Imagination and originality
Movies seen late winter 2010.
Originally written: October 2010
Inception
Killers
Salt
The Iron Giant
Gran Torino
Gettysburg
Defiance
The 2010 Emmys are hardly worth talking about, except to note the deserved acting award to Jim Parsons, whose Sheldon Cooper is one of the great comic creations. Mad Men is a habit we haven't acquired as yet, although it is something I will have to investigate. On the other hand, it's worth noting that Toy Story 3 has become the seventh film to cross the $1 billion barrier worldwide, and the first purely animated feature to do so. It has surpassed Alice in Wonderland as the year's highest grosser. Inception's $700 million is almost as noteworthy. In an era where more and more films are failing to earn back their cost, and too many are pale imitations of better films, the really good ones are doing very well indeed. With a couple of exceptions, one very notable, the past few weeks for us, have been about catching up with a number of films we missed on first release. Too few of the northern summer movies look worth seeing, so more and more we rely on DVDs to see us through. Before getting to those DVDs, there was one honorable exception ...
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Give me a kiss ...
When I started writing about movies for teh intertubes in the mid-1990s, I started with an essay about heist movies. Christopher Nolan's Inception takes the genre to a new level, using the creative tools available to the modern auteur to interweave the elements of the classic heist movie with SF ideas to develop a wholly original - and very satisfying - work. Certainly in high concept terms ("Tell your story in 25 words or less, with reference to at least two previous films") Nolan could have summarised the idea as "Dark City meets Rififi with lots of nods to Spellbound" and he would have got nowhere near relaying the brilliance of the ideas, and the superb execution of those ideas, that make Inception such a great film. In a "summer" season of sequels, re-imaginings and adaptations of fantasies based on comic superheroes (not that there is anything wrong with that), Nolan's film stands out for its originality, as well as for its craft. It has a classic heist movie structure: the opening scenes relate a failed heist; next the mastermind assembles and trains his dream team for the main job; and the last half of the movie is the heist itself, with its increasing complexities and risks. The McGuffin here is not an ancient treasure or jewels or gold, it is more cerebral: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) steals information ("extraction") by entering the dreams of his victims and conning their subconscious into revealing a secret. In the opening extraction, the mark, industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe), foils the attempt - and then makes Cobb and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) an offer that Cobb is loath to refuse: he'll fix Cobb's problems with US authorities if Cobb will do a job for him. Only this time it is not an extraction but the holy grail of dream thieves, "inception", planting an idea so deep in the mark's subconscious that he thinks it is his thought. Cobb is tempted; Arthur less so. Nonetheless, they start assembling the team. The recruitment of a novice dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), allows Nolan to integrate a fair deal of plot dump smoothly within the narrative. Ariadne becomes the audience point of view as the rules of the dream world are detailed. It also allows Nolan to play with the art of film, to take the concepts of dreamscapes that Hitchcock explored in the Dali-designed nightmare in Spellbound and morphing landscapes that Alex Proyas' team developed for Dark City to a whole new level. Some of the imagery that The Matrix barely touched on is here fully imagined. In addition to Dali, there are echoes of Magritte, of Gleeson and of Escher, but the design is wholly original and quite mind-blowing - and this is before we get to the heist itself. This second act also allows us to understand that Cobb carries with him several layers of guilt arising from the earlier death of his wife, Mal (Marion Cottilard), and that this guilt expresses itself at the physical level within the worlds of the dreams in which he is involved. The team is completed by the addition of a "forger" (Tom Hardy) and a chemist (Dileep Rao). As is usual in such heist movies, we are told the object of the exercise - and the identity of the mark - but little is revealed of the details of the execution until we are plunged into the increasingly complex events of the attempted inception. There is little need to discuss in detail the "heist" itself, and good reasons to avoid any spoilers that might interfere with the viewing enjoyment of the few that will not have seen this movie before reading this critique, other than to note that it involves a dream within a dream within a dream - and an additional layer within that third dream. Despite the complexity of that process, and the simultaneous action in several different dreamscapes, the events are clearly delineated, and the internal logic of the various actions and consequences so thoroughly maintained, that the audience is never at a loss to understand the narrative or appreciate the threats to the heroes. The cast is uniformly good; several are Nolan regulars, like Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine, others are emerging talents. Gordon-Levitt, so good in a number of small budget independent movies like (500) Days of Summer, has a telling role in a big budget adventure, and is excellent. He also has responsibility for the stand-out action sequence in the film - a series of battles in a zero-G environment through a labyrinth of corridors in an imagined hotel. Tom Hardy has a similar breakthrough after a number of good supporting roles, as in Rocknrolla. Both