Short Take: Margin Call

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Writer-director J. C. Chandor’s 2011 debut feature, Margin Call, is a trim ensemble melodrama about an investment bank in crisis during the early days of the 2008 financial collapse. The film takes place over a 24-hour period. In the opening scenes, the bank’s chief risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) is laid off just as he uncovers a significant problem with the company’s mortgage-backed-security asset portfolio. His department protégé (Zachary Quinto) finishes the work later that night, and discovers that the bank is in immediate danger of insolvency. Word of the crisis quickly makes it up the chain-of-command, climaxing in a wee-hours meeting overseen by the bank’s CEO (Jeremy Irons). Plans are hatched to immediately divest the company of its toxic investments before buyers become wise to the assets' worthlessness. The various characters know they are engaging in a massive swindle, and they have to grapple with both the morality of their actions and the awareness that their professional reputations are going to be destroyed. The film is intelligent, absorbing, and well-paced, but it may seem pat and overly simplistic to viewers familiar with the ins and outs of the real-life banks’ actions during the 2008 crisis. (The fictional bank is not, as stated by some reviewers, based on Lehman Brothers, whose institutional problems were far more complex than what is depicted here.) Chandor assembled a dream cast for the production. Apart from Tucci, Quinto, and Irons, it includes Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker, Demi Moore, and Mary McDonnell. Unfortunately, the characters don’t have particularly vivid personalities. Apart from Jeremy Irons, who delivers an amusingly hammy turn as the CEO, none of the actors makes much of an impression. The film accurately portrays the banally corrupt culture of the financial world of the early 21st century, but one wonders if that banality stood in the way of finding significant drama in the setting.

Short Take: The Deep Blue Sea

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Rachel Weisz’s finely wrought, richly expressive performance is the emotional and dramatic center of The Deep Blue Sea, writer-director Terence Davies’ 2011 adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play. The Rattigan material is a variation on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The setting is London in 1950. Weisz plays the wife of an affluent British judge (Simon Russell Beale) who abandons her marriage for an affair with a dashing former RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston). The film tells the story of the affair in flashbacks. It begins with the heroine’s suicide attempt, and it follows her as she recalls the relationship and looks forward in an effort to save it. Rattigan may have started with Tolstoy, but the men in his love triangle only recall their antecedents upon first glance. The husband ultimately proves a decent, sympathetic man, and the lover, for all his bravado, is a dissolute fellow unable to make the adjustment to civilian life. The heroine only resembles her precursor at first glance as well: she ends up a hopeful figure, not a tragic one. Terence Davies does a marvelous job of realizing the material for the screen. The tonal shifts between the flashbacks and the story’s present tense are beautifully orchestrated. He even includes a movingly ironic homage to the train-station climax in Tolstoy’s novel. The three main performances complement each other exceptionally well. Simon Russell Beale’s stolidity and Tom Hiddleston’s surface confidence are each a form of uprightness, and they both offset and frame Rachel Weisz’s exquisitely delicate tremulousness. She returns the favor; her emotional range helps render the dimensions given the male characters. The picture is a lovely piece of work.

