionally) insensitive and occasionally even sadistic. These pictures, which seem to always add insult to injury with running times that exceed two and a half hours, are buffets of tragedy, samplers, with a little something bound to tickle the secret pains and what-ifs in everyone; never mind that nothing’s ever actually explored or challenged beyond the presupposed two or three word poster-tagline at hand in these pictures; the heavy-osity of the subject matter will do most of the work for the filmmakers, and for certain audiences, who are more than happy to have an awful time in the service of expelling those trapped tears.
Filmmakers caught up in Oscar fever will name check any and all societal disturbances to scratch those tear ducts. David Fincher, the director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Eric Roth, the screenwriter, announce their desperation and indifference to taste or any particular emotional texture in the opening, establishing the obligatory flashback-diary framework. It isn’t enough that a woman is about to expire, or that her daughter is reading something from the distant past to her, or that there’s clearly choked, undefined regret between the two; Hurricane Katrina must also be referenced, for lazy topicality, for art-house sleight of hand, and because it’s one more thing to toss into the stew.
The diary is Benjamin Button’s, a child born as an old man who grows younger and younger until briefly attaining, mid-life and mid-point of the film, the Dorian Grayish hunkiness of Brad Pitt. Pitt’s looks have been expounded on endlessly, reaching self-parody even in some of the actor’s more knowing roles – but he’s never had the tribute that Fincher, who directed him in Seven and Fight Club, gives him here. Pitt’s age has caught up with him in a best of every world fashion – his wrinkles and edges only add visually and empathetically pleasing contrasts – giving him just enough grit to elude pretty boy blandness, while still more than up to occupying chief residence in most straight female moviegoer’s minds - he’s a Ken doll toasted in the toaster oven for just a few seconds. Pitt’s an astute movie star, possibly the most astute current movie star save George Clooney (no surprise they work together often); his range is narrow, but he knows just what to hold back to lure the audience in – he’s a void, but a purposeful one, a void who lends our voids the sexy torture that only a genetically blessed star can. It’s a testament to Pitt’s knowing that I run into more men who admire him than women. Men can sympathize with Pitt because, while he looks nothing like most men, he projects a sense of rootless ache that most men can respond to, Pitt aches in the way men wish they could – he has the illusion of lending men his sex appeal. Men forgive Brad Pitt of his looks, because he doesn’t seem to coast on them, or even really enjoy them. Pitt suffers, but he, and here’s the balance, doesn’t suffer too much, because then we’d resent his self-pity.
I go on because its Pitt’s appear-to-shrink-from-the-camera approach that keeps Benjamin Button going as well as it does, I can’t think of another star, or even a major actor, who could do so well with this conceit of this character. Some of the critics who’ve fallen for the film (it’s got enough funerals, wide shots, and special effects to inspire cries of “masterpiece”) have, ironically, implied that Pitt is a liability, a passenger in his own film. That nature, of life floating away from Button, is the one thing that transcends the script’s stillborn platitudes. Benjamin is always, excluding middle age, the wrong age at the wrong time, left in a continual state of “?”, of constant sideline. Benjamin, a man who’s always about to die, is always trying to die with a minimum of fuss and embarrassment. Pitt’s old man, the star of the first third or so of the film, isn’t convincing, but he’s unconvincing in a way that works in the picture’s favor – in that old man we see one of our biggest stars trapped, searching for a release – curious, matter-of-fact, taking each and every day as a bonus round but mindful never to enjoy it too much, he must knock on wood to numb the loss he’s been conditioned, through his affliction, to expect.
Pitt’s eyes, his stifled yet engaged voice, and his odd little old man’s walk tell us all of this; but Fincher and Roth don’t trust him, they fill every other character’s mouth with the little bon-bons we’ve come to expect, most of which are, best case, meaningless, worst case pointedly false. Taraji P. Henson, a beautiful, talented jangled nerve of an actress, is stuck with this picture’s most asinine noble black role. African American experience in the early 1900s, particularly the potential fallout for a black woman adopting a deformed white child, are ignored for whimsy that recalls possibly Spielberg’s worst few minutes: the “Kick the Can” segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Even at his sloppiest, Spielberg most likely would’ve gotten something out of the Henson-Pitt dynamic (there’s a scene here that also recalls A.I.) but Fincher, burdened with a never ending series of barely connected episodes that barely have anything to do with the age gimmick, doesn’t give himself any time, he has no feel for this stuff, he doesn’t buy it any more than I did. People come and go, primarily to die for Benjamin’s (and our) fabled growth.
The picture eventually turns into a romance in which we wait for two pretty things to lose prettiness that most of us were never blessed with anyway. The old woman from the beginning turns out to be Benjamin’s true love – Daisy, played for the most part by Cate Blanchett; and Blanchett, every bit the movie star Pitt is as well as a considerably more durable actor – gives good heartache. Fincher composes them as statues chasing each other, tumbling together, pushing one another away – what was once a joke (in one of the sex scenes in Fight Club, in which Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter appear, mid-copulation in slow-mo, as some sort of H.R. Giger inspired sculpture) has now been spit-shined for the masses, with, as I wrote last week, irony removed (Oscar voters aren’t high on irony). I didn’t much like Fight Club either, but that hypocritical picture was at least alive, and appeared to be fighting itself over what it actually meant. Benjamin Button is deadly serious, a mannequin romance that’s insultingly meant to stand for universal existential despair.
And that last sentence is the rub. I like flimsy, artificial, sex appeal and heated loss and neat digital aging effects as much as the next moviegoer, but I get a little huffy when filmmakers drink their own Kool-Aid and take their tricks as something other than diversion. I get huffier when loaded subject matter is name-checked frivolously, when the filmmakers could have spent that time actually selling us their romance. We believe that Blanchett and Pitt should be together for one reason: because they are the only person of the opposite gender equal to the other physically. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote the story that served as loose inspiration here, mourned and satirized (and dug, but he fought it) that sort of material fascism. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher’s worst picture, expects us to weep for its passing, with a shot of a dying baby to seal the deal. The Fight Club bruisers would’ve thrown a Molotov cocktail at this thing.
