Juno (2007)
Juno (Ellen Page) loses her virginity to her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera) in an opening scene of surprising tenderness. Evidently they weren’t too careful, as Juno soon finds herself pregnant, and looking for parents to take the child she knows she’s not equipped to raise. She tells her parents, (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, both sharp in small roles) and they react with understanding and good humor, a reaction that I’m sure many accidentally impregnated teens pray their parents will have as they consider how to best break the news.
Taken as a fantasy in which babies are nothing more than a roommate with a nine month lease, Juno largely works. The pregnancy is, barring the occasional scene, the macguffin. The film isn’t interested in the pregnancy’s affect on Juno’s parents, or Paulie, or Paulie’s parents (who are curiously sidelined, I’m assuming they never know to begin with), it is merely a means to inspiring an intelligent, insecure, relentlessly self-aware girl to recognize that she isn’t Queen of the World, and that her humor, which she uses as a bludgeon, can be off putting and mean. Like many young people of both genders, Juno can be as casually awful as the people she thinks she’s protecting herself against. This realization is the movie. I actually had a bit of a hard time accepting that, because the film, regardless of what you’ve heard, is not a farce. The film is ambitious and serious enough to expect a bit of owning up on the part of director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody in regards to the unborn child. Like Juno herself, Juno is a young person’s movie, created by young people, it’s insecure and unsure of itself, and that’s both the best and worst thing about the movie.
Worst for the reason I just described, best because the film’s rambuctiousness is surprisingly human. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner portray the adoptive parents to be, and, of course, they are rich and live a certain facade that the arrival of a child threatens to crumble. But their crumbling is the best part of the movie, and that’s because Cody, when she’s not striving to be the hippest thirty year old screenwriter in the room, has surprising imagination. Garner is immediately expected to be the shrill harpy of the duo, but her character is more, and less, than that. Self-awareness is not, refreshingly, reserved for just the under twenty set in Juno. Garner catches the fear, the resentment in her husband’s looks, and the heartbreaker is that she agrees with his assessment of her.
Bateman and, especially, Garner needed this movie. I’ve never thought Garner had the stuff to be a movie star, and honestly I still don’t. But she has the stuff of an actress, at least here. Garner might be the best performance in the film, and this is a film where the performances unquestionably deliver. Bateman’s a bit of the opposite, he’s definitely a star, but I was never sure if he was quite an actor. As Bateman reemerged into feature films, it seemed to me that his very appealing Michael Bluth might be the only note he had in him. Juno doesn’t really refute this suspicion, but it illustrates a darker, subtler, less sentimental key* of that note.
Which brings us to Juno herself, and her maybe/maybe not mate, Paulie. Ellen Page was terrific in the unwatchably sanctimonious Hard Candy a few years prior, and her work here is similar. Like Bateman she’s unsentimental and even more committed. Yes, Juno is armed with a never ending arsenal of annoying MySpace double speak, but the film acknowledges it for the stunt that it is. Have you folks ever actually read a MySpace profile? The self-justifying through obscure musical, filmic and literary name dropping, the cross breeding of insults into something you can barely understand, there are plenty of little women like this running around, sure, it’s stylized, but, guys, that’s what we at least sometimes go to the movies for. Cody does try too hard though, and will hopefully realize that a little goes a long way, and that her less explicable jokes are more effective (there’s a Woody Allen reference early in the film that slayed me.)
Cera is Cody, Reitman, and Page’s secret weapon, the redemption of the snark. He’s the cost of Juno’s bullshit, the jarringly raw nerve young man who’s even more lived in than Page. Like his Arrested Development alum, Bateman, Cera was in danger of boring me. I get it. Cera does his thing extremely well, but I get it. Well I don’t get it, or at least I haven’t had enough yet. Cera, again like Bateman, doesn’t stretch so much as refine and slightly re-contextualize. Cera’s work is simple and poignant, the personification of the unmasked adoration that Juno believes to be out of her reach.
Reitman could’ve laid off a little on the self-congratulatory sound track, but he’s learned a bit from his first film, the overrated, have it both ways Thank You for Smoking. This film is just as blunt, but it moves and shakes more comfortably, more organically, than Smoking. Juno is a bit of a pain in the ass, but you really can’t help but at least partially like the damn thing.
*I know nothing about musical notes.
★★★
Rants: Another Look at The Lookout (2007).