Short Take: Bridesmaids

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

In Bridesmaids, Saturday Night Live regular Kristen Wiig plays a single woman in her thirties who's down on her luck. Her business has failed, her love life is depressing, and she’s just scraping by financially. When her best friend (Maya Rudolph) gets engaged, she’s asked to be the maid of honor, and she tries to take on all the wedding planning. But everything she does goes comically wrong, and she finds herself in competition with the wife (Rose Byrne) of the groom’s boss. The wife isn’t shy about flaunting her wealth, and she seems determined to usurp the Wiig character’s place as the bride-to-be’s best friend. The film, directed by Paul Feig from a script credited to Annie Mumolo and Wiig, is too earnest and sentimental to be an entertaining farce. The film gets bogged down in the Wiig character’s self-esteem problems. It isn’t very well crafted, either. It's overlong, and many of the comedy setpieces continue and sputter a good while after they should have wrapped. (There are some badly misconceived scenes as well, most notably a gross-out slapstick sequence in a bridal boutique.) In general, the cast isn’t very inspired. Wiig’s role doesn’t give her much opportunity to play to her talents. On SNL, she’s demonstrated a genius for skewering fatuously self-absorbed personalities. In the film, she saddles herself with an everywoman part. She’s a sympathetic presence, but apart from her character’s drunken bad behavior on an airplane flight, there aren’t many laughs in the performance. Rose Byrne, who plays the role Wiig should have taken, doesn’t have a comedic bone in her body. Maya Rudolph isn’t given much to do, and as two members of the bridal party, Wendi McClendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper appear to have had their roles truncated. Only two performers stand out: Jon Hamm, who is hilariously smug as the Wiig character’s handsome, loutish bedmate, and Melissa McCarthy, in a delightfully wry turn as the groom’s overweight, over-assertive sister. They have the humor and timing the rest of the film is lacking.

Short Take: Drive

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Drive is a piece of low-grade schlock that uses an A-list cast and a faux-existential tone to put on airs. Ryan Gosling plays the taciturn man-with-no-name protagonist, a mechanic and stunt man by day, and a freelance getaway driver by night. He’s cold-bloodedly violent when necessary, but he has his gentle side: he takes a shine--platonic, of course--to the young mother (Carey Mulligan) who lives next door, and he becomes something of a surrogate father to her son. He’s nothing less than chivalrous towards them; when her husband (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison, he’s calmly accepting. And when the husband is corralled into a robbery to pay off a debt, he offers his driving services for free to get the fellow off the hook. The robbery, of course, goes horribly wrong, and the rest of the movie has the protagonist trying to square the situation while the body count rises. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, does a sleek job with a pre-title chase sequence, but the rest of his work is largely identical to Clint Eastwood’s filmmaking schtick: shapeless, dead-air scenes of the characters standing around, which are punctuated by moments of grotesque violence. As with Eastwood’s work, the viewer is left too stupefied to recoil from the crude sensationalism. And of course this gets mistaken for an existential atmosphere and proof of the filmmaker’s artistry. (The picture won Refn the Best Director prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.) The staging is so lackadaisical at times it’s almost funny, such as the scene in which Gosling’s character assaults a mobster in a strip club. The dancers just sit there as if nothing’s happening. Gosling and Mulligan, two of the best young actors working, are completely wasted in their stock roles, as are Christina Hendricks as a moll, and Bryan Cranston as the protagonist’s mentor. The only performer of interest is neurotic-comedy master Albert Brooks, who is cast against type. He plays a gangster whose steely, violent ruthlessness rivals the protagonist’s. Brooks is, by turns, a droll and chilling presence. But he is the only fresh aspect of the film. The rest is a collection of exhausted clichés, notable only for the pretentious manner in which they are presented. The screenplay, based on a novel by James Sallis, is credited to Hossein Amini.

Short Take: Shame

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Michael Fassbender stars in Shame, the second feature directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen. At first glance, his character embodies the ideal of the successful single guy. He’s a well-paid, strikingly handsome white-collar professional who lives and works in Manhattan. He’s also a sex addict who compulsively indulges in hook-ups, call girls, and pornography. His world is thrown for a loop by the arrival of his sister (Carey Mulligan), a small-time jazz singer who crashes at his apartment. The siblings are two sides of the same coin. They’re both desperately alone and emotionally adrift, but she’s as high-strung as he is self-contained. The film works best as a showcase for the two actors. Fassbender’s specialty is smoldering beneath a stoic surface, and he shows a remarkable range within it. The character’s fear, pain, and loneliness are as palpable as his anger. Mulligan’s role doesn’t allow for this kind of austere bravura. The woman is slobby and demonstrative, but Mulligan makes her a vivid counterpoint to her brother. Mulligan shines brightest in the film’s best scene: her character’s nightclub performance of “New York, New York.” It's a low-key rendition that aches with longing, and it brings tears to a listener’s eyes. The two stars are terrific, but the film is cold, glib, and pompous. One can’t decide if McQueen is using the sex to jazz up the angst, or the angst to jazz up the sex. The explicitness of the film (which earned it a NC-17 rating) comes off as self-congratulation for being “bold” and “unflinching.” The picture is compelling, but it is hardly poetic or profound. The screenplay is credited to McQueen and Abi Morgan.