Milk (2008)
Milk is another biopic; with gay struggle as the MacGuffin - it could just as easily have concerned a man’s grappling with any number of other barriers or signposts of doubt: drugs, homelessness, a physical affliction, pop music, drag-racing, hop-scotching. Most bios are forgettable hackwork, but Milk is more schizophrenic – burned through with director Gus Van Sant’s pop and art affectations, his little bits of self-consciousness (framing through inanimate objects, pointedly disconnected medium shots) meant to transcend thin pop psychology and lazy rationalizations. Milk, an earnest plea for equal rights – denies gay men and women’s humanity as rigorously as the right-wing demons the film protests, only in a more insidious, typically condescending way.
To be fair, the picture’s clichés are probably more firmly rooted in the biography formula than skittishness with the subject matter. Milk opens promisingly, with Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), ashamed, disconnected, lost, but charismatic, picking a young man up in a subway station. The scene is visually too showy (Van Sant shoots too close, congratulating himself, for allowing a character casual sex) but there’s a promise of common sense, a vital current amongst the usual; but Van Sant squanders that – the young man, Scott (James Franco) is the great love of Milk’s life. Once that relationship ends later on (neatly of course, with virtually no detail) Milk starts something with the volatile Jack (Diego Luna), only to commit to him for the rest of the latter’s life. This is Susie Homemaker-Frank Capra sex and affection, cleaned up for the masses, complete with the usual over-expository, plastic love dialogue that underlines that Milk is never too gray, never too impure, and that his lovers don’t quite understand his drive – his will to be something more than just another man who lays down for the injustices of the world. Milk, the first openly gay politician, is also evidently the first politician to successfully dodge all fringe benefits of the position.
I like my humans human, not flattened of all contradiction or compromise in the service of ensuring that I accept one potentially hard to grasp aspect of their personality. This is a common danger of bios in general – we elevate anyone who did anything to the level of casual god - ignoring context, ignoring intentional/unintentional factors that drove these people, as well as providing little in the way of suggestion as to what the outcome of this person’s influence may have, in the grand picture, actually been. This is a curious short cut for so-called inspirational films; it tells us, indirectly, that normal people can’t do anything – to change this country we must be indistractable, rigorous and exploding with fevered platitude – we must be ciphers that life happens to. Milk, like the recent string of feel-good musician movies, shortchanges how the characters’ demons and uncertainties informed their ultimate achievements – how the flint produced fire. The beginning of this picture, which finds Milk and Scott fighting their way into Castro Street’s merchant union, should have been the most revealing portion – an insider’s tour of the handshakes and the deals – our hero’s learning of the name of the game; and there is some of that, but Milk, yet another character allowed to summarize his death in un-revealing voice-over (it’s a bridge, a device, nothing more, and it’s pointless) just glides over it in a few passages of narration, his righteousness never questioned or examined.
The middle third of the picture, in which Harvey is elected to office and tastes the fruits of being a player, is promising. But Van Sant is unclear and indecisive, and hypocrisy reveals itself in conflicting uses of an important line of dialogue. An early opponent, who’s clearly going to win, explains to Milk that his plan is a downer – he’s reveling in what he’s against while omitting what he’s for. You have to sell hope, the in-the-thick-of-it politician tells him; and so Milk, rightfully likening politics early on to a circus, sells hope, as, yes, a philosophy but also with the understanding that it’s a means to an end - a political tool. Yet, at film’s end, the line is repeated with irony removed, in case we leave the theatre with the impression this world’s too big and disappointing and nasty and unresolved. Bracing scenes of Milk manipulating his eventual killer Dan White (Josh Brolin) are negated for the sake of trumped up “inspiration”. Van Sant follows his subject’s suit: hope sells, in terms of politics, as well as Oscars and reviews and box office.
It’s time we ask whether Van Sant’s a brave, experimental filmmaker, or a talented director who tries things on and tosses them off just as quickly as fashion statements in a (successful) bid to maintain reputation and relevance (and I’m beginning to suspect Steven Soderbergh of the same). Van Sant has his obsessions (sexual identity crisis, death, youth, youth grappling with death, death grappling with youth,) but he’s shaky with mood – he either commits too much (Elephant, Last Days) or not enough (To Die For). Van Sant’s unformed, loaded, vague images can be taken as astute leaps of empathy in his youth pictures – we assume he’s channeling the rolling, tortured psyches of his characters. But clarity is needed in Milk – moods, tones, and ideas are sampled: satirical, inspirational, with requisite stock footage, rock music, blasts of opera and Christ imagery inserted at the optimal moments for audience massage. White’s frustration and madness is the most vivid portion of the film, because it’s the element of the picture most recognizably Van Sant, he has a comfort, a confidence, with madness – and he’s not as concerned with having us identify with White, because White doesn’t stand for progress – White’s an oppressor, so he’s, unintentionally ironically, allowed more force than anyone else in the film. Brolin isn’t tethered to symbolism the way Penn, Franco, Luna and Emile Hirsch (what a cast) are, or the way that he himself was tethered to caricature in the considerably worse W. - White’s disturbingly unprocessed.
Much has been made of Sean Penn’s lightening up for this role, but that’s just his mannerism de jour, his conceit that he grabs and maintains for the entire movie with little variation. I’m worried about what’s considered great acting these days – undiscerning audiences will accept anything, and so-called discerning audiences will accept anything that unwaveringly, usually unpleasantly, hits the same note for an entire film. Penn is every bit as talented as he’s made out to be, but he’s buckling under that stone he’s forcing himself to carry for every movie now –he would do well to understand that not every role must atone for all mankind’s sins. (Recently, Penn’s more reliable work has been behind the camera.) Watch Penn in the underrated David Fincher movie The Game; he was loose and authoritative and terrifying in that picture – and poignant – his defeat and doubt and hatred were simmering underneath, waiting for people to find them. I’ve prescribed a variation of this exercise to many actors, but Penn’s riskiest, most liberating, move nowadays would be a starring role in a romantic comedy directed by the Farrelly brothers.
Scrooged (1988)
A great comic actor gives voice to our anger, our feelings (or suspicions) of insignificance – he weaves our misery into poetry, giving us, by the association of watching him, the grace we strive and long for, but are likely to never obtain. This is why Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (we’ll hopefully deal with it more directly soon) and its infinite knock-offs are ideal for a great comic actor – he can cut to the bone of what drives the material, and sing it in a key that transcends the unavoidable, fake pop-mawkishness of the traditional approach. A great comic actor can achieve what Dickens’ language originally did – he can make the bitter, bent-over compromise that drives the instant-bullet fantasy vivid; he can make it so forceful that it becomes something raw and honest.
