Catching Up: Mini-Reviews (Oscar Edition)

We're in the heat of awards season now, so I am catching as many films as I can before year's end. This past week I caught three films, all of which seem tailor made for the Oscars. Will any of them score with the Academy? I suspect at least one of them will. The other two? Well, read on...


Invictus

Clint Eastwood's latest is also among his worst, if not his outright greatest failure of the decade. I am generally a fan of Eastwood, which makes Invictus all the more painful. He has seemingly assembled all the right pieces together: a great historical figure in Nelson Mandela, a stellar cast (Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon), and a script that both works on its own and as an allegory for the current political climate here in America. And yet, none of it works. Eastwood is intent on oversimplifying the whole affair, to the point where Mandela comes across as naive and hopelessly lost in his new found position of power because all he cares about is rugby. We do not see him in any context except that which pertains to his dream of uniting the nation through the Rugby World Cup. Did Mandela actually do anything else, political or otherwise, in this period? Invictus would lead you to believe no.

The acting is unexceptional, Damon especially. Freeman is never bad, but he is not given a whole lot to work with. It's a shame, too, because Freeman seems like he makes a good Mandela, from what I can tell. But perhaps the most cringeworthy thing in this film, and the moment that made this go from simply bad to among year's worst, is the way in which it suddenly invokes 9/11 imagery for no reason. Now, in the right context this sort of thing is completely justified, but not here. As the final match of the World Cup begins, we get an out of nowhere scene in which a pilot informs his crew that he accepts full responsibility for what they are about to do. We watch as he pilots his plane towards the stadium. The plane just barely misses the stadium, and we see that the bottom of the plane has a message of congratulations written on it. This scene adds nothing to the film, aside from unnecessary tension and a sense of discomfort. What was Eastwood trying to say with this moment? Nothing, I suspect, and the film itself amounts to much the same thing: nothing.





The Lovely Bones

After four years out of the limelight, Peter Jackson is back with The Lovely Bones. The last time he adapted a beloved book we got Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, lightning does not strike twice, although I suspect at least part of that is due to the source material. Never outright bad, The Lovely Bones does very little right, either. The story of a young girl who is murdered and watches from heaven (or is it?) as her family and her murderer go on with their lives. At the film's center, Saoirse Ronan is quite good. She is shaping up to be quite a skilled young woman, and I look forward to her future projects. Beyond her, though, little is worth mentioning, as the other performances are largely forgettable. As the murderer, Stanley Tucci feels like an amalgamation of killers we've seen before, never hitting any new notes. As the grieving father, Mark Wahlberg plays every scene in wide eyed wonderment. The rest of the cast don't even have enough screen time or character development to warrant much thought. Which is a shame, as they seem like they could have had real weight given the right director.

And indeed, Jackson seems ill-suited for this kind of story. He once might have been able to handle the smaller scale of the story, but his output this decade has steered his sensibilities towards spectacle and bloat. His vision of heaven (or is it?) rings false, largely due to the tacky and obvious cgi used. These images also overwhelm the human story at this film's center. By film's end, you feel slightly exhausted instead of emotionally satisfied. This story probably would have worked far better in the hands of an up and coming director who could make the picture smaller and more intimate, streamlining the novel's narrative in a more meaningful way. As it is, it simply doesn't work.





Up in the Air

This film is the real deal. After stumbling in a big way with Juno, Jason Reitman is at the top of his game here, as is George Clooney, who hasn't been this good in years. Up in the Air follows Ryan Bingham as he travels the country firing people for companies who can't seem to do it themselves. When he learns that he may himself soon be out of a job, he starts to question what it is that he wants out of his life. Clooney really makes you start to believe that his lifestyle would be fun, which is why he is the perfect man to play this role. When his walls start to come down, and he starts to second guess himself, we are right there with him. A lesser actor would have had us against him from the beginning. The rest of the ensemble are equally strong, with Vera Farmiga in particular standing out with her feisty and unexpectedly nuanced performance. Reitman has proven to have a knack for collecting the perfect actors for his movies and utilizing them correctly.

A great film is more than the sum of its parts, and such is the case here. I could go on and on about the great acting across the board, the smart and timely script, the way certain themes weave in and out of the story in subtle ways, and so on 9and I probably will in my best of the year countdown). But really, it is the film as a whole that is so wondrous. Everything in the film is there to serve everything else in the film. And as I think about this film, and as I write about it, I can't help but think how close to a masterpiece this film is. It absolutely needs to be seen.

Burn After Reading

Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers movie, plays like the comedy mirror to their own No Country for Old Men, with a dash of The Big Lebowski thrown in for good measure. A group of dimwitted personal trainers (Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and Richard Jenkins) discover a disk in their gym with what looks to be secret CIA files on it. The disk belongs to Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), who doesn't even know that it is missing (or that the disk of information even exists), so when the personal trainers contact him in order to collect a reward of some sort, things turn sour and all hell breaks loose. What follows is mayhem, death, a few laughs, and a morally ambiguous ending. Pretty much what you'd expect from the Coens.

If you've been keeping track, you probably remember that I was not the biggest fan of their Oscar winning picture from last year. I came to appreciate it as time wore on, but it is not the classic many might have you believe. Which is a shame because I really love these guys and their offbeat filmography. On paper, Burn After Reading looks like a return to familiar territory for the brothers. Viewing the film, however, it became slowly apparent that this was not going to be the knockout that so many of their earlier films were. Indeed, by film's end I was a bit disappointed. Not overwhelmingly so, thankfully, but enough to make me a bit sad. Will the Coens ever achieve the same lofty heights they hit with Fargo, Lebowski, Barton Fink, and others?