Short Take: The Help (film)

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The film version of The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s phenomenally successful 2009 novel, is handsomely produced and briskly paced. It also rings almost completely false. Tate Taylor, who wrote the script and directed, stays fairly close to Stockett’s story. Set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 and 1963, when the African-American civil-rights movement was beginning to come to a full boil, it follows the efforts of an upper-class aspiring writer (Emma Stone) to put together a book of testimonials by African-American domestic workers. Particular assistance comes from two local maids (Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer). Stockett’s handling of the material was glib and self-congratulatory, but it works. Taylor’s treatment seems completely wrong. The heart of the story’s drama is in the various social codes--both between the races and within the white upper-class--and how they’re enforced and acquiesced to. Taylor doesn’t get the nuances. Among other things, he directs the actresses playing the maids to use far more assertive body language with whites than would be tolerated. Taylor also includes moments that aren’t in the book--such as one maid interfering without reprisal with the police during an arrest, or another threatening, again without reprisal, an affluent white man--that make one wonder if he knows anything about the milieu he's depicting. Viola Davis is a remarkably compelling actress, but Tate doesn’t have the judgment to use her imposing intensity with restraint. As a result, the relationship between her character and Emma Stone’s doesn’t play right, and the climactic confrontation with the white queen bee (Bryce Dallas Howard) doesn’t have anywhere near the power it should. Taylor botches the queen bee character, too. She’s an effective villain in the book--the butt of much of the humor, but a genuinely threatening presence as well. However, Taylor doesn’t show the intimidation tactics she uses with her cohort, so it makes no sense why they defer to her. He also directs Howard to play the character in a cartoonishly over-the-top manner, so a viewer can’t take her seriously, either. The only character Taylor handles well is the local misfit, played by Jessica Chastain. Her failed efforts to be accepted in the town’s social circles are funny and touching, and Chastain gives a terrific comic performance. Taylor also does justice to the character's pathos--the film’s most eloquent moment is when the viewer learns the meaning of the isolated flowers she plants on her lawn. It’s about the only time this tone-deaf filmmaker shows perfect pitch. The large cast includes Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, and Mary Steenburgen. The capable production design is by Mark Ricker.

Short Take: Melancholia

This review originally appeared on Pol Culture.

The films of Danish writer-director Lars von Trier are insufferably pretentious as a matter of course. Melancholia is no exception. One knows it the moment one hears the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde over the opening shots. Von Trier doesn’t employ the incomparably sublime music for irony, and he returns to it throughout the picture. It predictably outclasses the film, and it's a sign of how full the director is of himself that he doesn’t recognize this. That said, the first half of the movie isn’t bad. The montage that begins the film is a clever collection of surreal allegorical imagery. It’s followed by an enjoyable black farce depicting the wedding reception of a couple (Kirsten Dunst and Alexander Skarsgård) at the manor estate of the bride’s sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland). If the antics of the bride’s misanthropic mother (Charlotte Rampling), whimsical father (John Hurt), and boorish employer (Stellan Skarsgård) weren’t enough, the Dunst character suffers from a depressive disorder that has her alternating between episodes of withdrawal and acting out. In one moment she’ll be ducking out of the reception to take a bath or a nap, and in another she’ll be having sex with a co-worker on the estate grounds. It’s perversely amusing. But in the second half, the picture shifts from farce to fable, and it becomes ridiculously overblown. A previously unknown planet (called “Melancholia”--hint, hint) is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. Von Trier shows how the Dunst, Gainsbourg, and Sutherland characters respond to the impending apocalypse. Surprisingly, it’s the Dunst character who retains her composure. It’s a nice irony, but the allegorical framework is too over-the-top for it to be effective. Von Trier demonstrates a complete lack of perspective about his material. But he does get a superb performance from Kirsten Dunst, who impressively portrays the character’s divergent moods and transcends the overall pretension. Mileage may vary with a viewer's opinion of the film; it was voted the Best Picture of 2011 by the National Society of Film Critics. Dunst received the group's Best Actress prize.