Bill Murray is a great comic actor, a loose, sharp, succinct madman with an unrivaled rhythm for loathing of all sorts. Wes Anderson has made Murray acceptable for cinephiles, and I love that, but Anderson has also, to an extent, given us a more predictable, palpable Murray. This new Murray has (art) audience reaction built into his performances but he is, through the force of his personality, bracing and occasionally brilliant anyway (Broken Flowers- the best neo-broken by life Murray movie). Murray, even now, can deliver just the line you expect and still get something out of it and you – and he, even in his heaviest pictures, never once bows for audience approval. The old Murray was wilder and woollier though and showed us the glee that can occasionally come from being the smartest prick in the room; he, like Steve Martin at his best, is likeable for the precision of his inability to be likable. Murray and Martin personify the advice given to the lovelorn for how to win a woman – through old fashioned damn conviction – in something, anything. Murray had conviction in not having any conviction – and the authority of his intimidating, tossed off self-entitlement was electric. I’ve never warmed to Murray’s performances in Caddyshack or What About Bob?, because they miscalculated in casting him as a naïve idiot, there’s plenty of idiots to be found – only one Bill Murray.
Murray has played Scrooge twice, in Scrooged and, even better, in Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day, a masterpiece, is one of the most convincing embodiments of that old Hollywood chestnut - that people, with intervention, can change – like a faucet turned or a light switched. Never mind that people constantly change, up and down, up and down, sometimes to the better, sometimes to the worse (a happy ending is dying in an up wave); our movies, particularly the redemption fables, have us believe that bad men are made good - for good, a variation of the coming of age fantasy that insists that we become men and women at one defined moment (loss of virginity, reconciliation with parent) and are forever adults blessed with the comfort of perspective. This is why I prefer open, un-worked endings, such as the knock on the door that concludes Sideways or the beautiful final images of two of this year’s best pictures, Shotgun Stories and The Edge of Heaven – they tell conventional human stories, and have the good manners to suggest that life isn’t beautiful for its tangibility, but the opposite, and not always.
This had something to do with Scrooged. Murray brings to the film, an unusually well-written, consistent, sharp, high-concept picture (Scrooge as Donald Trump crossed with Rupert Murdoch) a complexity that’s unusual even in straight up Christmas Carol adaptations. You don’t wait anxiously for Murray’s Scrooge, technically called Frank Cross, to transform from crone to recognizable human because he’s already recognizably human, you like him, despite his amusingly screwed misdeeds (callously bending a woman’s possibly broken neck, attempting to staple props to animals), because he’s contradictory, alive, enthralled, in his own way, with the damn things of this world. Cross is up and down – sincere, ridiculous, heartless, sincere as heartless, heartless as sincere, and just as you have him pegged, he throws you another curve ball (natural to a good Murray performance anyway). Murray’s conception of the character enriches scenes that I’ve come to normally dread in the Scrooge story, particularly his moments with his brother (normally a nephew), whom he’s ignored in his quest for money, fame, etc. Early on, Murray turns to his brother (his real brother John) and tells him that he loves seeing him (he’s telling him he loves him) but that Christmas is for children, a crock (Murray’s delivery here is particularly crisp, reminiscent of his “they’re hicks” from Groundhog Day). Murray’s declaration isn’t subterfuge for the cynicism that follows, it’s vice versa, and Murray is one of the few actors to take on Scrooge who recognizes the difference. Bill Murray, playing the most self-conscious conception of the Scrooge character I’ve seen, delivers the most human performance of Scrooge that I’ve seen. Most take the role as Grand Ham, and have a Hell of a time. Murray gives us the guy and the ham.
I’m in danger of making it sound as if Murray is the whole story in a wobbly star vehicle. Scrooged is about as close as live-action comedy has come to the satiric bloat shock of a typical Simpsons film parody – it scores points on the obviousness of certain movies by being just as obvious, in a comedy way (Ben Stiller’s pictures, Cable Guy and Tropic Thunder, have a similar approach). Scrooged was directed by Richard Donner, typically an action guy, and he lacks an instinct for comedy that’s appropriate for this material. Donner turns up the volume, and the effects have no majesty (these tendencies sunk his The Goonies, which was attempting the awe of 1980s Spielberg) but his crude, perhaps unintentional, lack of finesse clears the awe from a scenario that’s been killed with over-theatrical reverence. Donner’s framing here, his cutting, has the obviousness of the TV that’s parodied throughout the picture. Scrooged is a parody of undeniable 1980s artifacts that’s an undeniable 1980s artifact itself, and that confliction rubs against Murray’s terrific performance and knocks refreshing sparks loose – this big dirty loud contraption is just what the increasingly pompous, fraudulent Scrooge myth needed – it’s a talented student’s daydream of a classic while stuck in study hall.
Eagle Eye (2008)
Eagle Eye is one those pictures that generates suspense from the bald, shameless disparity of the movies it’s willing to rip off. For awhile, maybe 45 minutes, you settle into watching a picture that’s a comfortable, confident hybrid of North by Northwest and The Game. Then it goes loony, then loonier still, until finally deflating into the finale that’s required of any film costing more than twenty million dollars. Eagle Eye is parts of North By Northwest, The Game, WarGames, Minority Report, H.A.L, The Manchurian Candidate, Demon Seed, Seven Days in May, and God knows what else. That list implies labor – but the picture, directed by D.J. Caruso, who did a low-key, professional job on the also Shia LeBeouf featured Rear Window retread Disturbia, is surprisingly lean and light on its feet. Caruso’s learned a few things since Disturbia, a few things that recall executive producer Steven Spielberg. Caruso’s nowhere near Spielberg, he’s workmanlike, but he also occasionally surprises you with glimmers of swift, unforced visual menace and wit, and he has a sense of pace. Exhausted from all the B-movies desperate to be Bush or 9/11 parables, it’s refreshing to see a B picture that knows exactly why it’s here. Sadly, in ten years, that sort of lack of pretense will probably come to be defined as “arty”, Hell, we’ve possibly already reached that point. My only regret is a lack of a sense of humor; Eagle Eye could’ve been a mad pop-comic cult classic, if it had perhaps De Palma’s perversity or Joe Dante’s sense of play. Let people pretend to like crap like Transsiberian that pretends to transcend the thriller as excuse to withhold its basic pleasures, I like my junk more on the unapologetic side.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has a knack for the non-sequitur that slips unexpectedly into existential despair. Kaufman’s work howls with confusion, with death obsessions, and with pleas for understandings between the sexes - with a resigned acknowledgement that we’re all, to one degree or another, too enslaved to our own perceptions –trapped in our own heads – to ever entirely empathize with another human being, particularly one for which we have a sexual hunger.