Re-watched Scott Frank’s The Lookout again last night. I wrote about this film in March, but a summer earthquake at BC somehow destroyed it. If I remember correctly I wrote that the film had a terrific first half followed by a second half that dampened the proceedings somewhat by being just ok.
I’m sticking to that. The first half is, if anything, even better than I initially wrote. Frank’s script is lean, mean and character heavy in equal measure, and he, in Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Chris Pratt, gives us a humdinger of a desperate noir hero. Brain damaged, self-loathing, perpetually suffering from shame and blue balls, this is definitely a guy you can see robbing a bank to get away, particuarly when charismatic weasel Gary Spargo (Mathew Goode) and the yummy Luvlee (Isla Fisher) get ahold of him.
The acting is superb. Levitt is one of the most exciting young actors of his generation. Unlike a certain overrated Ryan Gosling, Levitt doesn’t feel stifled and self-conscious: trying to convince you every moment of what a Great Actor he is. Levitt is authentically sensual, tortured and dangerous, particularly in this, Brick, and his brilliant career best work in the under appreciated Mysterious Skin. Mathew Goode, of Match Point, is just as startling here. The Likeable Villian is trickier than most acknowledge, you either go too likeable or too villian, but Frank and Goode handle Spargo’s seduction of Pratt confidently, convincingly, with tasty dialogue familiar to anyone who’s seen the Frank penned Out of Sight. Add Jeff Daniels doing another of his bitter beard numbers and you’ve got something with potential.
And the second half is fine. Just fine. But I don’t want to call it fine. I want to call it violent, pent up, deranged, sexy. I want the damn thing to come off the tracks, or be shaggier, less beholden to the framework of the classic noir story. Frank cares about his characters and that might be a bit of problem: he doesn’t want to put them through their paces. The end is safe and anti-climactic. A big build to, drumroll, just another bank robbery. Everyone who should die dies and everyone who should live lives.
Still worth seeing though, for the Swiss watch that is the opening two acts. I hope Frank gets behind the camera again soon and really takes his gifts for a spin.
Unoriginality.
Nothing is more dispiriting than a major critical consensus, especially when it’s Top Ten of the Year time. Right now, my two favorite films of the year are There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.
Yeah, like everyone else on the planet.
It reminds me a bit of 2004. My favorite film that year was Sideways.
Again, like everyone else on the planet.
2007 though is different, because it’s not just the top couple of movies that seem to be the same across the critical landscape, it’s large stretches of lists, everyone seems to love I’m Not There. Everyone seems to love Juno. Everyone loves Zodiac. Etc. Etc. The bitch of it is that all of these (excluding Juno which I haven’t seen) are very, very justified. The movies really were THAT damn good.
Some have sensed this and populated their lists with a few less likely titles. But now even these are the same. Black Snake Moan was disregarded in release, but I’m seeing it pop up in more than one End of the Year list. That is, of course, a good thing. Black Snake Moan is a strong movie that turns post modern idolization on its head in a surprising way, and deserves to be seen.
What to do? Grin and bear it. I’d rather have good movies than a good top ten list any day. Even if it slightly tarnishes my sense of individuality.
That said, my Number 3 choice, The Astronaut Farmer, should surprise some people. As should my plea for There Will Be Blood as Paul Thomas Anderson’s ultimate symbolic exploration of the 1950s Soviet/American space race.
Black Book (2007)
Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a beautiful young Jewish woman, is on the run from the Nazis. It’s the Netherlands in the 1940s. She’s, basically by accident, joined a resistance group. By careless chance, a few of the group’s members, her de facto friends, have been captured. It so happens that Stein has met the man in charge of the region’s Gestapo. His name is Muntze (Sebastian Koch) and he’s taken a shine to Rachel, who’s known to him as Ellis de Vries. Like many a conflicted heroine before her, Rachel must infiltrate Muntze’s heart, and bed, in the fleeting hope that her friends can be saved, particularly before even more ruthless Nazi underlings can get to them.
The film is Black Book. The director is the Paul Verhoeven, returning after a long absence. If I recall correctly, the story theory people say that there are, once you boil everything down to its essence, only seven basic stories. I think the confused young woman in peril bedding an enemy superior against her wishes should be added as the eighth. It combines many elements of the other seven, but has any specific story been of more use to a filmmaker? The classic template is Notorious, and Ang Lee just made his best film, Lust, Caution, using the same scenario. Lee laced his Notorious cover with a bit of the obsession of Last Tango in Paris; and finally caught the movie that he seemed to be chasing for at least a decade. I was expecting Verhoeven to get all Basic Instinct on us and unleash a violent story of erotic bedroom gymnastics and purplish dialogue accompanied by even purplier score.