Short Take: X-Men: First Class

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

X-Men: First Class, the fifth entry in the venerable superhero-movie franchise (and the second effort at a prequel) is a definite step up from the last two offerings, X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It isn’t aggressively stupid, and the pacing won’t give one a headache. Most of the film is set in 1962, and the viewer is introduced to the leaders of the rival superhuman factions (played in the earlier installments by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen) when they were young men. James McAvoy plays the Stewart character; Michael Fassbender takes over from McKellen. The film charts the development of their friendship, their short-lived alliance, and the conflicts that drove them apart. They also get to train a new group of young superheroes. It’s all in preparation for a showdown with a super-powered ex-Nazi (Kevin Bacon) who manipulates the Cuban Missile Crisis in a plot to take over the world. Director Matthew Vaughn and the gaggle of screenwriters have made a moderately entertaining adventure movie. But the film is a far cry from the first two pictures, both helmed by Bryan Singer. It lacks the poetic storytelling and well-developed character ensemble that gave the Singer-directed installments their distinction. Most of the supporting characters are ciphers--they’re a collection of powers, not personalities--and Vaughn’s half-hearted efforts at using metonymy and other tropes to advance the narrative are clumsy. His judgment in other areas is questionable is well, particularly with the film’s cavalier sexism and the smug, campy performance turned in by Kevin Bacon. But the one thing he gets unquestionably right is the handling of the Michael Fassbender character. Ian McKellen’s droll megalomaniac is reimagined as a Byronic figure. Fassbender plays him with remarkable intensity and charisma. He's the best reason to continue the franchise. The large cast also includes Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne, and in a hilarious cameo, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Short Take: Mildred Pierce (2011 film)

This review originally appeared on Pol Culture.

With Mildred Pierce, director Todd Haynes gives the five-hour mini-series treatment to James M. Cain’s 1941 novel. It follows a self-made businesswoman in the Great Depression and her tempestuous relationships with her two husbands and eldest daughter. Haynes doesn’t tell the story so much as live it. The series is lavishly detailed and languorously paced. Haynes' immersion in the material feels like obsession. In lesser hands, this might seem oppressive, but one never feels Haynes can’t see the forest for the trees. He may take his sweet time presenting the story, but every scene is effectively shaped, and they add up to an outstanding whole. The deliberate tempo also dries out the soapiness that a brisker pace might have stumbled on. The cast is superb. As the title character, Kate Winslet is remarkably fluid and expressive. She seems to be living the role even more than Haynes is living the story. Evan Rachel Wood plays the vicious, narcissistic daughter in adulthood, and she may be even more impressive. She gives the character a bored, haughty glamour, but she also takes the viewer past this diamond-hard surface and into the daughter’s anger and drive. The character is in many ways the femme fatale of the piece, and one has never seen a femme fatale given this kind of depth. The mini-series’ portrayal of the daughter may even surpass the book’s. Brian F. O’Byrne and Guy Pearce hold their own as Mildred’s husbands, as does Melissa Leo as her best friend. Applause is also deserved for the contributions of cinematographer Edward Lachman and production designers Mark Friedberg, Peter Rogness, and Mark Pollard. They give the miniseries a look that elegantly evokes the period setting and lends it a lived-in feel. The teleplay is credited to Haynes and Jon Raymond. Note to readers: the mini-series includes several sexually explicit scenes. They would be enough to earn a theatrical feature a NC-17 rating.