Kaufman has directed his newest picture, Synecdoche, New York, and it falls prey to that Masterpiece bug that just about every major film artist catches from time to time. This bug plays on filmmakers’ inferiority complexes, their belief that they’re working in the most ghetto of art forms, popular entertainment that any Joe can consume between work and Subway. The filmmakers, distrustful of their playful, accomplished, far more subtle, pop instincts, punish themselves, and us, for enjoying their prior work. These directors have a peculiar approach to manufacturing masterpieces – they promote the subtext of their prior work to the status of text, and, in case we still don’t quite get it, force their major characters to take turns sounding their Big Idea, which is always the Same Idea, aloud, over and over and over. Repetition, unpleasantness and obviousness are somehow, by these gifted men, mistaken for brilliance. And a portion of the critics, probably as insecure as the filmmakers, and generally far more gullible than the general public believes, go along – because they like pictures that do their work for them; and that congratulate them for sitting through the pictures all the way to the end.
Synecdoche is a puzzle picture, like the other Kaufman films, but the structure is flabby, a series of meta-nesting dolls that don’t quite cohere in that predictable faux-“ambiguous” art way. The film is a wannabe masterpiece about the creator of a wannabe masterpiece who stages a massive, life-long production that is the detailing of his creation of his wannabe masterpiece. Reality and art blend and converge and entangle because that’s what they do in this sort of movie. The picture is about Death, Death, the decay of the body, Death, and a very sad man who’s, like Woody Allen characters, so fixated on the dwindling fragile gift of life that he squanders his gift of life – he wastes his life trying to create art that makes proper sense and stock of his life. Kaufman dives into his preoccupations in an attempt to get at something purifying in its unwavering fixation, but Kaufman, trying to create a Great Thing, loses his voice, and the seams show – we watch this new picture thinking less of Life and Death than of the various other similarly overrated movies Synecdoche recalls – Paris, Texas, certain Allen, off Lynch, etc.
It never occurs to these filmmakers, trying to capture real life, that bleak for the sake of bleak is every bit as false, perhaps more so, as the candies the movies sell us on a regular basis. Synecdoche is a self-deceiving, hypocritical picture, a picture concerned with life that never manages to establish what’s being squandered in the tunnel vision. There’s nothing at stake – because everything we see is a comic, pretentiously ugly, self-consciously theatrical Hell. Hospitals look like diseased warehouses, bathrooms look like warehouses, theatres look like warehouses. Warehouses must be, in this picture, the part that represents the whole. It’s a mark of this movie’s delusion that Philip Seymour Hoffman, cast as Kaufman’s stand-in, goes to bed with practically every notable awards bait actress in Hollywood without so much as a pause of pleasure. Kaufman directs as a writer venturing behind the camera sometimes does – he doesn’t. I underestimated Jonze and Gondry’s contributions to Kaufman’s prior films – perhaps they helped hone those pictures’ dazzling drives (though Gondry lost his way too this year, in Be Kind Rewind). Synecdoche has no shape, no form; all of the scenes (intentionally) appear to be worked up specifically for actors to workshop – each scene is a disconnected movie onto itself: overwhelming, numbing – every moment, save one, in this picture is an emotional crescendo –there’s no down time or fleeting enjoyment, every scene is a Scene, and they’re all basically the same.
Kaufman has essentially made the sort of film that he parodies in his other pictures but he may, unlike Allen, be aware of it, because the humor in Synecdoche is primarily self-satirical. We see pretentious plays and books and art work, points are scored on all the blowhards who believe their own rarified hype. So Kaufman, presenting his circle of Hell, his portrait of a man incapable of pleasure, can’t even commit as wholeheartedly as he initially appears to be committing – there’s a post-modern escape clause – the picture could be a pretentious dark comic spoof of pretentious no exit art. Synecdoche, New York (did that really have to be the title?) never quite commits to anything – it can be anything you want it to be, and you can use you whatever part of it you want to justify whatever excuse you want to cook up for liking it. The contradictions are intentional, part of Kaufman’s master plan, evidence of his brilliance of perception of the human condition the fans will say, and they are partially right – but it’s a master plan to string together ten years of ideas that didn’t quite make it into the other scripts.
I haven’t read too many reviews of Synecdoche, New York, but I’m guessing that Hoffman has received his usual enthusiastic notices. Hoffman is an intense, inventive, commanding actor – but his work in Along Came Polly is more original. Hoffman, like many of the actresses of a certain age so desperate to prove that parts still exist for women of a certain age that they take anything with a whiff of pedigree, is beginning to fall into the trap of acclaim: Kaufman’s trap here of mistaking ugliness for profundity. There’s no discernable difference between Hoffman’s work here and his work in The Savages or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, except for the fact that we’ve now seen the performance at least three times. This brilliant actor, brilliant in The Talented Mr. Ripley, forgiving and human in Almost Famous, blackly funny in Love Liza, appears to be allowing an autobiographical self-disgust to warp his range, and weigh him in something that’s very close to formula. There’s little surprise in this Hoffman performance, stranded by Kaufman, he spins himself in circles.
There’s one moment, between Hoffman and Samantha Morton, who gives the best performance in the film. Morton, a shy box-office attendant in the first act, and a hall of mirrors illusion in the latter seventeen acts, instructs the impossible Hoffman character on how to win her. Hoffman goes along, longing giving way to flirtation giving way to kinship and attraction. This tiny bit reminds us of Kaufman’s wonderful past tricks, which are really sci-fi screwball comedies for the current generation; for a moment, we’re allowed to understand what Hoffman and Kaufman are so terrified of losing.
