Weird and wonderful
Movies seen spring 2008.
Originally written: December 2008
Burn After Reading
Rocknrolla
The Wackness
It's late November and we still haven't really seen a movie that has been proclaimed as "the Oscar movie". There are a number of potential such movies due out in the next few weeks: David Fincher's latest The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Gus van Sant's Milk; and Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, co-directed with Loveleen Tandan, which has very recently opened in limited release in the US, to rave reviews and strong box office; Baz Luhrman's Australia might not end up being such a movie given the lukewarm reviews here). If nominations were made now, the field might include The Dark Knight and Wall-e, both of which are getting serious consideration despite one being a superhero tale and the other animation. The Dark Knight seems stalled at a world-wide gross of $993 million, so if you can encourage another million or so people to see it, it might become the fourth movie over the billion mark, which only adds impetus to its Oscar claim - two of the three other billion dollar movies, Titanic and The Return of the King were gonged; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was not. I said in August, "I suspect that the Batman thriller will go the distance [i.e. make a motza at the box office] despite the tone of the movie". And it looks like it will. Wall-e has so far grossed closer to $500 million, which makes it not as successful as most Pixar movies in terms of box office returns. Nonetheless its 96 (out of 100) Rotten Tomatoes rating and it 8.7 rating on IMdB indicate its critical success, and I hold out hope for an animated Best Production nominee, especially if the current dearth of nominatable sercon movies continues.
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Stupid people slip discs
If there is such a thing as a bad good movie, then the Coen Brothers' latest Burn After Reading fits the bill. Partly I suppose it's because it's a lightweight piece in the wake of their major success with No Country for Old Men. Partly it is because the whole is never quite the sum of its parts; and many of the parts seem quite familiar. The McGuffin is a computer disc with the memoirs of a choleric ex-CIA operative Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), sacked for drunkenness and resentful of it. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who has hooked up with gym bunny Linda (Frances McDormand). It is Linda and her fellow employee Chad (Brad Pitt) who find the disc and who try to sell it to the Russians. From that you can guess that Linda and Chad are not the sharpest tools; in fact, they are reminiscent of Carol and Earl, the incompetent criminals in Ruthless People. Brad Pitt's Chad is the twin brother of Bill Pullman's Earl (about whom another character remarks: "This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.") While Pitt is somewhat funny, I couldn't help but see the echoes of Pullman, who was much better. But it's Linda and Harry who have to carry the main parts of the movie. Linda is an interesting character, given a depth by McDormand. She believes that her body has passed its use-by date and needs money for a series of operations to improve herself surgically. Meanwhile she continues to troll dating websites looking for Mr Right. Instead she finds Mr Pfarrer who, despite a wife and a mistress, uses the web for more nooky. In a different movie, they might have been perfect for each other, but neither have enough self-awareness to recognise their limitations or their needs. This is Clooney's third film with the Coens and, in each, he has played a character who thinks that he is smart, but really has almost no insight: Harry is at one with Ulysses Everett McGill (O Brother! Where Art Thou?) and Miles Massey (Intolerable Cruelty), an incomplete idiot. A real prblem with the film is that Malkovich and Swinton seem to be in a different movie. Malkovich has no lightness of touch at all. Osborne Cox is constantly angry and misanthropic, displaying not a skerrick of the intelligence that his career suggests that he has. Swinton, as his wife, plays it straight, and it is her intention to divorce Osborne, and acquire his wealth, that sets the movie in train. Yet towards the end of the film we learn that she is a medical specialist - probably earning more than her husband ever did. As you would expect in any Coen movie, there are many plot twists, as the various characters work out their destinies. Good character actors like Richard Jenkins and J K Simmons are wasted in support roles in which they have too little to do, although Jenkins has a couple of poignant moments that lift the film briefly. The dialog, with the exception of Osborne's spleen, which becomes repetitious, is as sparkling as in any of the Coen comedies, but to less effect in the end. The resolution of the movie is like a comic version of the fifth act of Hamlet. Here death is accidental rather than planned, and not necessarily a very serious thing. Ultimately, the movie is entertaining enough while it's on, but it fades very quickly. It will not join The Big Lebowski and Fargo as comedy classics. A good movie, but not a good example of a good movie.