Short Take: Midnight in Paris

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The romantic comedy-fantasy Midnight in Paris, writer-director Woody Allen’s 41st feature, is one of his most charming. It’s also his strongest effort since the 1980s. Owen Wilson plays the film’s protagonist, a Hollywood screenwriter who is increasingly dissatisfied with his life. He wants to leave movies to become a novelist, and while working on his first book, he travels to Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams). The city takes over his imagination. All he can think of are the artists and writers who have called it home across the decades. One night, while out for a stroll, he finds himself in the Jazz Age Paris he’s dreamed about. He spends the next several evenings hobnobbing with the likes of Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). Stein even reads and offers input on his novel. But the biggest impression is made by a flapper (Marion Cotillard) who idealizes the Belle Époque even more than he does the 1920s. Allen delightfully sets the stage for a parable about nostalgia, and he follows through beautifully. The climactic epiphany about living in the present walks hand-in-hand with the joys of one’s romantic dreams. The performers are a delight as well. Owen Wilson’s ingratiating wistfulness has never been more appealing, and Marion Cotillard is so sweetly sexy that the sight of her is pure reverie. The various 1920s figures are lovingly (and hilariously) portrayed. The most enjoyable is Corey Stoll’s Ernest Hemingway. Allen provides a happy caricature of the writer’s tough-guy pretense, and Stoll puts it over with aplomb. There are also a number of terrific throwaway jokes. The best involves a contemporary fellow who finds himself in the time of the Ancien Régime. The production design of Anne Seibel and Hélène Debreuil beautifully evokes the Paris of today, the 1920s, and the Belle Époque.

Short Take: The Adjustment Bureau

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

As the star-crossed lovers at the center of The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have an extraordinary romantic chemistry onscreen. They and writer-director George Nolfi immediately establish the rapport between the couple in their scenes together. As the characters play off each other, the humor, warmth, and happiness between them builds and blossoms. In these moments, the film is giddy love-story bliss. One can’t help but wish Nolfi would just focus on the pair and jettison the gimmicky sf-fantasy framework. The script is based on concepts in the 1954 Philip K. Dick story “Adjustment Team." It posits a world secretly guided at times by supernatural beings who call themselves The Bureau (played by John Slattery, Anthony Mackie, and Terence Stamp, among others). These trenchcoat-and-fedora-clad guardian angels have determined that the Damon and Blunt characters need to be kept apart in order for both to achieve their full potential. (He is a politician; she's a dancer). Most of the picture is given over to the efforts of the Damon character to thwart their plans. It climaxes in a stupid chase that has the cast teleporting through doorways all across Manhattan. (However grudgingly, credit must be given where it’s due: Nolfi’s use of the New York locations in this sequence and others is superb.) There’s a terrific romantic movie struggling to break free from the pretentious pulpiness, but it never sees its way clear. The outstanding cinematography is by John Toll.

Short Take: The Tree of Life

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Terrence Malick’s fifth feature, The Tree of Life, is a great film, and perhaps his best. Its centerpiece is a richly detailed look at life in Texas during the 1950s, as seen through the eyes of a middle-school-aged boy (Hunter McCracken). We see his experiences with his brothers and friends, as well as his ambivalent view of his mother (Jessica Chastain). The film is at its most eloquent when it explores his extremely complicated feelings towards his authoritarian father (Brad Pitt). Malick stages, shoots, and edits the picture in an impressionistic style that’s nothing less than dazzling. It dances from shot to shot and scene to scene with the utmost elegance. It’s one of the few films that truly deserves to be called lyrical. Malick’s artistry is at such a high level that one easily forgives the pretentious aspects of his script, most specifically the life-through-the-aeons nature allegory during the film’s first third. When the picture settles into the 1950s sections, one feels one could watch it forever. Sean Penn appears in the film's framing scenes as the protagonist in middle age. The masterful cinematography is by Emmanuel Lubezki.