The Foot Fist Way (2008)
The Foot Fist Way is an unusually trim, consistent modern American comedy, and it has something even more rare and refreshing – perspective. The picture, directed by Jody Hill from a script he co-wrote with the stars, Danny McBride and Ben Best, scales back when you expect it to really blow up. Hill brings to the rowdy bad boy comedy what Jeff Nichols brought to the revenge film in Shotgun Stories – a mood dominated by nasty things not quite happening, with a pared down execution that doesn’t self-congratulate, or make precious, the paring down (David Gordon Green, the most famous of the Arkansas-North Carolina filmmakers, has this tendency); he doesn’t overplay his low-budget or big-budget cred. Hill nips scenes in unexpected places – he squeezes humor from the unhappiness he matter-of-factly omits: a gaudy, frustrated wife is cut away from mid-sentence, her boredom and resentment lingering, an older woman is punched out in a funny, disturbingly aloof medium shot (a Sandler or Ferrell picture would exaggerate to distract us from the cruelty). The Foot Fist Way accumulates, one little dashed mini-detail upon another, until it deflates in a climax that’s atypically merciless. Hill’s micro-budgeted comedy features characters, Tae Kwon Do instructors, performers and wannabes (same difference here), who wouldn’t be out of place, on paper, in a corrupt Apatow or Sandler production – but Hill doesn’t idolize his blowhards and celebrate their intolerance and encourage our frustrated mediocrity – his picture is more honest without being a drag, because the writers’ humor and Hill’s approach as director don’t quite mesh- there’s friction, and that friction informs the performances and the idiosyncratic blasts of profanity .
Danny McBride has appeared in Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express (the latter directed by Green) this year, and he was just-ok in parts that were forgettable. In Tropic Thunder, McBride was the weak link in a movie that largely worked; in Pineapple Express he was too much of a cliché to make much of an impression - he came off as a poor man’s approximation of Nick Frost’s work in the far superior Edgar Wright films. McBride’s allowed his own vibe in The Foot Fist Way – he undermines your expectations of chubby-strange-struggling comedy heroes. McBride’s performance is broad but varied – he counters your expectations in that way that the strange child in elementary school might: shining with occasional sincerity and yearning, and just as quickly retreating into intolerable crudity. McBride’s secret weapon is his voice, which is softer and less distinctive than you’re used to in your leading men comedians, there’s that friction again, and, again, it’s effortless – unspoken, with no trumped pathos to soften the desperation.
The Foot Fist Way will probably become the next over-quoted college hipster-party indie comedy; like Napoleon Dynamite, or Swingers, or Office Space, and its deserved (it’s better than most). The Foot Fist Way is a have-your-cake-and-it-too movie, which, for me, usually implies pandering; in this case, I mean the drunk, over-powered frat guys can laugh, and the film guys can laugh too – it’s a character study disguised as beer pong wallpaper.
Quantum of Solace (2008)
James Bond has survived a number of ridiculous-in-retrospect signs of the times over the years, and now he must trump pop psychology – the pretentious director’s shortcut around the inherent amorality of the action film. The action film has gotten smarter and more hypocritical. We could laugh off much of Clint Eastwood’s old output or, later on, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, but the action picture has now acquired a self defense mechanism – a “conscience”; we can now excuse our men for killing everyone in site because the pace occasionally slows and we occasionally see them looking out a window or over a drink or pouting in the pillow of a beautiful woman and because the violence is nastier, with a stylishly absent lack of style. Better, cleverer, directors have gotten hold of pulp conventions and made them more insidious for people who can’t admit to enjoying the conventions more honestly. Early in the year, I gave Stallone’s junky Rambo a mild pass because I found the honest blood-lust nearly quaint, the amateurishness a breath of air.
James Bond’s ruthlessness was more honest when his directors didn’t labor so hard to demystify and excuse his ruthlessness. Connery was vaguely psychopathic in the role, but there was, intentionally or not, a satiric undercurrent in his performance. Connery was reveling in the ultimate male and sending it up slightly in turn – this is why the performance, early on, is so legendary. Connery wasn’t the found object some critics claim him to be, he was a more intuitive actor – he knew what had to be done for audiences to accept Bond so readily – there had to be a just barely audible laugh track – or else the character would have been too vicious or too ludicrous.
The Bond producers don’t, despite their hype, understand how good of a Bond they have these days in Daniel Craig – he’s as playful as Connery and far more subtle. Craig’s two performances as James Bond are, taken on their own, the best James Bond picture we’ve seen, but the filmmakers don’t trust the performance – they have to clarify and rationalize him, they have to give him little contrivances to excuse him for us. They have to “humanize” him. Craig’s done that already, he’s made Bond ambiguous again, animal, with a hint of little man’s syndrome. Bond has brought a raw physicality out in Craig that was only otherwise present in Munich. Craig is a wonderfully contained, clipped actor – he makes walking exciting, revealing, passionate, scary. Craig’s a Bond with a love of consumption that’s yet to find its vindictive outlet in “the finer things of life”. Craig’s Bond discovers killing in the opening minutes of his opening outing, Casino Royale, and so killing is still novel to him, he hasn’t acquired Connery’s transference yet; killing is not yet hidden in innuendo. That was why Casino Royale was so exciting, particularly the ending, because we were promised, despite two acts too many and some too florid, too self-conscious romanticism and some flaws that seem to exist for their own sake (we can’t make this too good…), the making of a legend, the making of a consumed consumptive, a just about madman whom we all want to be. Craig transcended (and transcends) self-help mommy-doesn’t-love-me tripe; he could, with better material and some nurturing and understanding, be the Bond; capable of a legitimately ironic iconic man’s man performance that actually, in its purity and confidence, deconstructs the man’s man in a way that the filmmakers facilely prevent themselves from doing.
Besides Craig, Quantum of Solace is little. The picture is just the sort of impersonal thing that I figured director Marc Forster would deliver. Bond films are almost exclusively handled by not huge personalities behind the camera, but they, at their best, are at least trusted to unassuming pros with a sense of composition and how to keep things going. Bond’s been at this awhile, I’ve given up on an auteur taking him on, and maybe I’m even ok with that. We’ve all heard the Quentin Tarantino stories, but do we really a need a Bond that’s also a name-check of everything Tarantino was watching at the time he discovered the double-o? If that’s personality, I think I’ll keep my Bond impersonal thank you very much. But Marc Forster is the worst kind of impersonal that’s, sadly, acceptable in these cinema times – he’s a plastic-insta-personality, a wannabe auteur, so far, incapable of anything other than the hollow clicks that pass as a McIndie these days. Forster has “range”, which in his case means he appropriates a different set of self-important clichés with every picture he makes, which include Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction. Forster is the kind of director who says he wants to “examine” Bond, which means he wants to peel the inexplicable away in favor of something blunt and “liberal” and “human” and boring. There is one surprise in Forster’s handling of Quantum of Solace – a little man’s syndrome entirely removed from the subtext Craig brings to the role – an eagerness to compete with the pumped up action calisthenics currently in. But Forster doesn’t have any more feeling for these scenes than he does anything else – the action of Quantum is labored and forgettable.