Verhoeven has and hasn’t made that film. Black Book is surprisingly, for him anyway, restrained in the sex and violence department. The story has, dare I say it, brought out the humanitarian in the filmmaker. Maybe it’s van Houten, one of the most startlingly beautiful women I’ve seen in a recent picture. Verhoeven has clearly fallen for his leading lady and that’s not particularly unusual, he falls for all of his leading ladies, but he doesn’t fetishize van Houten. He’s rooting for her, he respects her, and he clearly mourns the more outrageous and cruel things that happen to her over the course of the film. The trademark Verhoeven perversity serves him in a different fashion here; it dries out the potential schmaltz of the Wounded Survivor of a Historical Tragedy movie. Verhoeven is too much of a natural born filmmaker to bog things down in sanctimony. He wants to bare the tits and spill the blood as much as he ever did. But for once he sees the human cost involved in his spectacle. He hasn’t made his best film in Black Book, his masterpiece is still Robocop, but he’s easily made his best since then, a major comeback that erases the memory of the unforgivably boring Hollow Man.
The refreshing trick of Black Book is that it actually doesn’t commit to the story I just described, as over the top as the film can be, logic has more bearing here that you’d expect. The film isn’t a drawn out game of how long will it take Muntze to figure out who Rachel actually is. He’s fingered her (pun fully intended) by the time they’ve made love for the second time. The film doesn’t forget that a man in his position is, you know, probably fairly intelligent. Muntze doesn’t just let every single hot spy into his bed without so much as a question. He holds a gun to her, calls her on a coincidence, and before long, he’s holding her perfectly sculpted breasts again. Welcome to the return of the good Paul Verhoeven movie.
Koch, superb in The Lives of Others, and van Houten are invaluable here. I wrote a few paragraphs ago that van Houten is one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in the movies. She’s also a sharp, charismatic actress, handling tones that turn on a dime with the ease of a seasoned pro. The most important thing though, is that you like her, root for her, and van Houten seems to sense this, because she doesn’t bend over backwards trying to appeal to your sympathies. van Houten’s performance is brave, commanding and unsentimental. Rachel is a survivor. As simple as that, this is a tough young woman, a warrior who happens to look like something too stunning, too naughty, to even appear in your inner fantasies.
Koch is playing the opposite of his character in Others here. Or is he? Black Book is more ambitious than you initially assume. The film is, first and foremost, melodrama, but the third act is a shockingly convincing anti-war film, evil is among all of us, even the fallen, even the victimized, and things can change on a whim. Nothing new for the war film of course, but Verhoeven handles the theme gently and with ease. No self-congratulatory story killing pontificating here, a major character’s death is handled briskly, matter of factly, and that haunted me more than anything to appear in the many Iraq movies that I largely didn’t see. Verhoeven has refound himself, he’s ALIVE again. The women make him hard again, the violence revs him up again, but, for once, and this is promising, he’s scared of the horrors he unleashes.
★★★½
BC’s Best Picture of 2007….
…has been chosen. I’m not posting the Top Ten of the Year until I see a few other things (expect it in about a week) but I’m pretty confident that the number one spot is no longer up for grabs. Like many Best movies of the year, this film simply grabs you and says “There are plenty of great movies but I am, most certainly, the ONE.”
Of course, I spilled the beans over at Craig Kennedy’s wonderful site, Living in Cinema, a few days ago, so why am I still being so coy? Probably because my ego needs that much more massage, therapy is in fact one of my New Year’s resolutions.
Next week Bowen’s Cinematic will be doing a mini theme, an appreciation of the director of the 2007’s best film’s prior work. Hint: there are four prior films. Hint, Hint: This director is one of the guys to come of age in the 1990s.
Oh, fuck it. The best film of the year is There Will Be Blood. Tune in for a Paul Thomas Anderson fest next week.
Pot Luck aka Three Chuck rants for the Price of One.