Cotillard and Page are very good as the Yin and Yang of the female persona - the temptress and the innocent; it is ironic that only a couple of years ago they were the antagonists in a close fight for an Oscar and there seems to be some element of karma achieved by the resolution of their confrontation within the plot of this film. DiCaprio has become one of the more reliable screen actors in recent times: after The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Departed, it is no surprise to see how well he handles the pivotal role of Cobb. It's the sort of role that is noticed by those who give awards. In spite of the brilliance of the acting and of the production design - and of the special effects work to bring it to realisation - there is no doubt who the "star" of the film is: Christopher Nolan. With his first truly original script, Nolan has parleyed the technical achievements of movies like The Dark Knight, with the ideas and questions raised in his more thoughtful films, Memento and The Prestige. The end result is a science fiction film of the sort that fans have long craved: one that takes the elements of film (especially the visual palette that Nolan's crew employs) and combines them with the best of the thought-provoking concepts that animate the written genre. This is pure SF: placing recognisable characters in an altered environment and seeing how they react, bringing the reader/viewer along without too many passages that have the effect of stultifying the narrative. In this film, the nature of reality (in a Descartian sense) is the implicit subtext, one that is brought into stark relief by the final shot of the film, a shot that had the audience with whom we saw the film in several minds as to its impact - and its meaning. That final conundrum is the capper on an all but perfect science fiction movie experience. I really loved Inception.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
If Inception gives hope for those wanting something fresh and challenging from studio movies, Killers has the opposite effect. I've spoken before about the strangeness in the zeitgeist that means the appearance of two or more very similar movies almost simultaneously: Dark City and The Matrix; Deep Impact and Armageddon, and so on. This year it is the appearance of Knight and Day (Cruise and Diaz) and Killers, two the romantic assassin movies, which came out at almost the same time. Neither is as good as the progenitor of this subgenre, Mr and Mrs Smith. Briefly Katherine Heigl, again playing an overtly successful woman who's made a mess of her love life, is travelling in Europe with her Mom and Dad when she meets cute with CIA assassin Ashton Kutcher. Soon they're married and when next we meet them three years later, they are living in a suburban development that is replete with every cliched neighbor you could imagine - and Mom and Dad live close nearby. Without traversing too many of the uninteresting details, it seems someone's put out a a contract on Ashton and every co-worker and neighbor is trying to collect. The movie switches gear at this stage from rom-com to shoot-em-up. Not that it was a very good rom-com up to that stage - the characters had not had a chance to develop before they become engaged in a series of stunts involving, serially, guns, cars, trucks, buildings, fights and reconciliations. Heigl and Kutcher have better in them than is shown here. After the promise of Knocked Up Heigl has chosen a series of lesser comedies and is in danger of ending up like Jennifer Aniston in the they-never-quite-made-it group. Kutcher has a certain boyish charm that never really gets a chance to break out here. Better served are Tom Selleck and Catherine O'Hara as Dad and Mom. She in particular provides most of the comic highlights. Like Heigl, Australian director Robert Luketic started his movie career on a high (Legally Blond) and, with a very similar trajectory, has been going downhill since. He needs a hit, and this is not it. I chose to see this rather than the Cruise vehicle because it garnered better reviews. Knight and Day must be appalling. Disappointing.
That's Bond, Jane Bond
After Die Another Day, there was talk of giving Halle Berry's Jinx Johnson a series of "female James Bond" movies. They never materialised. If Berry always seemed a little too genteel to play the role, Angelina Jolie seems to be born for it. After two Lara Croft movies and Mr and Mrs Smith, and being OK in the otherwise dire Wanted, Ange fits the bill, both in acting chops and the ability to perform the stunts. When Kurt Wimmer's espionage thriller, written with Tom Cruise in mind, was rewritten (in part by Brian Helgeland [LA Confidential]) for a female lead, Jolie was the logical Salt. This spy thriller with a series of frankly incredible plot twists is a true romp. As long as you are prepared willingly to suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride - much like you'd have to do in the better James Bond films - you'll love Philip Noyce's latest adventure film. Evelyn Salt is a CIA officer, first seen as captive of the North Koreans and the subject of water-boarding (not torture according to the Bushies), released after her arachnophile boyfriend's intervention. Two years later she is working with Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) when she is asked to interrogate a walk-in, Orlov, who spins a tale of a Russian mole program that is about to come to fruition with the imminent assassination of the Russian Premier in New York. (This aspect, one of the more fanciful parts of the story, became more credible when a dozen Russian moles were arrested and deported just before the movie opened.) The interview, which becomes much more interesting in retrospect, ends with one of the great plot-establishing exchanges:
Vassily Orlov: The name of the agent is Evelyn Salt.
Evelyn Salt: My name is Evelyn Salt.
Vassily Orlov: Then you are a Russian spy.