There is one scene that suggests an ideal merging of past and present Bond. James, on the trail of a suspect who has something to do with the killing of his lover from Casino Royale, discovers a cloaked conversation amongst the world’s powerful in an opera house – where a more vast than we expected organization, QUANTUM, is revealed. This moment is the only time the film plays, deftly, with more than one tone; and it’s the only time that Bond’s machismo is satirized with a light touch. We watch this moment and we discover that the filmmakers have thrown Bond into a far deeper pool than we suspected. The scene has the scary us-against-the-entire-world conformity of a Body Snatchers picture and it suggests that nothing can outshoot or out-punch money. The ironically contrasting the beauty of opera with the evil of man bit has been done before, but it stands out, intentionally, ideally, from the other horseplay we’ve half-slept through up until this point. Forster and co-writers Paul Haggis and Robert Wade and Neal Purvis have, for a few moments, found the horror and the silliness of being a super-human macho man – they, for a moment, recognize a legitimate terror, that Bond is just fantasy, that none of it means anything to people who know how to play ball.
Get Smart and Kung-Fu Panda (2008)
Most big summer movies are so willfully, overbearingly impersonal that any hint of chemistry at all is sadly noteworthy. Get Smart is a lazy, thrown-together movie but Anne Hathaway and her unexpectedly appealing give-and-take with a loose, funnier than usual Steve Carell lends the laziness the illusion of lackadaisical wit. You don’t walk out of the picture resenting the explosions because the director, Peter Segal, isn’t enough of a filmmaker to build those scenes up, they blow away, and leave you with just Hathaway and Carell, who suggest legitimate possibility as some sort of romantic-screwball team. Get Smart has the savvy to allow Carell an unexpected equality to Hathaway that could possibly strike her gorgeous super-spy as novel. She’s the promise of glamour and sex, of adventure and all the things we resent or envy cheerleaders and actresses for implying and withholding. Carell is the nerd as ironic hero - he’s as misplaced in this movie world as this Hathaway would be in most of our worlds. Carell’s everyday commonality makes him exotic too - to the bad guys and to Hathaway – his solutions baffle their glorified expectations and rules of play. Carell, devoid of outlandishness, must find another way.
It helps that Carell, playing a spy in a not-quite franchise, is a more convincing everyman here than in his more self-conscious roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Dan and Real Life. Carell plays broad, that’s unavoidable, but he allows his Maxwell little asides of melancholy that add up. While Carell’s neediness was irritating in some of his other pictures, it’s surprising and refreshing in a film we have no expectations of. It’s also a credit to the picture’s (barely existent) script that Carell’s brainy, interior nature isn’t mocked or emasculated in the typically jock blood-junky Hollywood action fashion. There’s a wee suggestion of empathy. You like him. And you understand why Hathaway, who’s given a bizarre plastic surgery story to explain her age difference from Carell, would like him as well. Carell sells that cliché of the average guy so clueless he doesn’t know he’s totally out of his dream girl’s league – he treats her like a comrade, a buddy, a princess in camouflage shorts, and he walks away with her.
Get Smart also plays into Hathaway’s strength, that slightness that I had, last week, suggested was a liability. Hathaway is a good sport, her slightness humanizes her beauty and her charm – her charm isn’t dictatorial, like Julia Roberts or Halle Berry. Hathaway is capable of occupying a scene that isn’t devoted to everything that’s gloriously, ineffably her. Hathaway took it too far in The Devil Wears Prada, she was a bore and was upstaged by Emily Blunt, but in Get Smart, a considerably weaker film than Prada, she’s allowed a part so undeniably silly that she just goes with it, without congratulating herself for her sportsmanship. When Julia walked away with Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, I took it as I would the ending of a particularly ghoulish horror picture – an unsettling promise of misery to come. When Hathaway and Carell walked away, I almost started the film over again – they’re a cute couple. Is a good director up to capitalizing on this promise? Probably not, our big directors these days seem to be incapable of escapist fare without obvious 9/11 parables to justify their working in the mainstream sector. Self-loathing in artists has never been so boring. We’ll never get another Thin Man, unless it’s a remake of The Thin Man that doesn’t remotely resemble The Thin Man.
The trend of front-loading animated films with celebrity voices of varying degrees of success is irritating and occasionally racist, but the animated film also sometimes provides the opportunity for an up-tight or stuck actor to rediscover himself. (Tom Hanks’ best work in the last many years is Toy Story and Toy Story 2.) Kung-Fu Panda, possibly the most purely pleasurable action film of the year, stars Jack Black’s voice as Po, a roly-poly panda stuck working for his father in a noodle shop, while dreaming of acceptance into an elite team of ninja animals led by Dustin Hoffman as a little creature I couldn’t quite identify. Hoffman, who’s made a late inning career of warm, funny and relaxed performances in movies that suck, is allowed a vehicle here that gets on his stoned legend’s wavelength. Kung-Fu Panda doesn’t hustle you – it doesn’t run you over with its energy or its importance – it’s a kung-fu animal blowout for children, the hilariously straight-forward title more than appropriate.
It’s also a kung-fu animal blowout with Jack Black’s most restrained performance. Sticking Black in a little room with a microphone has allowed him to cool his jets and riff on the self-loathing that propels him, that revelation of tenderness that marks School of Rock as a career high point. Maybe Black’s finally gaining a sense of control over himself: he was also restrained in his lack of restraint for Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder this year. Black is normally a physical-verbal tornado, a parody of acting out as compensation for fill in the blank; but, as Po, Black allows us to come to him – he drops the meta – he isn’t a sad, lonely man satirizing how sad, lonely men try to transcend themselves with volume – he’s, as a panda, pared down, relaxed. You can feel Black exhaling – and he lends Po a surprisingly fragile voice, a voice with a beauty normally reserved for those ironically forceful covers that can frequently be heard over the end credits of his films. I almost never buy this self-actualization through ass-kicking stuff, but the ending, a duel between Po and a surprisingly menacing baddie voiced by Ian McShane (he doesn’t dial his viciousness down for the kids) is a feel great moment – a fat boy’s dream of super-heroism. Kung-Fu Panda is a children’s action film that respects children, that embodies what children sometimes dream of as their action figures collide in the grass.