Babbling brooks steal show
It's hard to know what the first line of Guy Ritchie's obit will be. Will he be best remembered as Madonna's (now ex-)husband, as Lourdes' daddy, or as the director who tried to be London's Tarantino? In the wake of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Ritchie has completed a sort of gangster trilogy with Rocknrolla. And again he falls just short. Not that he doesn't give it a good shot: there is the nub of a great movie in here trying to get out. But, like Burn After Reading, it is too derivative, reminiscent of too many other, better, films. The plot is complex, involving real estate scams, Russian billionaires, corrupt local government, small time crooks graduating to the big time, a bored accountant and a Mr Big of local crime. The latter is Lenny Cole, played by Tom Wilkinson, and he has grafted himself into a position in the centre of criminal activities in his "manor". Those wanting to do business need to do it through him. He makes a number of mistakes, dating back to when he messed up the adolescence of his stepson, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), the mad bastard drug fiend in the eponymous role. Subsequently he rips off One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), two small-time grifters with delusions of real estate development; and he underestimates the sheer bastardry of Uri Obamavich (Karel Roden), a Russian standover man, with a football team, looking to redevelop his stadium. All of this is told from the viewpoint of Archy (Mark Strong), Cole's right-hand man. Strong was excellent as Harry Starks in the TV miniseries, The Long Firm, recently on Australian television, and he is equally good here. In fact, his character and his narration are the highlights of this movie. When Uri organises the readies to pay Lenny's bribe, his accountant, Stella (Thandie Newton), engages One Two to heist the millions, part of which the latter uses to pay off Lenny. Meanwhile Uri has loaned his lucky painting to Lenny, and Johnny Quid, a former rock singer who is now constantly drug-fucked, pinches it by way of some petty revenge on his step-father. And, in another part of town, Handsome Bob, a member of One Two's group, is preparing to go to jail after he has been shopped by the local grass. It turns out that both Handsome Bob and Stella's lawyer husband play for the other team - which adds another level of complication and some humorous twists to the plot. And yet another complication comes from the presence of a couple of Yanks (Jeremy Piven and Ludacris) cast as music entrepreneurs who are forced by circumstance to hunt for Johnny Quid. All of this would play much better is there were slightly fewer interludes of extreme violence, and much better dialog. Butler is not charismatic enough for the lead role of One Two and Newton gets too little screen time. Wilkinson and, especially, Strong hold up well, but the truly outstanding and breakthrough performance comes from Kebbell, who manages to imbue Johnny Quid with humanity and create a sympathetic character from a complete maddie. The real problem is that Ritchie's direction is never strong enough to bring the diverse elements together as a coherent whole.
A glass half empty
Sometimes you just want to pull the auteur aside, hit him upside the head and tell him to change the title of his damned movie. Someone should have done that with Jonathan Levine. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with The Wackness - except for the title, which offers no incentive for people to attend, and is, in fact, off-putting. In fact, the movie is better than "nothing intrinsically wrong": it's a surprisingly well-developed bildungsroman, where the protagonist is a recent high school graduate passing the summer before he goes off to college. Set in New York in 1994, as mayor Guiliani is starting his "clean up" campaign, the film concentrates on Shapiro (Josh Peck), the school's dope peddlar, but otherwise on the outer with the cool crowd. In the face of his father's financial incompetence Shapiro sets about putting together a college fund by increasing his sale of weed. One of his customers is 50-something shrink, Dr Squires (Ben Kingsley, with a false nose and goatee), with whom Shapiro trades grass for psychiatric help. The object of the young man's desires is Squires' step-daughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby, the best friend from Juno). As Squires' world begins to come apart, Shapiro starts to grow up. Stuck in the city in the summer between high school and college (with all her friends off in Europe and elsewhere - he has none other than his customers) Shapiro and Stephanie have a brief affair, highlighted by a weekend at her parents' place on Fire Island. She helps Shapiro understand what's wrong with him: he sees only the worst in people and events, rather than being optimistic and open, or to put it in the words of the film: Know what your problem is, Shapiro? It's that you just have this really shitty way of looking at things, ya know? I don't have that problem. I just look at the dopeness. But you, it's like you just look at the wackness, ya know? Thus letting us know where the film's crappy title comes from. She gives him something other than more psychoanalysis, as well. But the Shapiro-Stephanie relationship is the secondary one in the film. The main one is the one between the shrink and the kid. Squires has formed what he sees as a bond with the kid and, as his own marriage deteriorates (Famke Janssen is underused in the underwritten part of his wife), the older man hangs out more with Shapiro, trying to help him with girls, "assisting" him as he buys and sells his dope, meeting his customers. These include a rock one-hit-wonder (Jane Adams) and a flirtatious hippie chick (Mary-Kate Olsen). While Stephanie (and his parents' increasingly desperate financial situation) has the effect of forcing Shapiro to mature, it is Shapiro who is the one who causes the doctor to face his own immaturity. Like the relationship between the two younglings, it is on Fire Island that the climactic confrontation takes place. The film is the brainchild of writer-director Jonathan Levine and, leaving aside his infelicity with titles, shows him to be a major talent as both a writer and a director. The obvious financial constraints on him as a film maker are shown by the use of some substandard shots, some over-exposures and the sort of stock that would not make the final cut of a big budget studio movie. But his dialog is great (reminiscent in ways of the use of the language in Juno). The final scene between the two youngsters gives a flavor:
Shapiro: Do me a favor, Steph? Stephanie: Huh? Shapiro: Don't say nothin, ok? Just stand there till I leave. I wanna remember this. I've never done it before. Stephanie: Never done what? Shapiro: Had my heart broken.
Like the makers of Juno, Levine also has an ear for the music he uses with the film. Most of the soundtrack consists of the emerging hip-hop of 1994, and it is supplemented by some interesting alternative choices, like Mott the Hoople's version of David Bowie's "All the Young Dudes", a sound from Squires' past. In addition to the strong roles played by the dialog and the music, the best thing about this is the acting: Peck and Thirlby are very good, but it is Kingsley who carries the movie. His Dr Squires is a far more complex character than you would normally expect to see in a teen coming-of-age movie. That gives the film additional depth, and helps bring into relief the interesting aspects of Shapiro's maturing. It worries me that I am beginning to appreciate quirky independent American cinema, winners from Sundance even. But this one is worth a visit, despite the damned title.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]