And it's game on. What follows is 80 minutes of virtually non-stop action as Salt escapes from Winter and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), tries to find her missing husband and heads for New York to either kill or save the Russian leader. I'm not going to try and explicate the plot from this point for two reasons: the discovery of the labyrinthine turnings of this film is one of its joys - it keeps you guessing as to where it will end up, and it does have plenty of surprises - and it is frankly so far-fetched that it needs the adrenaline rush inherent in the action to accept the plot twists. Suffice to say that Salt keeps working herself into tight corners and then getting out of them. Some of the escapes are more unbelievable than others and the plot complications just keep adding to the tension and the interest; edge-of-the-seat thriller material marvellously put together by Noyce (whose previous thrillers include two good Harrison Ford-Tom Clancy films) and by his editors (Stuart Baird and John Gilroy). It works well for the same reason that, say, Casino Royale worked well: the actor in the central role embodies the protagonist and makes it work. Jolie has never been better, at least in an action role. Maybe I could have done without the anti-climax, but even that makes some sense in the long run. Salt is a pretty damned good spy thriller.
Seen on video
The Iron Giant is an animation I have been waiting a long time to finally catch up with. It is an early feature from Brad Bird, after he left The Simpsons and before he went to Pixar and hit the jackpot with The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Made at the end of last century but set in the 1950s, the movie is a playful homage to the threat-from-outer-space paranoia of the fifties. The eponymous character, an alien machine isolated on Earth and befriended by a friendless boy, must come to terms with its own nature, while the ruthless military, egged on by a fearful G-man, seeks its destruction. It's a sort of cross between The Day the Earth Stood Still and ET. Like many of Pixar's features, it disguises its adult message beneath a lovely story that will keep the younglings entertained. There is even a nascent love story involving the boy's single mom and the local scrapman/sculptor. Made towards the end of the era of the dominance of hand-drawn animation, The Iron Giant, based on a Ted Hughes parable, is everything it has been cracked up to be: funny, smart, entertaining and interesting.
Gran Torino is another indication that Clint Eastwood as a director is very good at selecting his leading man. Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski is the best thing in this slice of life drama. A recently widowed Korean War vet, Walt is about the last surviving European in the neighborhood, where the Hmong have started to take over. Walt becomes involved in the Hmong family next door, in its (and his) struggle with an ethnic gang. Walt, an elderly retired-auto-worker, is anger barely contained and the attacks on his neighbors, originally the centre of his xenophobic contempt, bring his violent tendencies to the surface. The script doesn't rely overmuch on dialog and is beautifully constructed - with an inevitability of its story arc towards an anticipated, if slightly twisted, ending. I'm still not sure that Eastwood is in the first rank of great directors, but as a combination of actor/director he has few peers. And there is no-one in contemporary movies who knows as well as he how to use silence.
I'm not quite sure what writer/director Ronald Maxwell was trying to do with Gettysburg, a four-hour plus filmed version of the pivotal Civil War battle, but he has managed to combine good history, with interesting characterisation and a mobile camera, to create a dramatic documentary. Most of the best war movies are told at the unit level: a film like Battleground that looks at the Battle of the Bulge from the perspective of a small group unaware of the wider ramifications of what is occurring. Maxwell ignores that, ranges over the battlefield, over three days, showing what Lee was trying to do, and how the Union armies responded. The commanding generals of the North didn't arrive until late on the second day, so lower ranked officers like Buford (Sam Elliott) and Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) determined the response. The miscalculation of Robert E Lee (Martin Sheen) on the third day is shown in stark relief, and with much blood and thunder. Using many Civil War re-enacters as the grunts, and filmed on the site of the decisive 1863 battle, that was commemorated by a speech destined to be little noted nor long-remembered, the battles look "real". The actors eschew histrionics and try to get inside the men they are portraying, very effectively especially in the case of Daniels, Tom Berenger (Longstreet) and Richard Jordan (Armistead). This film blurs the edge between entertainment and education, and is all the better for it.
Edward Zwick is an interesting director. He made, amongst other films, Glory, one of the best Civil War dramas, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond. He is currently preparing Guy Gavriel Kay's novel of the reconquista, The Lions of Al-Rassan, which is something to look forward to. His most recently released film, Defiance, got only limited theatrical time last year. It tells the story of a resistance band of Jewish Belarussians who successfully defied the Nazis, hid in the forest and fought back against the occupiers. The Bielski Partisans remain largely unknown, partly because they were excised from the Soviet history of the Great Patriotic War, and partly because the idea of successful Jewish resistance didn't fit the Zionist storyline. Zwick's film overly dramatises and personalises some of the story, which is incredible enough. The Bielskis are played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell and their sibling rivalries occasionally overwhelm the story of the band's establishment, and its survival against the odds. There are a couple of set piece battles and, more interestingly, a number of scenes about the establishment of a social structure for the village established by Tuvia Bielski. In Glory, Zwick revivified the history of the black Civil War soldier; in Defiance, he does a similar job for the Belarussian Jewish resistance.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]