In the last week or so I’ve caught
I’m Not There,
There Will Be Blood, and
Sweeney Todd in the theatre. Amazing and mildly exhausting in equal measure. These are films that should be seen, digested, and seen again. Not shoehorned into a few days and knocked over like dominos. Such is the situation though, and, particularly considering the traditional winter drought that’s approaching, it’s a nice situation to be in. Eventually maybe studios will realize that people like movies the other 3/4 of the year too, and everything will be easier to catch. Maybe the Academy will one day be able to recall films that are more than sixty days old. One can dream.
Here are a few other things that I’ve caught over this same week to ten day period, but didn’t really have a full post’s worth of musings to share.
Reign Over Me, the newest film from Mike Binder and the newest in which Adam Sandler tries to atone for the obnoxiousness he unleashes as an actor and producer on a more regular basis, is one of my candidates for Worst Movie of the Year. There have been films that are technically less competent, but Reign Over Me takes the cake in sheer self-righteous unwatchability. The film is strange and ambitious. I give it that much. And only that much. In dramatic roles, Sandler usually plays the castrated opposite of the psychotic frat boy that populates his comedies. Here he gets to have it both ways: he’s deranged and castrated, and if that wasn’t enough, he gets to court Oscar by speaking in a pointless Fraggle Rock lisp that annoys more than anything else. Don Cheadle, as the old buddy who tries to save Sandler from himself, is warm and appealing, and wisely never tries to out convulse Sandler. You care for Cheadle, and hope that he one day finds someone else to help. After the overrated The Upside of Anger, and the awful Man About Town, it may be time for Mike Binder to reevaluate himself in the same banal way that his leading characters always do. Hopefully he’ll come up with something more useful than leftover Cameron Crowe, and something less desperate than a 9/11 grief cash-in.
Unlike Reign Over Me, Mr. Brooks at least has conviction in its absurdity. I can say this about the new Kevin Costner-Demi Moore-William Hurt-Dane Cook serial killer film (you read that right); every single scene is as stupid as it can possibly be. The film is unwieldy in the best way, subplots multiply like fungus: every other suburban yuppy is a serial killer or serial killer in training, and Costner presides over the entire enterprise in a performance that almost has to be self-satire. Costner is playing the same kind of colorless leading man that made him a star (and that he transcended beautifully in Bull Durham and Tin Cup) only here he’s the man of the year and the killer of the moment in equal measure. Has to be a joke. If this is a joke, I can guarantee you that Demi Moore isn’t in on it. Hurt, carrying over his character from A History of Violence, sure is though, and his scenes with Costner are the few that are truly pleasurable in a way that isn’t ironic. Mr. Brooks is the “good bad” movie of 2007.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the unfortunate who knew? casualties of 2007. Some have speculated that the film may have stiffed because people are tiring of uber-comedy producer Judd Apatow’s sensibility and that the inevitable backlash has set in. I don’t buy it. I think the real issue is timing and the fact that Walk Hard is sending up something that people still take seriously: the Oscar bait musical biopic that, in it’s obligation to provide faux uplift and hope, is as false in it’s own way as anything Mr. Brooks is selling. Too bad. Walk Hard is the next evolution in the Anchorman, Talledega Nights line of hyperbolic farce, reining the shtick in just enough to magnify the bits of absurdity that drop in occasionally like hand grenades. Walk Hard is more concerned with cumulative effect than bits, and director-co-writer Jake Kasdan’s patience pays off. The music, like the music in Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind, is credible in its own right. The performances, particularly John C. Reilly’s, are as good as any to be found in more obvious Oscar bait. Hell the film, as an R-rated comedy, is actually a more credible examination of the self-destructive musician’s life than the real Mccoys who have to play cleaner to ensure that the kiddies can get in. Walk Hard also doesn’t, like most other Apatow movies, get soft and sentimental at the end. The sincerity and the sarcasm go together hand and hand here, in a more graceful way, no Act 1-crude, Act 2-crude and sentimental, Act 3-sentimental, story constructions here. This is one of the more pleasurable films of the Holiday season, and would make an interesting double bill, as others have suggested, with the more heavy duty life of the music man deconstruction I’m Not There.
Reign Over Me: ★
Mr. Brooks: ★★
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: ★★★
Happy New Years
Happy New Years folks, hope you ushered the year in last night in just the right way, whatever that may be. Updates should be regular this week, hopefully with looks at
Juno,
Black Book, and a little Pot Luck medley of 2007 pictures that didn’t, for me at least, require a full review’s worth of opinion.
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