The film starts off surprisingly slowly, introducing us to all the players. This is problem number one: there are too many characters at the outset, and too few are immediately interesting. Cox and his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) take up a good majority of the opening scenes, yet they have very little spark to their characters. They are two bitter, angry people that you would not expect a comedy to be centered around. Thankfully just when you think you can't take any more of these two George Clooney shows up to brighten things up a bit. His Harry is a twitchy, odd duck. Cheating on his wife with Katie, he also cruises the internet looking for other woman to fool around with. He is a fun character, but for a long time we don't understand why he is even in the film. After a good twenty or thirty minutes we are finally introduced to the Hardbodies employees, and this is when the film finally takes off.

McDonrmand is a ball of energy as Linda, a woman who just wants a couple simple procedures done to make her appearance better. Discovering the secret disk may be exactly the ticket she needs in order to pay for those procedures. The true revelation is Pitt, an actor who rarely disappoints but is especially great here in what is easily his funniest role. Pitt plays Chad, a man who takes dimwittedness to rarely seen levels. His attempts to negotiate with Cox over the return of the disk fail repeatedly, yet he can never understand why. Chad feels almost like he is from a different movie, especially when he is interacting with the dry Malkovich, and as he cuts a swath through the story he leaves behind nothing but charm and laughs. Sad that he has relatively small screen time compared to the rest of the cast - a few more scenes with him would have gone a long way, especially early on.

The film has a strong climax, and the abundance of characters makes sense by the end, but that opening half is far too slow and dull. Also, I suspect many might be annoyed by the glib, offhanded way the film is concluded, making the loose ends of No Country seem like nothing. When this film does hit the right notes, it can be very funny. Yet it is not nearly funny enough, nor as interesting and insightful as most of the Coen Brother's previous films. It all adds up to a lot of nothing. I know the Coens had some purpose to this darkly misanthropic comedy, yet I can not figure out what it is. My silver lining is that a some of their films have failed to impress me upon early viewings, only to expand with passing time - even No Country. I suspect a second viewing here will illuminate some of the subtler points and make me appreciate what felt like an otherwise malformed film. But until that second viewing, all I am left with is a film that came close to being good but just missed that mark.

Michael Clayton

As the years pass, I find myself more and more in agreement with the general consensus of film critics, and many of the top rated movies this year on Rotten Tomatoes are some of my favorites as well. But it seems like every year there is one movie that somehow blinds critics to how poor it really is, and this year that movie appears to be Michael Clayton. Movies like this one make me question my sanity, as surely I can't be the only one who sees the numerous flaws with the film.

With a very, very limited number of exceptions, I've found that movies that begin at the end and then flash back to the beginning are movies completely devoid of creativity. So when Michael Clayton began at the end, I already knew something was wrong. The movie starts with Clayton, who is a corporate "fixer," trying to help a new client. He realizes that the man he's been assigned to help is out of luck, so he leaves and just drives. He eventually stops in the countryside, gets out of his car, walks over to look at some horses (something that made no sense then, nor after we see what led to this), and finally his car explodes behind him. The reason the movie begins like this is simple: it's the only exciting part of the movie, and if you didn't know the car explosion was in it, you would certainly leave before it happens. By placing this scene at the start, it's a sign that the filmmakers had no faith in the material or the audience, so they tried to hook us with a scene that is tonally different from the rest of the film. Call me jaded, call me cynical, but I hate movies that do that.

From there we head back four days and find Michael (George Clooney) asked to help with a situation involving a friend of his, named Arthur (Tom Wilkinson). Arthur is a litigator for the same law firm that Michael works for, and it turns out he had a psychotic breakdown during a deposition, stripping off all his clothes and chasing the plaintiff down a street. Arthur apparently has realized that the company he's devoted his life to protecting has been killing people with toxins in its products, and he no longer wants a part of it. This makes the bigwigs at both his legal firm and the corporation releasing the products, u-North, very nervous, especially when they begin to realize that Arthur is planning to provide documents to the plaintiffs so that they can bring down u-North. Let it be said now that Tom Wilkinson, a vastly underrated actor, almost single-handedly saved this movie. He is astonishing with the limited screen-time he has, and he deserves some serious recognition come awards season. He is intense and frightening as a mentally unstable man, yet very sympathetic as we see him losing his mind while trying to finally do the right thing with his life. It's just a shame the film didn't focus more on him.

For a movie titled Michael Clayton, it's astonishing to see just how uninteresting and how unimportant Clayton is to the story. He's called in to help with the Arthur situation, but he is unsuccessful. It basically becomes a movie about Arthur's attempts to bring about justice, and the woman who is hiring people to follow him and try and stop him (Tilda Swinton). Clayton is just kind of there. There is a turn of events that leads to Clayton being the center of the action in the final act, but even then, he is such a minuscule part of the overall story. It doesn't help that the screenplay does an awful job of characterizing him. The film must have started a half dozen loose threads that were meant to give insight into Clayton, yet they never went anywhere. We see that he may have a gabling problem, we see that he is trying to open up a restaurant, and we see he has an alcoholic brother he doesn't want to speak to. Yet none of these threads ever go anywhere or tell us anything interesting, making it that much more frustrating to watch the movie.

You've seen this movie many times before, as the story structure is lifted directly from a number of other legal thrillers. The problem here is that they try and overwhelm you with too many subplots and confusing dialogue to mask the fact that this is a highly generic movie. The filmmakers are hoping you'll walk out slightly confused so that you'll assume that it must have been a smart movie. It's not. With the exception of Tom Wilkinson, everything in this movie falls flat or strikes a false chord. If you end up seeing this movie, savor Wilkinson. This would be a one star affair were it not for him.