Short Take: The Descendants

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Director Alexander Payne does a lovely job handling domestic-tragedy melodrama in The Descendants. The picture is beautifully paced and quite affecting. It's even wrenching at times. The occasional comedy scene keeps the material from getting too maudlin, and Payne makes fine use of the Hawaii locations. He doesn’t get lost in either the scenery or the poetic-ironic effects he uses it for. The story centers on an affluent Honolulu lawyer (George Clooney) and his efforts to come to terms with the impending death of his wife. He also has to take over the role of primary parent to his two headstrong daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller), as well as manage the dissolution of a large family land trust. On top of everything else, he discovers his wife was having an affair. The dramatic sections are well realized, but Payne does his best work with the comedic material: the efforts of the 17-year-old daughter to play mother to the 10-year-old; the Clooney character’s annoyance with the older girl’s pothead boyfriend; and the high comic moment when the Clooney character and the older daughter confront the wife’s lover. Clooney renders his character’s churned-up emotions with precision, and his comic timing is as strong as ever. Shailene Woodley, who plays the 17-year-old, isn’t a vivid presence in her dramatic scenes. But she nails the comic ones, with her delivery of her character’s profane dialogue a particular highlight. Payne gets fine work out of the rest of the cast, and the tempo of the individual scenes is just about perfect. The film’s only real flaw is how Shailene Woodley is occasionally presented. Payne gets too enamored with her eye-candy appeal at times, and it works against the tone of the scenes. The Descendants is award bait, but the picture represents that kind of filmmaking at its best. The elegantly crafted script, credited to Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, is based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

Short Take: Young Adult

This review was originally published at Pol Culture.


With his fourth picture, Young Adult, director Jason Reitman’s batting average goes from perfect to .750. It’s a cruel, repellent film, and it curdles on the screen. The screenwriter, Diablo Cody, who collaborated with Reitman on Juno, appears to be working off her resentment of the popular girls she knew in adolescence. The protagonist, Mavis (Charlize Theron), was a glamour-girl prom queen in high school. Now 37, she’s alone, divorced, and flirting with alcoholism. Her career as a writer is at a dead end. She’s spent the last few years ghosting a series of young-adult novels, and the books have run their commercial course. One day, after receiving a birth announcement from her high-school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson), she decides to return to her hometown. Her goal is to break up his marriage, and get him back. The film demeans Mavis by turning her into the opposite of what she was in her teens. Now she’s the infatuated loser being humiliated by the futility of her romantic pursuits. The glamorous hauteur and fashion sense that made her a queen bee now mark her as a misfit. She was once the center of attention, and now the only friend she can find is a pudgy, geeky classmate (Patton Oswalt) whom she barely noticed while they were growing up. The scenes with Oswalt are by far the easiest to take, partly because he’s an open, amiable presence, and partly because they’re the only time Mavis isn’t making a complete ass of herself. But the film is just using his character against her, too. The romantic turn their relationship takes is treated as the moment Mavis hits bottom, and the film completely forgets about him afterward. Reitman isn’t in bad form. His staging, tempo, and sense of location are fine, and he gets good work from Theron and the rest of the cast. He’s just not able to get past the ugliness of Cody’s material.