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
In Rachel Getting Married, director Jonathan Demme’s compassion shines through in a way that even good directors’ films rarely do; in this sense, the picture more recently recalls Shoot the Moon, Away from Her, other Demme, and, currently, little. Everything here contributes to a miserable-wonderful-electric state of being. Demme’s misguided Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie, used the French New Wave as an experiment and a fashion statement, but in Rachel Getting Married the visual devices have a point – an urgency. The camera is desperate, searching, we feel life eluding the characters, the good times half-forgotten and giving way to the bad before they’ve been properly savored. The picture explodes in bursts of energy and music; it doubles (layers) in the way Kael wrote of Something Wild doubling. This new Demme picture merges the ideal qualities of a young and old filmmaker – a younger filmmaker’s curiosity and need to get it all out with an older filmmaker’s consideration and humanity. Rachel Getting Married is the film you find yourself fantasizing about as you watch your fiftieth coming of age romantic roundelay – an honorable formula picture – a picture that uses formula not out of cynicism or laziness, but as a springboard for something less tangible – an emotional blow-out, an instinctive trance-out, a bliss that closer resembles a beloved pop album.
Demme employs something currently vogue again: the hand-held, slightly over-exposed, constantly in motion camera, and takes it further than most filmmakers seem willing. Many current filmmakers, particularly the ones huddled under the annoying “mumblecore” umbrella, use a self-conscious diet vérité style as license to deny us poetry. Under the guise of “realism” many of these filmmakers pass non-films off as films (not a new trend), and wait for their friends and others embarrassed of the conventional pleasures of the medium to applaud them (they’re applauding their own willingness to deny themselves pleasure). Demme still gives us poetry, in the pauses and the interludes, in the in-jokes and the speeches, in the bursts of patter that tell us little in the words, but a lot in the delivery, and in the music that never ceases. Demme trusts you to find his poetry – a trick of a lamp, a woman standing over a pool, a gaze from a swing, that others would base their entire films around. Rachel Getting Married has many painful-squishy moments (admittedly too many – a few are too trumped for tears), but we don’t come away from it feeling mauled as we do with many other critically acclaimed pictures released this time of year. Demme isn’t interested in bleak chic – his obsession with the every day click-clicks of life won’t allow for it.
The buzz of the surface craft of the film has a poignancy, and relevance, beyond its own sake, though that would be enough. The editing is an extension of character in Rachel Getting Married – a fragile recognition of its hero’s manic self-loathing. Kym (Anne Hathaway), a possibly reformed drinker and drugger, is so busy defending herself to herself in front of others that she misses the beauty of everything we’re admiring. We’re in Kym’s head from the start. We share her panic, her self-fulfilling fear of drowning in embarrassment and inferiority. Jenny Lumet’s flawed, pat script has brought the great Demme from the 1980s back to fictional films - this picture is undeniably a fantasy, but it’s the fantasy of family life that Kym, and many others, feels is always just around the corner, or behind the cabinet – eluding her, and them. Rachel Getting Married represents a kind of utopia, an idealized vision of two families, one self-absorbed and troubled, the other still and talented and sage and idealized (they’re commanding, but shallow – deliberate symbols, sometimes to the point of irritation) – uniting in flourishes of energy and tolerance. It could be trite and insulting, it possibly should be, but Demme is too drunk on the momentum of the possibilities of interaction – the picture has the effect of dominos tumbling.
With Kym, Anne Hathaway has been given the part that many self-conscious young starlets attempt every year to varying degrees of success. Hathaway, from The Princess Diaries to Havoc to Brokeback Mountain to The Devil Wears Prada to Rachel Getting Married, clearly wants to be a great actress, perhaps too clearly. Hathaway’s roles strike me more as experiments than calculations, leaps into something she hopes approximates brilliance of effect, but she’s always nice, slight, and too studied. I root for Hathaway, but she never quite pulls it off, and she has an unfortunate tendency to lose scenes to her co-stars. Kym plays into Hathaway’s qualities – the eagerness to please, the not-quite-channeled talent, the delicate, sometimes ghostly beauty, and it’s the surprising parallel between role and star that gives Kym bite. Kym is a scriptwriter’s device, and she has a lousy, needless, skeleton in the closet, but Hathaway’s unexpected empathy sidesteps the stunt. The actress’s palpable, human hunger drives the character’s hungers to places of true need.
Kym is still the role most programmed to elicit a specific reaction. The star of this film is the collective world, the mix of actors, musicians, and family and friends of Demme. Bill Irwin, as Kym and Rachel’s father, has a haunting, hollowed face – a Rosetta’s Stone of domestic tragedies that humanizes his daughters’ manias. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel is possibly the strongest performance in the movie, she takes you into her teeter-tottering movements of rage, resentment and pity – she establishes the family, fluidly, subtly, as a family of over-thought, recklessly talented nuts. Rachel, the character who, in a lesser movie, would be the asexual, conventional shrew, is the force of Rachel Getting Married –a contradiction – a sexy, intelligent, indulgent woman constantly swept to the side-stage. DeWitt gives the picture’s riskiest moments tonally (particularly a long kitchen confession) the immediacy of theatre – she lends the seemingly matter-of-fact title a heartbreaking subtext: Kym is flamboyantly fucked-up, a glamorous, self-absorbed crash site – Rachel is just getting married.
The casting, from Hathaway, to Irwin, to DeWitt, to Debra Winger, has an imagination and eerie exactitude that reminds one of Altman and good Coppola. We can see Irwin and Winger on DeWitt and Hathaway’s faces, and we see the parents’ ticks blend in the language of their children’s bodies. Demme’s most perverse move is the casting of Winger. Debra Winger, perhaps the most gloriously unguarded, sensual actress in American movies in the 1980s, is straight-jacketed as the requisite passive-aggressive, remote, manipulative phantom here. By denying the sort of curtain call that Demme knows certain movie fans crave of Debra Winger, he puts us right with Kym and Rachel – a hope dashed.