Short Take: The Ides of March

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

George Clooney directed, co-produced, co-wrote, and co-stars in the politics melodrama The Ides of March. The setting of the story is a presidential campaign, and Clooney’s best move was to cast himself as the candidate. His charisma is firing on all cylinders, and he makes the candidate’s ability to inspire supporters effortlessly convincing. Clooney’s worst move was to put the tired script into production. The protagonist isn’t the candidate; it’s the campaign’s number-two operative (Ryan Gosling). The picture is about his transition from idealism to cynical ruthlessness. He and the other campaign officials are unconvincingly written. They seem far too rigid and earnest to function well in the mercurial environment of politics. The intrigues inside the campaign are uninspired and overly histrionic. Those involving the press, a rival campaign, and a valued potential endorsement never rise above the perfunctory. Clooney has assembled a first-rate cast. Besides himself and Gosling, it includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Evan Rachel Wood, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Jennifer Ehle, and Jeffrey Wright. But the material doesn’t give them much of anything worth doing. Even the dialogue is flat. The directing is unimaginative. Clooney shoots the script as if he were making a play on location. There’s no attention paid to creating the urgent, chaotic atmosphere of a political campaign. The picture looks professionally made, but as an entertainment it just lays there.

Short Take: Hanna

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The director Joe Wright is known for tony literary adaptations such as Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. With Hanna, he tries his hand at a pulp adventure story. The title character, played by Saoirse Ronan, is a teenage girl who has been raised in isolation by her father (Eric Bana) in the subarctic Finnish wilderness. The father is a former CIA agent, and he has been training Hanna since birth to be the perfect spy and assassin. After he feels she has come of age, he sends her out in the world. She quickly becomes the target of a senior CIA operative (Cate Blanchett). The journey is one part mission and one part road to self-discovery. Much of it is Hanna coming into her own as an indomitable killing machine, a aspect of herself about which she becomes increasingly ambivalent. The film is a glossily incompetent mess. The screenplay, credited to Seth Lochhead and David Farr, from a story by Lochhead, doesn’t give Hanna’s odyssey a clear purpose. There’s no urgency as a result. The picture treats the Blanchett character’s designs on Hanna as a mystery, but there’s no suspense there, either. One isn’t made to feel what’s at stake if she did nab Hanna, so it’s hard to work up much concern. The thinking appears to be that since Hanna and her father are the “good” characters, and the Blanchett character and her agents are the “bad” ones, then that should be enough for the audience’s engagement with the chases and the confrontations. Matters aren’t helped by Wright’s flabby direction. He shows little interest in pace or drama. The scenes function as an excuse for empty flamboyance. He's very fond of intricately edited montage and extended traveling Steadicam shots. Each are strikingly executed, but one would be a lot more impressed if Wright managed to enhance the story with them. (He would also do well to avoid single-take shooting in action scenes. His fight choreography is abysmal.) The disinterest in effective storytelling extends to Wright's handling of the actors. The only performer who makes an impression is Blanchett, and it’s the wrong kind. Her sleek villainy is so cartoonish one can’t help giggling. The elegant cinematography is by Alwin Küchler. The Chemical Brothers provide the annoying electronica score.

Short Take: Take Shelter

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Take Shelter, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, is a potent, affecting film, but ultimately a disappointing one. Michael Shannon gives a richly felt performance as a working-class Ohio man who is faced with the onset of clinical mental illness. It begins to manifest itself in a series of nightmares: oil raining from the sky, assaults from loved ones, and apocalyptic storms. But he cannot shake the dreams after waking, and he becomes increasingly obsessed with expanding and outfitting the tornado shelter in his backyard. The film doesn’t once flinch from the real-life consequences of the character’s behavior. Nichols and Shannon take the viewer inside his terror at his psychological decline> Much of the narrative's power comes from watching him gradually undermine the various pillars of his life, including his relationships with work, friends, and family. The film’s major flaw is that it is far more intelligent than imaginative. The hallucinatory dream sequences aside, the picture feels trapped in the mundane. Nichols seems far more concerned with evoking pathos than finding poetry or catharsis in the story. The film is harrowing, but it is not especially edifying. There’s just too much angst and not enough artistry. One may feel compelled to leave before it is over. The luminous Jessica Chastain is a forceful, grounded presence as the Shannon character's wife.

Short Take: Contagion

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh from a script credited to Scott Z. Burns, is an ensemble disaster melodrama. But it goes out of its way to avoid the schlockiness typical of films in the genre. The story follows the progress of a worldwide pandemic. We see it strike its first victims, the efforts of scientists and government officials to contain it, and the societal upheavals that result. Soderbergh and Burns present it all with relentless logic and intelligence. And for roughly the first half, the picture is a triumph. It never goes out of its way to shock the audience. The filmmakers know the scenario is horrifying enough. They only intrude on the story to emphasize how vulnerable everyone is, and even that’s understated. The trope of portent is nothing more than hands touching things. The suspense intensifies in accord with the growth of the calamity. But the film loses its tautness in the second half. It remains absorbing, but the rigor and understatement of the storytelling start to work against its dramatic arc. The suspense hits a plateau, and the flattened tone deprives the resolution of the lift it should provide. The film ends up feeling more like a tutorial than a story. The uniformly strong cast includes Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Elliott Gould, Bryan Cranston, John Hawkes, and as the plague’s initial victim, Gwyneth Paltrow. Soderbergh, using his nom de camera Peter Andrews, provided the outstanding cinematography. Stephen Mirrione is responsible for the equally superb editing, and Cliff Martinez contributed the terrific electronic score.

Short Take: Beginners

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The great Christopher Plummer is an elegant, amiable presence in writer-director Mike Mills’ Beginners. He plays an elderly gay man who comes out after his wife’s death, and the character is determined to make the most of life in the time he has left. Plummer glides through his scenes, hitting just the right notes, and his beaming, impish smile stays with one long after the credits roll. The film could use a lot more of him. Plummer appears entirely in flashbacks. The actual story is about the character’s son (Ewan McGregor), and his efforts to put his father’s death behind him. Key to this is his budding relationship with a pretty actress (Mélanie Laurent) who has father issues of her own. The romance is the story’s centerpiece, but it’s a glum one. As soon as the couple seems to lighten up and show some playfulness, the angst wells up again. The film is oppressively earnest, and shallow to boot. Mills tries to conceal the lack of depth with storytelling gimmicks: extensive flashbacks, jump cuts within scenes, and single-image montages narrated with trite philosophizing. He even includes gaudy absurdist touches, such as the subtitled fantasy conversations with a pet dog. All he manages is to highlight the dullness of the main story. Whenever the film cuts back to Plummer, one breathes a sigh of relief. Overall, the picture is a dreary, forgettable effort.

Short Take: Captain America: The First Avenger

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The Marvel Comics patriotic superhero, created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, gets the big-budget, big-screen treatment in Captain America: The First Avenger. The film, directed by Joe Johnston from a script credited to Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley, is one of the better comic-book superhero adaptations. The title character, played by Chris Evans, starts out as a sickly, diminutive fellow who is determined to serve the Allied cause in World War II. Repeatedly rejected for enlistment, he catches the eye of an expatriate German scientist (Stanley Tucci), who is part of a government project to create a group of super soldiers. After the scientist’s procedures transform the recruit into a superman, unforeseen circumstances make him the only one of his kind. The script is very canny in its development of the character. The three acts are each structured as stages in his self-realization as a hero. The first covers his transformation; the second has him prove his worthiness as a combat operative (the government initially uses him solely as a propaganda tool); and the third has him triumph with a supreme act of selflessness. The film thankfully doesn’t dawdle over the grand scheme of the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), the rogue Nazi who becomes the hero’s nemesis. Johnston and the writers are in and out with the exposition, and dive headlong into the solidly executed action scenes. The actors are pretty solid as well. Chris Evans gives the title character an earnest, morally centered determination that seems just right. Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones are the standouts among the supporting cast. Tucci all but disappears into his role as the scientist, and Jones is splendidly familiar as the hero’s gruff, no-nonsense commanding officer. Special mention should be made of Rick Heinrich’s production design and Anna B. Sheppard’s costuming; both capture the 1940s milieu perfectly.