The first two-thirds of Rachel Getting Married is one of the best films of its kind in years and the best Jonathan Demme picture since The Silence of the Lambs. The last third of Rachel Getting Married, in which all proper pretense of script is discarded, is the best Demme picture since Something Wild (still his masterpiece). Demme, as Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold demonstrated, understands how music affects us, how it medicates us, and how it materializes our heartbreak in a way that no other art quite does. It has something to do with the portability of music, it follows us, comments on us, allows us to comment on ourselves, and allows us to move to it and communicate and cleanse ourselves. The third act of Rachel Getting Married is an unusually long, vivid chronicling of the wedding, of characters we’ve met casting themselves head first into the celebration – cajoling and reaching for catharsis. This last act has the warmth and grace of Heart of Gold as well as the wild-wooly tone of Something Wild – we’re watching a physical, cinematic recap of the well-staged but more conventional stuff of the first hour – we’re seeing the characters at their truest and their most rehearsed in equal measure, we’re seeing how people respond to weddings, how they flirt with giving in to the illusion of renewed possibility – that all the clichés of love and life are true. Demme has found a pure current here – undiluted movie empathy.
This may be why people are already trying to discredit the picture, why the backlash has already begun, why people are resting on the picture’s admitted faults as a crutch to avoid the more vulnerable things Rachel Getting Married eventually gets to. How can one hate a picture with this many moments, this much intoxication, this much “much”? People have occasionally laughed at me for championing Demme’s screwball mobster spoof Married to the Mob, which they write off as ridiculous. Moments in Rachel Getting Married are ridiculous too, but the film is beautiful and memorable – a testament to the pursuit of the ridiculous, to what we tell ourselves in the hopes of giving a damn.
Red and Stuck (2008)
The lure of Red is seeing Brian Cox appear in more than ten-fifteen percent of the picture. Cox doesn’t do much with his voice or body here that’s much different from the government sleazies of his more widely seen pictures, but, as the star, there’s simply more of him: more of his resigned-hushed charisma, more of his stocky, dignified, generally miserable, oddly powerful frame. Watching the other actors in Red, Tom Sizemore, Robert Englund, Amanda Plummer, and several younger faces, whose work here would be laughed out of the message boards of Bloody Disgusting, I wondered what they must have thought of Cox as he worked on Avery Ludlow – a lonely retiree desperate for the slightest indication of remorse for the viciously pointless murder of his one companion – the dog of the title. Cox is acting in a movie that was never made; his co-stars are par for the picture you actually find yourself sitting through. This disconnection in quality has an unusual, unintentionally beneficial effect – we see Cox, ignored, restless, his intelligence giving way to something more primal – and we feel uneasy for him in the way we should feel for this man who lost what expectation for happiness he had left. We see Cox slumming, and we grow protective of him, particularly because the performance is so confident; so pared down and beautiful.
The rest of the picture, well, it has two moments that seize on what probably drew its creators to it: the murder of the dog (though the filmmakers muck that up by getting to it before we’ve befriended Red ourselves) and a long speech by Cox, in a rip on the Indianapolis scene from Jaws, telling of how he lost his wife. These moments have the sickening chaos of banality turning inside out – the point of a good horror picture. The rest of Red is a mixed-up revenge picture without the revenge, another wannabe deconstruction that can’t get past the rigidity of the formula. The violence, which is meant to be flat so as to deny us the hypocritical catharsis of most anti-revenge pictures, is indistinguishable from the tedium of the rest of the movie. One wonders how much of a hand the co-director Lucky McKee, of the also mixed up-but-promising horror pictures May and The Woods, as well as the unwatchable Roman, had in this mess. Can someone please give the man a budget and a timeline greater than two weekends and wait and see? McKee at his best promises something rare in even good horror pictures – empathy. The problem, though, may be that the qualities of McKee’s pictures aren’t meant to co-exist – he may not have the deranged, rebellious wit of a born horror filmmaker – he still wants the kids in P.E. to like him. McKee’s searching makes his clichés go limp when they should pop – as in the best parts of Rob Zombie’s movies.
I’m tempted to wish more money and encouragement in Stuart Gordon’s direction, but he seems to be doing fine without me, and that might only ruin him anyway - the equivalent of an interesting supporting actor going franchise-boring as soon as he wins an Oscar nomination. I can’t think of a director off the top of my head whose violence is more durable -Gordon’s biggest picture is the justifiably well-regarded Re-Animator, but he’s since continued to knock out increasingly sleek-vicious-funny horror pictures of a particularly sensual-satirically funky key. Dagon, occasionally crippled by inadequate funding, still has mood and an unsettling scene of violation – a perverse spoof of emasculation that paved the way for Edmond, Gordon’s film of Mamet’s play that trumps Mamet’s obviousness with unsettlingly plain, tickled, matter-of-factness; the picture, as pure Mamet as Mamet can get, could also almost be a spoof of Mamet in equal measure, and therein lies the appeal of Gordon’s touch – a flair for chameleon genre pictures that are deconstructionists in one light, revelers in the other. Gordon’s new picture, Stuck, seemingly as simple and straightforward as its title, also flirts with riding into the final frontier, the last taboo, of the American horror picture – economic collapse – but Gordon, no surprise, doesn’t play to the “common man” cheap seats. The picture nudges us, screws with us, indulges in sharp-daft hyperbole (most notably in an indulgent fuck-fest that’s a wink at the so-called sex in most mainstream movies) and then goes brutal. Every mood is given its fair due.
Stuck would work if Gordon’s sensibility was the only thing to enjoy, his pictures have trumped weak performances in the past, but that, bracingly, isn’t the case here. Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea, as folks caught in a bizarre chamber power play, are perfectly in tune. Gordon brought something out of Suvari in her brief turn in Edmond – she was commandingly off, and sexy, in a part similar to the one she overdid a few years prior in American Beauty. Divorced from the banalities of aspiring stardom, Suvari tapped into something that had the potential to make her star – provided the right part came along. Stuck moves Suvari in the right direction, but real horror movies aren’t marketed these days. Too bad. In Stuck, Suvari expands on all of her promising bits in Edmond – she’s a rare thing for our generation in these two films – an attractive, funny, controlled, menacing, flake. Rea is as strong as I’ve seen – playing a pleasant, average, bent-over guy without telling us he’s overly pleased with his character’s normalcy – which allows us to come to him, legitimizing the gore. The gore is (intentionally) the only thing that hits you over the head in Stuck, by the end you’ve realized you’ve seen something full and playful and disturbing, something gleefully lacking in the need to pronounce its credentials. Stuck has something that the younger horror filmmakers, in their obsessions to remake old movies at the expense of everything else, lack – a relatable, casual, downtown worldview – a simple heartbreak – the kind of dependable disappointment that drives you to four beers and a shot after work, to celebrate Wednesday as “hump” day. Stuck has something to do with what nails us down every day, and why we’ll fight for our privilege to have five more minutes of it.
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